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I have been thinking about this subject for a while now.

It seems to me that there is a style of animation that has never been done before.

New films that come out are either copies of past films,
It's either the standard vision of what we have of 2d nowadays. Princess and the frog's style is about the same as Aladdin etc, in terms of character design and graphics.
Or it's the standard vison of what we have of 3d nowadays.
The huge eyes, the plastic-ness, the slapstick jokes. Rapunzel looks just like Penny from Bolt but just with long hair.
The movements, the characters, the whole films have a very similar approach. The characters basically look like a computer game.

But what if.............

What if we would take ALL of that away?

What if they could create a whole new style of animation, based on old fairytales, a realistic approach like in the old story books. Combine the beauty of 2d and 3d but not like the styles we know now. Create a serious, realistic, yet beautifully animated film with gorgeous, matching music.

The style I'm talking about is the style of the Rapunzel picture art. Rapunzel in the swing. It looks like a moving painting, but nothing like the style of the actual rapunzel film or any 2d film we know. Characters that look like paintings, instead of computer games. Therefore the characters should be painted.
Another example of that style is the original theatrical Snow White poster. The way the queen is "painted" is hauntingly beautiful. It creates a vibe, a new world that we've never seen in an animated film before.

A realistic and beautiful style. Combining 3d with 2d. Painting the characters. I've only seen this in concept art but never in an actual film.
I have to say, some of the background work of newer 3d films looks wonderful and comes close to that style at times, but then the way they make 3d characters at this point in time is just no-match. It ruins it for me. Also, the way of storytelling nowadays is off-putting for me. With the slapstick jokes, the fart-jokes and the forced "semi-cool"" characters and the forced "hip/modern" attitude of the characters. But I guess the animation style asks for that.

I wish they could make an animated feature with this approach. A visual style that we've never seen in an animated film before.

A bit like The Adventures of Prince Achmed then (or more recently, Tales of the Night)?

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I've never heard of those, but I looked it up on youtube and those clips looked quite abstract and stiff to me. It's not exactly what I meant.

To give you an impression of my ideas:

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyju3 ... o1_500.jpg

Instead of this:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1hXEeWOyCLc/T ... Bhappy.jpg

Or this, like how the queen is painted here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... poster.jpg


Or even like this:

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/ ... 25-802.jpg

Instead of this:

http://www.oocities.org/hollywood/theat ... tMer56.jpg

I'm sick of the modern animation formula too. Big eyes, raised eyebrows (the Dreamworks trademark?), snide expressions. It's becoming boring and is lacking in the potential beauty of animation. But if Disney ever did something in the style you're talking about Marky*, then I hope it would retain a softness to it in the character designs, like in the DACs of the 40's and 50's. A Disney film that completely appears to be a moving painting sounds wonderful.

*: Is 'Marky Mark' Wahlberg on UD?

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http://onethousandandonemovienights.blogspot.com/

I agree,

The only thing that comes close to that quality is either concept art, or very specific shots from some of the old classics.

http://i629.photobucket.com/albums/uu18 ... sw1-04.jpg

Where the eyes were about 6 times smaller then they are nowadays.
That realistic-ness and fluidity is what we need.

It may interest you to know that a new process combining traditional and CG animation is indeed being developed at Disney and has reputably been used in an animated short: http://www.dvdizzy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29514

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-Joe

Blog | Deviantart

agreed, though I've a seen a few instances of animation more artful than what you'd find in NA, nobody seems keen on combining styles without a gimmick behind it.

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Thanks for that link.

I wish I could see something from that film.

I implore you to still watch the film. It is the oldest surviving full-length animated film (older animated films have been lost to time) - so if it looks 'stiff', I guess you can blame 1926. (yes, this film was made 11 years before Snow White) It was directed by a woman, which is progressive even today...

Now - one thing that annoys me not only about this forum but about the internet as a whole is the ethnocentrism regarding animation. All this very absolute discussion about styles "never done before" - there are so many countries & animators that have produced so many shorts & features I'd be hard pressed to discover a new style. You just haven't heard/seen of it. Not that I have, either. But there is some fascinating experimental stuff out there that does not look like Disney. Too many of you (and me too once, but not as much now...) think Disney is a pantheon of animation. But in reality, they represent just one visual style and a very cartoony one at that. Dozens of respected animators have publicly denounced the Disney style/formula for being too conservative and simple. Disney will never do anything truly avant garde or experimental unless it is guaranteed to return a profit. They are a multinational entertainment corporation, not a private/independent arthouse studio.

In terms of what you're talking about, here are a few examples that popped into my head.

1. "Heroic Times" - this 1983 Hungarian film was created by oil painting. Each frame was a brand new painting - creating a truly 'moving painting' look.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nWPq51-L7cw" frameborder="0"></iframe>

2. "Old Man & the Sea" - 1999 featurette - painted directly on glass cells, inspired by the romantic realist art movement.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/v1EbNvHDxbA" frameborder="0"></iframe>

3. "Iblard Time" - a featurette by Studio Ghibli. Takes the fantasy paintings of Naohisa Inoue and digitizes them so certain elements move. No real good videos online, but a screen:



4. This video shows animators who take a 17th century painting, deconstruct it and re-build it digitally so that it breathes in 3-dimensional space.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mWkBlmuSNb8" frameborder="0"></iframe>

5. "Gwen, The Book of Sand" - 1985 film that uses limited/cut out animation.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/fieXqvYL4pQ" frameborder="0"></iframe>

... that's just a few examples I can think of right now. All of these represent 'painterly' animation - not flat, cel-shaded, cartoon style that the majority of the Disney canon have been animated in.

I hope this is similar to what you were looking for.

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Believe me, there are a LOT worse places than here. What I hate is how EVERY animated cartoon is required by most traditional fans and experts to be of the talking animal variety. This notion is being reinforced in recent discussions about UPA, a studio known for opposing both Disney's pastoral realism AND Warner Bros' anthropomorphic cynicism.

As I've mentioned before, this all pokes into the quest to distinguish cartoons as a medium equal, if not better than live-action, as opposed to the kids' genre it's stereotyped as. Is there new types of animation I'd like to see? Absolutely. But nothing has been accomplished thru the endless bloodbaths from some animation circles.

The examples you showed are impressive, especially the first one. Some of the answers to what's being asked must await us in other countries, and not just thru Japan's anime. Of course, it involves overcoming the exclusive nature of American animation.

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Well, when it comes to animation production, Japan is # 1 and America # 2 (not scientific, but from my studies that seems the current state of things).

And people bandy the word "anime" around like it's all the same aesthetically/thematically but taking a look at my Japanese animation collection - it is extremely varied with many genres, maturity levels and animation styles represented.

France, Spain, Canada are also up there while China and South Korea are really beginning to get into animation.

However most countries have produced at least one animated feature at some point and a few trickle out of "obscure" countries every year.

What's nice about the selections I posted above are: none are over 30 years old and they represent a variety of production countries: Japan, Hungary, France, Canada - which shows that A) we don't have to rely on Japan for our most visually daring films and B) this style of traditional animation is not lost to a bygone era.

Japan is definitely putting out some of the most fascinating work at the moment and is the only country really keeping 2D alive - but there is experimental work in all mediums (traditional, CG, mixed media, stop motion, cutout, rotoscope, motion capture) emerging from many countries including the U.S. - but mainly through independent/privately funded/arthouse type studio collectives.

Animation is alive and well in all forms, genres, styles. Living in the U.S. it's hard to tell due to the CGI film bloat.

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Visit Animation Activist to discover excellent foreign, older and obscure animated films you many never heard of before!

That image was done in CGI animation. It was rotated in 3-D for Glen Keane. It just wasn't animated beyond that single frame.

Disney did make the animation you speak of. Even making Snow White's cottage background in CGI. They just didn't use it for Rapunzel/Tangled for unknown reasons, though the top reason cited is they said they had wasted too much money on Rapunzel already so they couldn't use any more to use this animation for the whole feature. I bet the other reason is because if it looked too classic and beautiful they would think that would scare people away who just wanted to see a funny slapstick tangled cartoon.

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If that were a reason it's a pretty silly one. There are already plenty of "funny" slapstick, cartoon styled films currently on the market, would it really hurt to take a chance on something majestic, beautiful, classic, timeless etc. for a change. I'd much rather see that then something that looks like everything else out there... It is what seems so sadly missing from Disney these days.

We need another renaissance y'all!!

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Well...that's why I was saying when Rapunzel was changed to Tangled, that they didn't need to care what audiences thought of the title, that Disney could take a chance. Where were you when I was saying such a thing, to support me?!

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I've only really started visiting the forum again after a 2 year hiatus, so if it happened during the 2 years I was absent that would probably be why.

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Aw, well, welcome back!

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