Animation Overload

Critter movies reach point of diminishing returns at box office
Saturday, November 25, 2006
David Germain
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES — Prancing penguins, rascally rodents, sociable squirrels and sabertoothed tigers — the Hollywood hills have been alive with talking critters in 2006, possibly the biggest year in history for movie animation.

The cute, fuzzy wildlife and other cartoon creations are being introduced so rapidly these days, audiences might well struggle to tell them apart.

"There’s definitely an overload, and I think everyone recognizes that," said George Miller, director of the latest animated adventure, the Warner Bros. penguin romp Happy Feet — which opened last week.

Toy Story, from Disney and Pixar, revolutionized the industry with computergenerated images instead of hand-drawn cartoons; in the decade since, first DreamWorks (Shrek) and then other major studios took leaps into the animation business.

As with the initial novelty of talking pictures almost 80 years ago, the early appeal of computer animation resulted partly from its fresh look.

Films with computer-generated images have since become the standard, so commonplace that the story — not the style — is considered ever more crucial to success or failure.

"What’s happened is, no longer will people go see computer-generated animation simply because it’s CGanimated, as they did when they first saw Toy Story. ," Miller said. "Everything will have to work on its own merits.

"Sure, when The Jazz Singer came out, people turned up to see sound pictures. In a handful of years, people no longer turned up to hear movies. They just turned up to see a movie they thought was good."

Ten years ago, Hollywood released as few as three or four animated movies a year, with Disney the only steady player. This year, 16 films are expected to be eligible for the Academy Award for feature-length animation, only the second time in the six-year history of the animated Oscar that there were enough movies for a full field of five nominees, rather than the usual three.

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Excerpt taken from Wikipedia under "Flash cartoons"

Flash animation in professional studios

Although Flash animation creation is generally much easier and less expensive than traditional animation techniques, the amount of time, money, and skills needed depends on the chosen content and style. Distribution via the Internet is very easy and cheap compared to television broadcasting, and websites such as Newgrounds and UGOplayer host Flash animations for free. Many Flash animations are created by individual or amateur artists, though it does require enough technical expertise to use Adobe Flash. Some web Flash animations become popular enough to air on broadcast television, on channels such as MTV and G4TV.

In recent years more and more studios doing animation for TV use Flash, especially since some recent drawing styles are easier to do in Flash than with other techniques. TV series also benefit from Flash's ability to organise a large number of assets, like characters, scenes, movements, and props for later re-use. Because Flash files are a vector file format, they can even be used to transfer animation to 35mm film without any compromise in image quality when bringing the cartoon to the big screen. This opportunity is used by several independent animators world-wide.

Excerpt taken from Wikipedia under "Computer animation"

Amateur Animation

The popularity of sites such as YouTube, which allows members to upload there [sic] own movies for others to view, has created a growing number of amateur computer animators. With many free utilities available and programs such as Microsoft MovieMaker anyone with a bit of creativity can have their cartoon viewed by thousands.

Animators Start 2-D Movie Studio

By CARRIE ANTLFINGER, Associated Press Writer
Monday, August 28, 2006 03 50 PM

Tom Hignite knew something was off when he went to the Disney studios in Florida three years ago and saw empty easels instead of animators working on a film.

Hignite later heard they had been laid off — since fans were going to see more computer-animated movies and box-office sales had been lagging for classic hand-drawn, or two-dimensional, movies.

Having gone to school for art, he didn't want 2-D films to die. He had been successful owning a home building company in southeastern Wisconsin, and decided to put money into a studio that would make only 2-D cartoons.

So in 2004 he started Miracle Studios in Polk, about 30 miles north of Milwaukee. He hired 12 animators, who have worked at Disney, Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. They also sometimes work from Hignite's Richfield home.

"If I could do something in a small way to keep this art alive ... it just struck me as a good time to do it," Hignite said.

So far they've finished a book called "Miracle Mouse" and plan to use the proceeds for an animated film based on the book.

Steve Hulett, a business representative for the Animation Guild, said major studios that worked on hand-drawn feature films used to employ 2,000 to 3,000 people in the mid-1990s, but that number has dropped to a few hundred.

Some companies still produce hand-drawn films, but contract some or all of the animation to other countries. The emergence of computer-animated films such as "Shrek" and "Finding Nemo" raked in big bucks, causing the industry to veer away from 2-D, he said.

"I think the market is heavily tilted to computer-generated imaging," Hulett said. "I don't see that changing for the foreseeable future."

But Sarah Baisley, editor in chief of Hollywood-based Animation World Network, an online animation news service, said even though 2-D films aren't being produced as much, that doesn't mean 2-D is dead.

She said other countries have become more involved in animation such as France, Germany and Canada, with some even giving subsidies, grants and tax incentives to help support the industry. About 20 European features are coming out this year, but they don't have the marketing savvy of U.S. studios, Baisley said.

She said Bill Hanna of Hanna-Barbera was one of the first to contract studios in other countries in the 1970s and since then studios have followed suit.

Los Angeles area animation house Film Roman Inc., which produces "The Simpsons" and "King of the Hill," is working on a Simpsons film and another 2-D film by Rob Zombie called "The Haunted World of El Superbeasto."

Scott Greenberg, the company's president , said they have 300 or 400 animators working on their television and DVD productions. They do much of the animation in the U.S. but some is sent elsewhere, like to AKOM Production Co. and Rough Draft in South Korea.

"We do as much as we can in the U.S.," he said.

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Suspended Animation

Pencils down. Disney terminates traditional animation

David Koenig
Thursday, August 14, 2003

Unfortunately, the latest installment of Survivor doesn't take place at some remote tropical island. It takes place a lot closer to home… in beautiful downtown Burbank, under a giant Sorcerer's hat, at the Walt Disney Feature Animation building, where last week another group of stressed-out castaways were voted off the show.

Forget the official Disney line that Feature Animation boasts a staff of 1,000 to 1,500 artists. In Burbank, there are only about 60 traditional “2-D” animators left who actually pick up a pencil or a paintbrush, counting Layout, Animators, Clean-up and Background artists… and Disney has no 2-D projects currently in production for them to work on. (Disney has a like number of survivors holding on in Florida, where a half 2-D/half-CG (computer graphics) project tentatively called My Peoples is underway.)

The vast majority of Feature Animation's artists have been reassigned to a computer or shown the door. It all points to Disney's next two animated features (this fall's Brother Bear and next spring's Home on the Range) being their last.

The latest cutback came two weeks ago, after 13 traditional animators submitted five scenes they had done on computer to vie for six “3-D” spots left to cast on Chicken Little. “The real controversy of this,” noted an onlooker, “is that they were pitted against one another and the playing field wasn't fair. Those who just finished the training program called 'Boot Camp' were up against those who finished Boot Camp six months ago and had more time to finesse, complete and present a more finished test. Also, they purposely entered more people into the training program, anticipating that the majority would fail at learning the computer. Well, they were terribly wrong! They all did great. Now they're worried because they don't know what to do with them because they already hired animators from The Secret Lab (Kangaroo Jack, the dragons on Reign of Fire). They hired them on the superficial qualities that they could do a lot of footage. Forget the fact that they can't do a lot of character footage!”

Last week, six of the animators got the openings on Chicken Little. It looks like the other seven will get the boot. Consider the loss of talent:

• Randy Haycock – character animator on Aladdin, Pocahontas, Lion King, Treasure Planet; supervising animator of Hercules' Baby/Young Hercules, Tarzan's Clayton, Atlantis' Princess Kida
  
  
• Richard Hoppe – animator on Black Cauldron, Beauty & the Beast, Tarzan, Atlantis, Treasure Planet
  
  
• James Lopez – animator on Lion King, Pocahontas; supervising animator of Hercules' Pain, Emperor's New Groove's Tipo
  
  
• Shawn Keller – started in 1970s, character animator on Black Cauldron, Great Mouse Detective, Oliver & Co. , Little Mermaid, Treasure Planet; supervising animator of Atlantis' Cookie and Preston Whitmore
  
  
• Mark Pudleiner – character animator on Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, Hercules, Emperor's New Groove
  
  
• John Pomeroy – started in 1970s and worked on Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Rescuers, Pete's Dragon, before leaving with Don Bluth; returned to Disney in 1990s to serve as supervising animator for Pocahontas' John Smith, Fantasia 2000's Firebird, Atlantis' Milo, Treasure Planet's Flint
  
  
• Dougg Williams – character animator on Tarzan, Atlantis, Treasure Planet

Officially, most of the seven still “work” for Disney, since their contracts all end at different times (some extending into next year). But don't expect many of them to latch onto new projects too quickly, considering Michael Eisner's official decree: “2-D is dead.”

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Just Watched Castle in the Sky - Don't Let 2-D Animation Die!

Some Things Shouldn't Be Done with 3-D Animation

by Mark Rollins
Nov 28 2005 12:00AM
This image, showing the aformentioned castle itself, shows just a small bit of the magic that can be brought forth in 2-D animation. This picture and all the detail within it was done by hand.

In case you haven’t heard, Disney has announced that they will no longer be doing traditional hand-drawn animated films. Disney/Pixar’s soon to be released feature Cars will mark the end of their partnership, and probably begin a war between the two computer animation groups. With CG films such as Dinosaur and Chicken Little being the new standard of animation with Disney, it is clear that Pixar’s films, such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, are the true family classics.

Which leaves us with an important question: is 2-D animation dead? I certainly hope not. Recently, I discovered a 2-D anime masterpiece that was marketed by Disney called Castle In The Sky. I absolutely could not believe what a fantastic work it was. It takes place in a world that is too primitive to be futuristic, but too advanced to be in the past. I realize how confusing that is, but it is a world dominated by city-sized airships, floating islands, and steam-based technology. Think Jules Verne meets George Lucas.

The story begins when a group of sky pirates led by Dola and her crew of mama’s boys attempt to kidnap Sheeta from a gigantic airship. Sheeta is being held by foreign agents led by Muska, and she sees the attempted abduction as a chance to escape. Unfortunately, she falls off the airship, only to be miraculously levitated by her magical necklace. She is then found by Pazu, and together they are chased by pirates and the military. They soon discover that Sheeta and her necklace are the key to Laputa, a fortress powered by an advanced technology that floats in the clouds.

Although Disney released a translated version of this story in 2003 with such voices as Anna Paquin (Sheeta), James Van Der Beek (Pazu), Cloris Leachman (Dola), and Mark Hamill (Muska), the original version was released in 1986, three years before Disney’s 2-D animation boom with The Little Mermaid. Writer and Director Hayao Miyazaki created an ahead-of-its-time masterpiece that combines elements of both fantasy and science fiction and pushes 2-D animation to its highest level.

What makes it work is the fact that no 3-D animation is used. Even if such advanced technology had been available during that time, it would cheapen the effect. Remember how Titan A.E. tried to integrate the two elements, with 3-D rendered spaceships that looked too advanced in comparison to the cartoonish characters? There are several scenes in the film where we see robots, and I couldn’t help but think that a modern animation director would have rendered them in 3-D. If they had, then the whole film would simply not look as beautiful as it does.

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Disney Returns To 2-D Animation

By Josh Tyler: 2006-07-27

This year will see a record number of computer animated films released in theaters. Only one of those is made by Pixar, which means most of them probably won’t be very good (Weinstein Company, I’m looking at you). 3-D CGI is officially no longer a novelty, which may mean that audiences are ready to get over it and make room for mostly dead 2-D animation to return.

Disney is betting on it, and Variety says they’re returning to 2-D animation for the first time since 2004’s Home on the Range. They’ll do it with a movie called The Frog Princess, being developed by John Musker and Robert Clements. They’re the guys responsible for Disney 2-D classics like Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. The interesting thing here is that both Musker and Clements abandoned Disney several years ago, and only recently returned after the very public merger of Disney and Pixar, which put people like John Lasseter in charge of Disney’s animation division. With the help of Pixar’s team, it looks like Disney is regaining its reputation as a haven for great animation talent.

Don’t think that means Disney’s slowing down on releasing more 3-D CGI movies. Their upcoming slate of computer animated movies includes Meet the Robinsons, Rapunzel, Joel Jump, and the next Pixar movie Ratatouille.

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Review: Flushed Away -- James' Take

Posted Nov 3rd 2006 8:01AM by James Rocchi

What is it about kid's films? Or, rather, what is it about kid's films recently? Computer animation has made making kid's film's easier, it seems, based on the flurry of dreck like Chicken Little and The Barnyard; the better question is if computer animation has made releasing them too easy. The case in point this week is Flushed Away, the latest collaboration between Aardman Animation (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run) and Dreamworks Animation (Shrek, Madagascar). Flushed Away combines two worlds - the design and aesthetic of Aardman's gentle, claymation stories with the computer-generated spectacle of Dreamworks' industrial approach to animation. The result is a curious, unfixed mix of the good, the bad and the ugly -- while Flushed Away has a certain English whimsy to it, it also has the overstuffed, joke-a-millisecond kind of excess that executives think render animated films breezy trifles, but actually turns them into leaden chores. Or, put another way: In Flushed Away, a group of minion frogs in the service of a mercenary bad guy known as Le Frog (and voiced by Jean Reno) are given the order to action; they immediately hurl up their hands and cry "We surrender!" Is this funny, to a kid? Is it funny to any grown-up whose I.Q. is higher than their belt size?

Before Le Frog enters the arena, though, Flushed Away begins as pampered house pet rat Roddy (voiced by Hugh Jackman) is left alone as his owner leaves the house for a holiday. Roddy promptly goes on a high-spirited spree, playing with all the toys and dolls and neat geegaws, but we also notice he's a bit lonely. A plumbing mishap leads loud, boisterous rat Sid (Shane Richie) to Roddy's home, and soon Roddy is plunged into the toilet and out of his paradise. In the sewers, Roddy finds a small London, underground -- a teeming Rodent-opolis of families, commerce and bustling activity. Roddy's quest to get back home brings him to the dock of ship's pilot Rita (voiced by Kate Winslet), who may be able to get him to the surface -- but that's waylaid by the manipulations of the silken-voiced mastermind known as The Toad (Ian McKellen), who's plotting to wipe the sewer rodent-opolis away. ...

... And I hope you could follow that, because I barely could while in the theater. There are Aardman animation touches here -- little sight gags like a container of liquid nitrogen that reads "WARNING: RATHER COLD" and quieter physical bits like when a group of slugs run from danger as fast as they can, which is to say, not very fast at all. Or the fact that the computer-animation replicates the imperfect, jittery frame rate of clay-mation Aardman-style mouth-movement and subliminally reminds us of the hand-shaped charms of Wallace and Gromit. But that gracious, gentle sense of understatement gets blasted off the screen by the barrage of pop-culture references thrown at the screen; there are seven separate names in the writing credits of Flushed Away, and that's not even including all the names listed in the final credits who contributed 'additional material.' So we get a brief splash of Roddy in James Bond gear re-creating the opening credits -- and, again, do kids get that? Does that mean anything to them?

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