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Signs is an amazing short, and while Paperman has its differences, the similarities are astounding - too much so for it to be a cooncidence, in my opinion. I'm sure the filmmakers on Paperman were influenced by it.

For what it's worth, i think the differences make Paperman the better short, story wise.

I too saw this in London and liked it. But this whole thing about it being about bringing the drawing back into animation only goes so far –
one of the questions at the London screening asked who had authorship over the animation? Who is the driving force behind the performance?

Although they wouldn’t come out and admit it, the answer is the CG animator. They are the ones animating the characters. The drawn side of it is glorified clean-up. They are working over the top of an existing pose already laid out by the CG animator. There is very little if any scope for them to really animate the scene as they would like to. One example shown afterwards where drawn animation enhanced the CG animation was where the 2D animator had gone in and embellished the hair movement and animated extra stuff on top of the CG animation, but this is a rare example of the 2D guys getting to do ‘animation’ and even then it’s a small one. It’s no different from being given a ruff drawing to work over with your 0.3 pencil.

Another thing that struck me watching the film was that it still felt CG’y. It was *too* smooth and lacked the imperfections that drawn animation has. A much vaunted ‘motion betweening’ tool (pfft) that smoothly inbetweened a line between two set points can be partly to blame. (And Disney – Flash has done this for years so I wasn’t sure why you were so excited about it…?) The chance to work over the top of CG animation with drawings is just like what a clean up artist would do – embellish, polish, push and enhance. It’s not 2D with CG. It’s CG animation since that’s where the performance is being driven from. Nothing wrong with that but this is all a bit of a red herring and not the breakthrough the Disney hype machine would have us believe. As said above – I enjoyed the film and it looked nice, but what’s wrong with pencils and paper?

I couldn’t be more agree… I saw it in Paris, it’s a beautiful movie, but no doubt about it, it’s a CG movie with some sort of 2D clean up on it.

We are working on an 'Art of Paperman' book (more of a booklet, really), for Siggraph next month, a run of 6000.

SWillie!, will you be attending SIGGRAPH this year on August 05-09? If so, don't forget to snatch up "The Art of Paperman" (and then share with your friends at UD )



Source: http://twitter.com/john_kahrs/status/225394550707986432