| Monday, October 24, 2005 |
14:15 - What Animates You
http://naha.cool.ne.jp/matatabiasobi/kansuto.html
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Here's a piece of marvelous Flash animation forwarded by Chris.
You know... here's what this makes me think of.
In the mid-90s, everyone was predicting the imminent demise of traditional 2D animation, with pencils and cels, because—as Pixar had so ably demonstrated—three-dimensional CG animation was here to stay, and would soon drive it into oblivion. And despite the general blah level of nearly every 3D CG production in the past ten years (aside from Pixar's own, because they really know what they're doing), it seems that those pundits were right—Disney Feature Animation has been shuttered, and now the company is pumping out lavish but uninspiring entrants like Dinosaur and Chicken Little in place of the shoestring-budgeted but smorgasbord-of-belly-laughs outings like The Emperor's New Groove. Feature animation isn't what it used to be—it's now the province of high-powered studios who can afford dozens of site-licenses of expensive animation software, and the animators they hire to use them have to be as much computer geeks and physicists and wire-frame modelers as they are artists... and the latter part usually suffers as a result. (This, for example, isn't something that someone just sat down on a weekend and did on a lark for the purpose of creating an Internet meme. It's the big-budget realization of a whole freakish phenomenon in the UK, soon—perish the thought—to arrive on these shores.)
But this Flash animation illustrates one thing, to me: that the impulse to create 2D animation is not dead. It's just moved back to the grass-roots, where it began eighty years ago. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks had their acetate and pencils and slanty desks with circular holes cut out of them; today people have their pseudo-legitimate copies of Flash and their $500 PCs. What they create fills the same niche. It's the raw, unpolished, simplified art of the Tartakovskys and the Parker/Stones and the Chapmans of the world that has all the energy and vitality these days, and it doesn't take any major training or subsidized budget to harness it.
The big-name studios may abandon traditional animation, but traditional animation will always want to exist. And thank goodness for that.
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Brian Tiemann
