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Same with the OG Lilo and Stitch:
IIRC last film to use honest to god water colors. And it shows.
Was this before or after the lion king, because they really started leaning on cgi from then on
Lion king was 5-10 years before this
Fun fact: 101 Dalmatians was the first Disney movie to be produced with the help of xerox. This was as a result of the financial flop that was Sleeping Beauty, that almost bankrupted the company and cut their budgets for future movies all the way from the 60s to the financial success of the little mermaid in 1989. This is why Disney movies within that time period has a rougher look when it comes to the characters’ lineart and the more simple backgrounds compared to the very detailed, painted backgrounds and colored lineart of all Disney movies up until 101 Dalmatians.
The xerox was a cost cutting method to save time and money and while it absolutely killed Walt Disney to have to compromise on the art, it also paved the way for a new look and feel that, especially in the case of 101 Dalmatians, created a timeless look that still looks as fresh and modern today as the day it was made.
Without the invention and utilization of the xerox, there most likely would have been no Disney company today.
The Disney corporation is a better person when it’s poor.
Not arguing with you there xD I have basically boycotted Disney. Last straw for me was their Mulan remake.
Didn’t watch it. Heard it was trash like all the other remakes, but the thing that did it for me was when I learned they had used actual concentration camp prisoners for free labor on the movie. That was it for me.
BuT nO! ReAl ArT uSeS nO sHoRtCuTsOrTecH!
They are still being being painted by hand. On a graphics tablet, for example.
Exactly, it’s not the medium. It’s like saying movies like Up aren’t beautiful because of CG.
Yep.
Those older movies are beautiful achievements for sure. But it’s disingenuous to say that there isn’t a plethora of movies and shows today that rival and surpass those older examples visually. Not to speak of just how much more fluent animation has become.
Many of the people who worked on those older masterpieces are still in animation today, and have only become better at their art.
The older movies are more atractive because of the flaws, you see the pencil strokes changing between frames. Today IMO they are too flawless.
I also like how when a kid was a voice actor, they sounded like a damn kid, mistakes and all.
The Aristocats comes to mind, the song Scales and Arpeggios is a great example. I hate hearing weird robotic kids who are flawless or its clear they edited the shit out of a dozen takes.
That’s one of the awesome things about Bluey. The voice acting is genuinely kids talking with their mums and dads.
Was at least, looks like Joe Blum wanted to end it, and Disney is keeping its corpse alive to license the shit out of it with no new episodes in production. Too bad really, but if the creator wanted to move on, he should have been allowed to.
That’s actually a really good point. The flaws make the beauty more human the same way music recorded reel to reel back in the 70s was very human because of the limitations of the day. And it is beautiful.
Not that a flawless thing can’t be beautiful. I just have a bias towards the humanness (pencil strokes, tape flutter) of the older stuff because that’s what I grew up with.
I’ve been listening to an album of 20’s and 30’s music. So good and so relevant. You have to find live music to hear that now for sure.
I don’t think it actually looks very good. The conouter generated look is pretty fugly. Story is a different matte
Yeah, Up was a weird example for me, too, but as someone who has watched Moana two dozen times, it’s always beautiful. The people are aged, with deep lines, the sand and the water and the straw, all the textures, all beautiful, and the setting is of course gorgeous.
Lilo and Stitch is a similar background, also so so beautiful, but it doesn’t make Moana ugly or useless in comparison.
It’s not the same. Of course things can be beautiful if painted on a tablet, but differently beautiful.
I guess it’s a matter of taste then. I really enjoy the vibrancy and fluidity of animation we get today. And I find them to be no less expressive.
Something “painted” on a tablet cant really match the expressions of something like a movie called Heavy Metal.
It is a matter of taste, I agree.
Studio Ghibli stuff has, up until recently, always been done by hand and it’s about as vibrant and fluid as it gets.
I guess we’re gonna just whitewash the systemic exploitation of “betweener” labor, then? Oh, good. 🖕🏽
So a couple things, do you have a link where I can read up on the history of betweener labor because now I’m curious? But secondly what are you talking about? What this post or the comments implies anything to do with race? I don’t understand where you’re getting that from
I think there is nothing about race at all. Whitewash as in the meaning: to make something bad seem acceptable by hiding the truth.
TBF it was also a time before the corporate entity realized maximum short term profit doesn’t come from perfected products.
The only counter argument would probably be something like Flow. But what Zilbalodis did was perhaps as handcrafted as 3D animation can get.
My kid got into Lady and the Tramp, so I watched it about a dozen times in a row, and Holeee shiiit is that thing beautifully animated. The backgrounds are needlessly lavish, and look at this…
I’m in awe of the work done on Tramp’s ears. The expressiveness, and the subtle balance of flexibility and internal structure is exquisite. You can find other examples of masterfully-done materials all throughout the movie.
Other movies might get more attention, but Lady and the Tramp is worth looking at for some peak Disney animation.
It’s one of my favourites!
So how many frames is this, do we think, just for this clip…
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While true, with hand drawn animation it’s slightly different as not every frame is drawn (usually). Disney films looked so good because they were done “on the two’s” instead of the industry standard of “on the three’s” - meaning that Disney films had a drawn frame for every 2 fps instead of every 3, or 12 drawn frames per second instead of the normal 8. Your brain interpolates the rest of the between frames, but this is why Disney looks so much more smooth.
Another great example is Akira, which was done on the 1’s and 2’s. That it has 12 to 24 hand drawn frames per second makes the visual quality difference really visible when compared to other movies.
24fps, nearly 3 seconds long, so somewhere near 72 frames total, BUT… these animations were done on 2’s - meaning every other frame. https://businessofanimation.com/why-animation-studios-are-animating-on-2s/
I am not a big fan of Pinocchio in general, but the animation is absolutely nuts. The part with the whale is truly remarkable.
A computer will most likely not only recreate but create better.
Life can be much better with AI, if we don’t starve to death. The problem is not AI but other humans who don’t share their resources.
When I see something impressive generated by a computer, I may go “wow”, but when I see something, displayed on a computer or not, that I know a person went and handcrafted so many details on, I am inspired by that dedication to the craft. The human elements within art are a big part of what makes it meaningful.
If someone wants to use AI for the parts of a work they don’t care about (or as placeholders) so they can pour their heart into a different aspect of the work, fine. If they want the computer to do all the work for them, they have created slop. This is independent of whether we live in a society that values gross resource accumulation or one that shares equally.
I will say that the push towards slop primarily stems from our societal zeitgeist. The mentality is “I need to make as much money with as little effort as possible”, and sometimes people really do need that money to pay bills. I think that’s a big reason why it’s such a problem. There is little monetary value in actual expression for the effort required when compared with mass produced “content” for dollars.
Unless humans are magic, AI will be able to feel. I would assume that AI will be able to feel much deeper and much stronger. So one day, AI will use art to tell us about things that are beyond our horizon.
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We assumed the same about animals and babies. AI could use hybrid systems that use animal or human cells, or it could simulate emotions to the point that ai art becomes interesting.
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We is humanity, years ago.
Why would the difference matter?
What’s the difference between emotions and feelings?
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Careful, there’s a lot of “artists” around lemmy that will get incredibly upset about this.
I would love cartoons that don’t traumatize children, that would be awesome. I watched bambi when I was young and got so traumatized I can’t wach animal movies anymore, than I went to see Elio with my niece and she was crying so hard I had to apologize to her parents.
Life is horrible enough lets make cartoons nice
There are like five popular Disney movies where a parent or both parents dont get murdered in order to drive the story forward. Of those left a handful has the parents dead before the story even starts.
Disney really seems to love killing parents. Someone ought to talk to them, seems like an unhealthy obsession.
Aren’t they animations of existing fairy tales, at least the early ones?
Coco and Encanto, Moana and Brave, it seems like in the newer movies they’re not as addicted to killing the parents, so maybe someone did? I haven’t seen wish or raya so idk. The parents are also alive in Tangled I think but she’s kidnapped so I don’t think we can really count it as no parental trauma (or we could count it as 3 parents?)
Was it the melting child scene? That caught me off guard.
Yeah, that came out of no where. I thought it was great, but also figured it would likely traumatize a number of kids.
I was sad the movie didn’t do better in the box office. It wasn’t the best, but it was a fun original story.
I disagree that this is an actual problem, we have so few sources anymore that show any kind of reality that kids can connect with.
It’s worse than ever. It’s a world of AI slop that is often far more disturbing, youtube kid’s channels that are completely lacking in value or education. Life lessons are avoided like the plague in media and in families now. Parents avoid “hard topics” with their kids at a level that has left an entire generation of adults unable to function under any level of pressure, or unable to do basic things like count change and make eye contact.
Will seeing Bambi’s parents die help with that? Not directly, but there is a type of psychological “grounding” that can come from careful exposure to distressing topics as a child.
Life is horrible, but avoiding it makes the problems worse. Avoiding something distressing because you can’t take negative emotions is a valid choice but it doesn’t make you stronger. Your mental capacity, your emotions and your perceptions are all muscles that wither and die without exercise.
If we taught our children that bad things happen but it’s okay and we can recover, maybe there would be less fear and scared adults who cling to violence as a means to feel in control.
I just don’t like the idea of sanitizing and shaving every hard corner off a world that desperately needs people with mental and emotional strength like never before.
I don’t think we lack nice cartoons. My siblings children watch Bluey and Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood and they are both great. they also watch the unavoidable paw patrol bu I like this too. My older niece lover frozen but she FF the part where the parents die lol
We have plenty of “nice” cartoons, my point though is that after a certain age, a child should have a solid understanding of some mature concepts like mortality, because if you’re going into your pre-teens and still can’t watch certain scenes in kid’s media, you’re going to have a very hard time with an array of things as life rapidly comes at you.
You should try The Fox and the Hound. It’s uplifting.
or brave little toaster T_T
the opening to beauty and the beast remains my favourite piece of animation ever <3
Beauty and the Beast features computer animation, by the way. I think it’s only in the ballroom scene though.
thanks! i’m not an expert so i wasn’t sure (i know they did switch sometime in the 90s but i thought 91 would have been too early for computer/cgi)
If you rewatch the ballroom scene it’s pretty obvious. It’s like partially 3d. But it’s subtle enough to not stick out.
Wasn’t the first use of CG in a major Disney animated film the carpet in Aladdin? No necessarily the whole movie, but certain scenes at least.
yeah i remember the carpet scene in the cave of wonders with the lava being particularly cgi (i mean as a kid it looked awesome but still)
Uh, sure, why not! Seems believable enough to me.
I totally agree, Disney’s Robin Hood from 1973 is peak hand-drawn cartoon
Eeeeeeh… Maybe not. It’s pretty good, but there is so much recycled animation that you might aswell call the Jungle book the best aswell.
Forgot about Fantasia?
Lion king?
Don bluth cartoons?
Anything made by Miyazaki.
I’m with you on the studio Ghibli stuff; and the Lion King while a better movie is very polished and to me lacks the hand made feel of Robin Hood
…but the Lion king was hand made.
The lion king famously used CGI though.
but robin hood isn’t entirely hand-made, most of it is copied from other films. that’s why there are so many visible roughs in the animation.
You dropped this -> /s
I don’t think they did…
Oooo da lolly!
Ah yes, Maid Marian. The first time I was like “why dis animal girl so hot?”
My confused seven year old ass was like “I would like to hold hands with both Robin Hood and Maid Marian ver much”
I still do
That was the video cassette I actually watched so much I wore it out as a child!!
Reasonably so hahaha
The first time
I’m not a furry, I’m just a furry enjoyer
That gif better not awaken something in me.
I just recently rewatched 101 Dalmatians and actually cried multiple times just from really soaking it in. Just the way so much of it comes to life. The imperfections genuinely make it feel so much more alive.
Modern Hollywood animation is incredibly sterile and perfected. A major studio now would never imagine releasing something with visible sketch lines.
Sure it wasn’t nostalgia? Sounds like the same symptoms
I don’t think so. I’ve been watching a lot of classics from my childhood lately and most of them weren’t hitting me that hard. Maybe it’s that the actual story and the horror of it sunk in properly for the first time as an adult. Hadn’t seen it since I was young. The voice acting from the pups is just incredible. That probably didn’t help.
A lot are still “paintedby hand”, the use of vector graphics isn’t as prevalent in other cartoon producing countries as it is in the US
really?
I know of zero studios that are still doing any painting. they are all digital. sk, china, japan - no one uses paint filmed one cel at a time, or any of the old analog processes anymore. I’d be happy to be wrong, but I don’t know of anyone that’s still doing painted cels recorded on film.
Even Ghibli. https://www.dqindia.com/features/studio-ghibli-blending-tradition-and-technology-in-the-age-of-animation-8921913
“Ghibli’s selective integration of technology, primarily digital ink-and-paint techniques facilitated by software like OpenToonz, stands in stark contrast to the unbridled embrace of AI in the recent Ghibli-style art phenomenon.”
I didn’t say that they were painting on paper
Digital painting by hand is still qualifies as “painted by hand”
I didn’t say that they were painting on paper
tell me you don’t understand animation at all already… ffs, no one painted on paper. can’t really shine light through it lol. it was all cels man.
Digital painting by hand is still qualifies as “painted by hand”
ROFLS okay bud. Perhaps you weren’t born yet but there have been a few arguments about this… well, more than a few. LOTS. Like, animator holy war levels of arguments. And it wasn’t a one-and-done transition either, lots of productions went back and forth because of the requirements of the episode or availability.
Take a look at the simpsons to see a show that eschewed digital ink and paint until they went all in. when they did, they changed the aspect ratio of the show, knowing it was going to look so different that few would even notice the swap to 16x9 from old crt 4x3.
Somebody is really getting worked up.
aw, sorry, I didn’t realize I was supposed to ignore your ignorance. please, continue to lie about things you obviously know jack shit about.
They used a lot of rotoscoping back in the day. Basically they filmed a scene normally with real people, then traced over every frame to give us those fantastic moments of fluid movement in things like Snow White, Mary Poppins, and Beauty and the Beast (which also used 3D by the way).
Ralph Bakshi used it in the 1978 LOTR. It made the battle scene confusing.
Dude Ralph Bashki made things weird for fun. Maybe if I volunteer to watch the Bashki LOTR with my wife, who loves that movie, I can convince her to watch Wizards with me. I have been wanting to watch that.
Fun fact, some of the more impressive examples from that era (like Mary Poppins) primarily used the sodium vapor process to get perfect mattes directly in-camera, no rotoscoping needed. It’s a fascinating and impressive bit of tech: https://www.historicmysteries.com/science/disney-prism/39484/
That is indeed a fun fact! I am somewhat obsessed with sodium vapor lights and the bandwidth of light they produce. I would love to have seen the original camera rig and their special prisms, but apparently they only made three and they’ve been lost.
High intensity discharge lamps are awesome, can confirm. I miss when streetlamps were still HPS/LPS and mercury vapor, the lighting felt a lot more comforting than the harsh LEDs used nowadays.
Rotoscoping is quite old, too. I think it even predates ww1.
