Thursday, October 23, 2003

The format doesn't matter!

I have noticed something rather interesting with the movie ad posters for Disney's Brother Bear. They look rendered. (By rendered, I mean that they look like stereotypical computer generated (CG) images, not like "hand drawn" images.) Why is this interesting? Because Brother Bear is a "hand drawn" film, not CG! Why make your adds look like it is CG? Simple. Hollywood is convinced that "hand drawn" animation is dead. That is such a rediculous statement. It's like saying that an essay is better when typed than it is handwritten, or that a novel is better in hardback than paperback (I'm talking about the story here, not the reading experience). It doesn't matter if a film is 2D or 3D! If the story stinks, it won't do well. Why, then, have Pixar films done better over the last few years than traditionally animated Disney films? NOT because they're CG rendered, but because they had better stories! Come on, people, get with the program. And besides all this, are people going to feel cheated if, based on the posters, they go to see Brother Bear expecting CG and get "hand drawn"? It's certainly possible.

BTW, for everyone wondering why I keep putting "hand drawn" in quotes, it's because no films are made any longer with actual ink being applied to cells. The last film to use that technique was The Little Mermaid. Every Disney animated film since then, "hand drawn" or not, was done in the computer. Granted, they were still drawn with hands, but either the sketches were then scanned and "painted" in the computer, or they were sketched on electronic pads which transferred them directly to the computer. Either way, the days of draftspeople sitting at desks with ink and paint are over. So, if someone tries to cell (oops, Freudian there; I mean sell) you an "original hand inked production cell" from, say, The Lion King, it's a fake! There have been hand inked cells released in honor of several films since then, but none were actually used in production. Your trivia for today.

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