Shame of the Creators

[pasithea]

Several months ago I started reading The Illusion of Life Frank and Ollie's book about their time at Disney way back when. Due to work and some other stuff, I got waylaid after a few chapters and it'd been sitting on my headboard unfinished.

So this last week I've been reading a chapter a night to work my way through the rest of it and absorb what I can. I'll probably go back and re-read the first few chapters as well as they spawned several ideas for me.

What I'm struck by today is a sense of shame for myself and other animators. Seriously. In making the old films for Disney, there was a HUGE amount of cost. Not so much the raw animation but inking, painting, cells, paint, film, development cost, dailies, adjustments, prints, photography time, sound mixing, static free-scissors, full orchestra, and on and on and on and on and you know what _NONE_ of those costs really apply today.

Ink and paint can be done on a computer.
No film.
Colour is wysiwyg and if the color isn't work in a scene, with approximately 3 mouse-clicks you can change it everywhere.
Sound editing is quick and painless. There's never pops from splices, you can remove hiss and all sorts of other level problems with the click of a mouse.
Disney's most expensive machine was the multiplane camera. $50,000 in the 1930's and it could handle 8 planes.
On my computer I can do hundreds. If one is moving at the wrong rate, I can find the flaw instantly, adjust it and everything else still works.
Shots that took the guys at Disney's a month working round the clock just to PHOTOGRAPH I can do in a few seconds.

For a couple thousand dollars you can have a studio more powerful than anything Walt Disney ever imagined. A studio that would have cost him a half million dollars, and that's just the equipment. Don't forget that the computer also lets you reduce your staff from hundreds of people to less than a dozen.

So _WHY_ are the cartoons made today so bad? Limited animation, often uninspired character designs. Why, when we could be making the most beautiful films ever seen, have we instead returned animation to it's crudest most base form, scarcely more than talking heads and pans over comic books. WHY!?

I'm ashamed, and you should be too. Art is the very essence of culture and what does it say of us that we have let ours become so crude and base?

Comments

[centauress.livejournal.com]

Directors like Miyazaki and studios on other countries (notably Korea and Taiwan) are pushing the edge, seeing what they can do with this complexity.

And you know, you're right.

I wish someone would tally up the cost in dollars then, to the profit then, and compared it to what that would cost today...

Really, someone needs to do the math.

Mostly, I think it's because as tools progress, people become lazier, not really more productive.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I think that's going to be true for some people but there will always be characters like the Mule in Asimov's foundation series. Someone who is not the average. On the other hand, you're probably right in the sense that people can just take things for granted. Back in the day, the photography and testing was expensive so you wanted to make stuff look it's very best so you only had to do it once. Now there's the temptation to go, 'Well... I think this is mediocre but let's see how it looks.' And then you go, 'Eh. Good enough. I want to move on to a new part so I can get this all done.' I'm extremely guilty of this, but I'm not sure it's as much laziness as complacency.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

There is something you completely overlooked in all of this, and why I am hoping Brad Bird will struggle his way to the top. And that's guidance.

Walt was a leader by example. He was by far not the best artist in the world, but he was persistant, and in the early disney, he had visions. He was a dreamer. He wanted to see things bigger, bolder, more bueatiful. He wanted to see it be done with animation. YOu can see the curve in the Disney films. It starts at Snow White, Picks up to it's hight right before Sleeping Bueaty, and then curves it way back down. Eisner brought guidance breifly, through the form of someone else (I know there is a producer responcible, but I can't remember his name) and you see the peak during the 90's (Little Mermaid to Lion King), and then it slides back down again.

However, you can see this influnce his very directly in WB... For years, WB animated features were SCHLOCK! They were so bad that when the Iron Giant came out, I completely ignored it, cause it was done by WB's. Brad Bird is what saved that film from WB. I mean, animation wise, it's about the same level as Sleeping Bueaty, but with the story guidance of Bambi. (I'm sorry, I know Disney like the back of my hand, I can't help refering to it).

There is this book. Walt Disney is a funny charecter... I think that's what it was called. It's kinda a biography of Walt, the man. Showed not quite the flattering side that Disney Co. wants you to see. However, he was a soldier and a man, so you have to expect some of those things. Drove people hard to make a better product. Expected a lot of loyalty. However, he was great as a leader, and people always believed he was doing the right thing.

All I am saying is maybe that's what it takes? Just a person who can lead and drive, and who people belive can't be wrong, that makes the films go from blah to great?

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Strong leadership is definetely important, but I think you might have been onto an even better part if your opening sentence.

Back in the day, you didn't start out as an animator. You got your start as maybe an inker or an inbetweener and you worked your way up to being an animator. Apprenticeship has really been lost in america and it's a shame because it's probbly the absolute best route to greater arts. First, in being an apprentice, you are learning from someone skilled with every single job. If your work is rough, they'll show you how to smooth it over or make you redo it. Second, I suspect in every apprentice, there lurks a seed of contempt for their master. How _I_ would do things if _I_ were in charge. It drives people, gives them a desire to succeed and exceed and be better than who they learned from. I think that may be the true component that made early Disney and Warner so successful and why, animation quality took a nosedive in the 70's... Right abou tthe time that inbetween work started getting shipped overseas. Not that the overseas inbetweeners are inherently bad, but rather, they don't have the keyframer sitting right there, giving them energy and ideas and suggestions on how to make their work better.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Because the bean-counters are firmly in control.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Money is the root of all evil but I don't think it's the only problem.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Adding to the swell of voices. Unca' Walt seems personality wise like a cross between Bill Gates (cult of personality, certain his way is the best way, drives the work but doesn't actually do any of it) and Howard Hughes (lunatic dreamer). Remember, right up to Snow White making money, the animation industry of the day considered it Disney's folly - feature length animated films was just not something that would get off the ground! So a lot of what we're seeing there is thanks to the force of personality of a particularly visionary jerk.

Then you look through your collection of old animation, and in some ways, times don't change. People crank out dumb junk with poor character designs and sorry plot excuses now, the same way they were cranking out dumb junk with poor character designs and sorry plot excuses during the '30s and '40s. Maybe a better model would be all those Looney Tunes from the late '40s and early '50s, where production and commercial appeal means sacrificing some of the Disney beauty, but there's enough still there to make a good story.

Inspiration and what'll sell is a lot more consistant era to era than technology.

In fact, I'd argue that technology currently works against quality right now - people forget that ultimately it's the writers, not even the animators, and certainly not something being CG, that makes a good product. BtAS, and then Justice League, Teen Titans, even Samurai Jack and Clone Wars, really hammer home that you desparately need the writing part - and that good art is the thing you need to prop that up.

I think Americans get too obsessed with the superficialities of anime without absorbing what anime has to teach us. For instance, my friend's 10 year old is or used to be obsessed with Yu-Gi-Oh - it had all these game and story elements that hit 10 year old logic exactly. Imagine a show with that sort of character and plot thinking behind it (childish, sure! But childish in the sense of real children, not the dumb theoretical entities I see a lot of American stuff pitched to) done with far better animation, and you've got what Americans could be watching.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Walt Disney's personality was definetely important, but there were other studios that did good work too. Warner's of course, some of the Fleischer stuff was pretty good. There were good bits in Felix the Cat and even some of the Van Bueren stuff was interesting to look at. In the case of VB, and to a lesser degree, Fleischer, I think the art did suffer from the lack of strong writing and they both tended to get their good animators hired away by Warner and Disney but even at their worst, a lot of their offerings were considerably more watchable than many of the things on Cartoon Network and Disney Channel today. Some the stuff that's out these days is down to the quality of Ruff and Ready. I mean it's just bad. The animation is bad, the writing is bad, the staging is bad. Bad bad bad bad. There's always been bad cartoons and there always will be, but somewhere along the line, we lost the good ones.

As for anime, there's several lessons that could be learned. Some lead in a good direction and some towards the dark side. I think stuff like Metropolis, Akira, and many of Miyazaki's films are showing us what modern animation could be, and I think there's even higher places it could climb to.

Even a lot of the series shows are interesting in that they're story driven and done by comparitively small teams to US shows. They're often made by people taking comics and adapting them for television, basically using the comic as a storyboard. This is probably a great potential for us. I've been listening to a lot of conversations with independent comic book producers and most of them are basically fanboys. Ignoring the big brand things, you could probably find a good comic team to work with that would be more than happy to sell or share rights to produce an animated version of their work.

On the other hand, the lesson american corporations learn from anime is 'HEY!!!! With an interesting camera angle and some barely-talking heads, I can make this shot drag on for 10 minutes and only pay for 1 cel of animation.' 20 minutes if it's a fight scene. That's the posion side of anime. A lot of it is done by small groups that love a comic but they don't really know how to animate. They know how to make some good keyposes and dramatic frames and angles. There's other issues in the US too with everyone wanting to be the star. Creative licensing, merchandising, and copyright are the bane of good stories becoming good animation.

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

In essence, I think there's two reasons.

The first is that a lot of animation is entrenched in the entertainment business. As corporations, their goal is to spend as close to 0 as possible while getting returns as close to infinite as possible. It wouldn't matter if you reduced the cost of an animated feature to $1,000. It's still too much according to modern economics.

But because it's so inexpensive, as you mentioned, that should leave the door wide open for independent productions, right? Well, yes, but you still need a team to effectively produce anything large. Yes, it's not a hundred people, but it seems near-impossible to get half a dozen people together nowadays. This increased freedom has enabled folks to get a starry-eyed sense of the individual project, and the ideal of sacrificing things such as time in the short term to accomplish long term goals is becoming more alien.

Then as Paka alluded to, there's the issue of writing. As Tycho of Penny-Arcade once said about independent comics, "...with the Internet, more people can not care about it than ever." The Internet is a great place to get a wide audience. The trick is getting that audience. It can be easy and cost near nothing, but you have to have something they'll come back for. Again, with a group of animators, it'd be hard to find one that's a good storyteller as well, which only adds more to a team and makes people resent that the idea they're working on isn't their baby.

I think that while we've gained all this technology, we've lost paitence.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's really a matter of patience. People spend months inking comics. Look at music. The electronic keyboard and home recording studio has opened up a wealth of new music and people are spending massive amounts of time on that.

I think you were closer in the problem of getting together the right group of people. Animation is so much more complex than music or comics. The storyboard is like a comic. Requires good writing, strong angles, etc to keep people interested. The musical score is like no other type of music as it can't just be music, it needs to sync with the pace of the story, it needs to explain and counterplay against the story, in effect, the story has to be thought of as a visual instrument for sound and played as a part of that symphony and there' sthe problem of the chicken and the egg. The music can't be done until the story is done, the story can't be done until the music is done. Then there's the sound editing, the colour-theory of making the characters stand out from the background, etc. Then there's the actual animation itself. No trivial task. Not to mention the effects animation. Then there's someone that has to put it all together, edit it, make it work, and if you get through that whole gauntlet, there's still the question of how do you get anyone to experience your work. It's a complicated issue.