The NY Times has a very interesting article today on upcoming Disney films, as well as confirmed projects that have been rumored(ie My Peoples). Some very interesting quotes as well from Jeffrey Katzenberg(Dreamworks) and Thomas Schumacher( president of Disney's animation division) on the future of 2-D(traditional animation) and CGI(Computer Generated Animation-ala Toy Story,Shrek, etc) and how they might be used together. I've copied and pasted the article since access to it is subscription based.
This summer could decide the future of the beloved form that gave movie fans "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Pinocchio" and "Beauty and the Beast." Two animated features, "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" and "Lilo and Stitch," will be offering traditional-looking hand-drawn imagery to an audience that has fallen in love with the simulated 3-D effects of computer-generated cartoons.
Although both new films make use of computer technology, they are essentially 2-D animations: that is, flat drawings come to life. Their unique magic resides in the discernible hand of the artist, who, like an offstage conjurer, offers human warmth, emotional intimacy and subtle characterizations that cannot yet be completely achieved on computers.
But lately, animators who use pixels have been outpacing those who use pencils. The computer, or C.G., animations "Shrek," "Monsters, Inc.," "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius," and "Ice Age" all of which followed in the wake of "Toy Story" were critical and commercial successes, while recent traditionally drawn features "Atlantis: The Lost Empire," "The Road to El Dorado," "The Emperor's New Groove," "Recess: The Movie" and "Osmosis Jones" (where the animation was combined with live action) were duds.
Arguably, the 3-D films had more engaging stories and characters than their 2-D counterparts, and were better marketed. But with all three nominees in the Oscars' new animated feature category coming out of C.G. workshops, the writing may be on the wall for traditional animators. They are joined by studio executives, financiers, critics, academics and fans in wondering whether 2-D toons are now obsolete.
Enter DreamWorks with "Spirit" and Disney with "Lilo," both hedging their bets by melding hand drawing with C.G. "I think 2-D films as defined in the past are a thing of the past," said the DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who produced "Spirit" and who is credited with reviving animated features while he was at Disney. "Today's audiences demand a richer, more immersive, lifelike, detailed world, and the only way you can create that is by computer." He describes 2-D as "an organic process" and 3-D as "an engineering process"; watching 2-D, he says, is like receiving a handwritten letter as opposed to an e-mail. "Traditional animation as it existed in the 20th century is being reinvented," Mr. Katzenberg said.
"Spirit," opening May 24, tells the story of the title character, a mustang, as he gallops through the American frontier of the late 1800's. Echoes of "Bambi" reverberate in the subtle, hand-drawn anthropomorphism of the narrative as it tracks a wild animal's birth, his relationship with nature, his encounters with humans and a climactic fire.
Walt Disney's multiplane camera gave the drawings in "Bambi" an illusion of depth. Computers do the same for "Spirit," with seamless transitions between the traditional animation and the C.G. imagery. The opening sequence, in which the camera follows a bald eagle swooping through forests and canyons in one continuous flight, combined thousands of pieces of 2-D and 3-D artwork, 700 painted background elements, and 30 layers of digitally composited images on each film frame. The naturalistic draftsmanship and animation (supervised by James Baxter) merge with the computer effects to make the characters and their story believable.
"Lilo and Stitch," opening June 21, achieves believability while celebrating the cartoon as cartoon. An action-filled comedy with requisite heartstring tugs in the best "Dumbo" tradition, "Lilo" has the most original story to come from Disney in years. Lilo is a lonely 6-year-old Hawaiian girl who adopts what she thinks is a small, ugly dog, Stitch. But he is actually an alien experiment from another planet. The score includes six Elvis Presley hits (sung by the King himself) commenting on the plot and fully developed personalities, which were hand-animated, principally by Andreas Deja and Alex Kupershmidt.
The stylized character designs match hand-painted watercolor backgrounds, offering a lush illustrative look reminiscent of mid-1930's Mickey Mouse shorts, a toon world that preceded the slavish "realism" of the features. But computers colored the animation drawings in "Lilo and Stitch," digitally aligned them with backgrounds and animated the film's metallic spacecraft. But, said Chris Sanders, the movie's co-director and designer, "Instead of placing our emphasis on technical marvels and pushing new boundaries, we wanted to slow the world down a bit and focus on character development and relationships."
Solid drawing skills will always be important in making animated productions. On television, hand-drawn cartoons rule, and some "Rugrats" and "Beavis and Butt-head," for example have made successful transitions to the big screen. But the way of the future is crossbreeding 2-D with 3-D.
The "Spirit" team coined a clumsy word tradigital to describe a smoothly integrated process. " `Spirit' is not a 2-D movie but the most technologically complex animated feature to date," Mr. Katzenberg said. "Hand drawing is one aspect of the film." He predicted that such hybrids would someday be the norm.
So all DreamWorks animators have been trained in both C.G. and traditional techniques. And at the Walt Disney studio, there is similar rethinking and retooling. In March, 250 jobs were cut in the Burbank feature animation unit mostly traditional animators and the assistants called cleanup artists. Remaining staff members have been offered retraining on computers, and angry former employees believe C.G. is taking over the studio where 2-D animation became an art form.
Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney's animation division, said that the firings were part of a general belt-tightening at the studio: "Over the years I have carried people with absolutely nothing to do," he said. But he conceded that Disney was restructuring the way its animated features are made. "There are functions that can be replaced or enhanced by technology," he said. "But you can't make a movie without being able to draw."
Mr. Schumacher contended that C.G. "is not defined at all," and cited examples of the multiple ways computer animators can "create looks." One is Deep Canvas, a technique created by Disney and first tried in "Tarzan." It made "paintings feel alive," he said. Another is "motion capture" technology, which uses live action as a base image, as in last year's Richard Linklater film "Waking Life." And there is "paperless" animation, using an electronic cursor as a "pencil."
The real future of 2-D at Disney may be glimpsed this fall in "Treasure Planet," an outer-space riff on Robert Louis Stevenson's pirate tale "Treasure Island." Long John Silver is "co-animated" by the traditional artist Glen Keane (animator of the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast" and Tarzan) and the C.G. animator Eric Daniels, who animated one of Silver's eyes, an arm and his peg leg. Also in the pipeline is "My Peoples," described by Mr. Schumacher as a "bluegrass musical of 2-D characters in a 2-D world that you watch transform and become 3-D."
Disney's distribution contract with Pixar, the supersuccessful computer studio responsible for "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters, Inc.," runs out after three more films. "With or without Pixar," Mr. Schumacher said, "I'm making movies that are C.G." One 3-D film currently in production is "Chicken Little," which is being drawn by C.G. artists and retrained traditional animators.
What would the company's founder make of all this?
"Walt Disney was one of the great futurists of our time," Mr. Schumacher said. "It is hard for me to believe that the man who kept reinventing animation wouldn't embrace this form of storytelling."
Indeed, technological advances helped build the Disney empire, from sound to Technicolor to multiplane camera to television. Besides, Walt Disney's relationships with workers were often strained, and he was known to suggest only half-jokingly that he'd gladly replace his slow and expensive traditional animators with animatronic robots. No doubt: Walt would embrace C.G.I.
This summer could decide the future of the beloved form that gave movie fans "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Pinocchio" and "Beauty and the Beast." Two animated features, "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" and "Lilo and Stitch," will be offering traditional-looking hand-drawn imagery to an audience that has fallen in love with the simulated 3-D effects of computer-generated cartoons.
Although both new films make use of computer technology, they are essentially 2-D animations: that is, flat drawings come to life. Their unique magic resides in the discernible hand of the artist, who, like an offstage conjurer, offers human warmth, emotional intimacy and subtle characterizations that cannot yet be completely achieved on computers.
But lately, animators who use pixels have been outpacing those who use pencils. The computer, or C.G., animations "Shrek," "Monsters, Inc.," "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius," and "Ice Age" all of which followed in the wake of "Toy Story" were critical and commercial successes, while recent traditionally drawn features "Atlantis: The Lost Empire," "The Road to El Dorado," "The Emperor's New Groove," "Recess: The Movie" and "Osmosis Jones" (where the animation was combined with live action) were duds.
Arguably, the 3-D films had more engaging stories and characters than their 2-D counterparts, and were better marketed. But with all three nominees in the Oscars' new animated feature category coming out of C.G. workshops, the writing may be on the wall for traditional animators. They are joined by studio executives, financiers, critics, academics and fans in wondering whether 2-D toons are now obsolete.
Enter DreamWorks with "Spirit" and Disney with "Lilo," both hedging their bets by melding hand drawing with C.G. "I think 2-D films as defined in the past are a thing of the past," said the DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who produced "Spirit" and who is credited with reviving animated features while he was at Disney. "Today's audiences demand a richer, more immersive, lifelike, detailed world, and the only way you can create that is by computer." He describes 2-D as "an organic process" and 3-D as "an engineering process"; watching 2-D, he says, is like receiving a handwritten letter as opposed to an e-mail. "Traditional animation as it existed in the 20th century is being reinvented," Mr. Katzenberg said.
"Spirit," opening May 24, tells the story of the title character, a mustang, as he gallops through the American frontier of the late 1800's. Echoes of "Bambi" reverberate in the subtle, hand-drawn anthropomorphism of the narrative as it tracks a wild animal's birth, his relationship with nature, his encounters with humans and a climactic fire.
Walt Disney's multiplane camera gave the drawings in "Bambi" an illusion of depth. Computers do the same for "Spirit," with seamless transitions between the traditional animation and the C.G. imagery. The opening sequence, in which the camera follows a bald eagle swooping through forests and canyons in one continuous flight, combined thousands of pieces of 2-D and 3-D artwork, 700 painted background elements, and 30 layers of digitally composited images on each film frame. The naturalistic draftsmanship and animation (supervised by James Baxter) merge with the computer effects to make the characters and their story believable.
"Lilo and Stitch," opening June 21, achieves believability while celebrating the cartoon as cartoon. An action-filled comedy with requisite heartstring tugs in the best "Dumbo" tradition, "Lilo" has the most original story to come from Disney in years. Lilo is a lonely 6-year-old Hawaiian girl who adopts what she thinks is a small, ugly dog, Stitch. But he is actually an alien experiment from another planet. The score includes six Elvis Presley hits (sung by the King himself) commenting on the plot and fully developed personalities, which were hand-animated, principally by Andreas Deja and Alex Kupershmidt.
The stylized character designs match hand-painted watercolor backgrounds, offering a lush illustrative look reminiscent of mid-1930's Mickey Mouse shorts, a toon world that preceded the slavish "realism" of the features. But computers colored the animation drawings in "Lilo and Stitch," digitally aligned them with backgrounds and animated the film's metallic spacecraft. But, said Chris Sanders, the movie's co-director and designer, "Instead of placing our emphasis on technical marvels and pushing new boundaries, we wanted to slow the world down a bit and focus on character development and relationships."
Solid drawing skills will always be important in making animated productions. On television, hand-drawn cartoons rule, and some "Rugrats" and "Beavis and Butt-head," for example have made successful transitions to the big screen. But the way of the future is crossbreeding 2-D with 3-D.
The "Spirit" team coined a clumsy word tradigital to describe a smoothly integrated process. " `Spirit' is not a 2-D movie but the most technologically complex animated feature to date," Mr. Katzenberg said. "Hand drawing is one aspect of the film." He predicted that such hybrids would someday be the norm.
So all DreamWorks animators have been trained in both C.G. and traditional techniques. And at the Walt Disney studio, there is similar rethinking and retooling. In March, 250 jobs were cut in the Burbank feature animation unit mostly traditional animators and the assistants called cleanup artists. Remaining staff members have been offered retraining on computers, and angry former employees believe C.G. is taking over the studio where 2-D animation became an art form.
Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney's animation division, said that the firings were part of a general belt-tightening at the studio: "Over the years I have carried people with absolutely nothing to do," he said. But he conceded that Disney was restructuring the way its animated features are made. "There are functions that can be replaced or enhanced by technology," he said. "But you can't make a movie without being able to draw."
Mr. Schumacher contended that C.G. "is not defined at all," and cited examples of the multiple ways computer animators can "create looks." One is Deep Canvas, a technique created by Disney and first tried in "Tarzan." It made "paintings feel alive," he said. Another is "motion capture" technology, which uses live action as a base image, as in last year's Richard Linklater film "Waking Life." And there is "paperless" animation, using an electronic cursor as a "pencil."
The real future of 2-D at Disney may be glimpsed this fall in "Treasure Planet," an outer-space riff on Robert Louis Stevenson's pirate tale "Treasure Island." Long John Silver is "co-animated" by the traditional artist Glen Keane (animator of the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast" and Tarzan) and the C.G. animator Eric Daniels, who animated one of Silver's eyes, an arm and his peg leg. Also in the pipeline is "My Peoples," described by Mr. Schumacher as a "bluegrass musical of 2-D characters in a 2-D world that you watch transform and become 3-D."
Disney's distribution contract with Pixar, the supersuccessful computer studio responsible for "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters, Inc.," runs out after three more films. "With or without Pixar," Mr. Schumacher said, "I'm making movies that are C.G." One 3-D film currently in production is "Chicken Little," which is being drawn by C.G. artists and retrained traditional animators.
What would the company's founder make of all this?
"Walt Disney was one of the great futurists of our time," Mr. Schumacher said. "It is hard for me to believe that the man who kept reinventing animation wouldn't embrace this form of storytelling."
Indeed, technological advances helped build the Disney empire, from sound to Technicolor to multiplane camera to television. Besides, Walt Disney's relationships with workers were often strained, and he was known to suggest only half-jokingly that he'd gladly replace his slow and expensive traditional animators with animatronic robots. No doubt: Walt would embrace C.G.I.
