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.