Tim Burton Says Hand-Drawn isn't Dead

[Mr.E]

This is his comments I found at Cartoon Brew...



In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists. The fact that Disney closed down its cel animation division is frightening to me. Someday soon, somebody will come along and do a drawn-animated film, and it'll be beautiful and connect with people, and they'll all go, 'Oh, we've got to do that!' It's ridiculous.
Well,lets hope "Curious George" has that effect.

[SirLemming]

Belongs in General Animation, but it's cool to hear.

[Bubblegum Girl]

Right on! Even though i like 3D, I really don't want it to replace 2D animation.

[Patchwork]

Right on indeed! It's always wonderful to hear someone put in a good word for good ol' 2D.

[Movie-Brat]

Go Burton!

[Silly McGooses]

Too bad Curious George hasn't seen the light of a poster, a promo shot, an ad, or any type of public exposure when it's coming out this Spring...it's gonna bomb, I think.

Oh, but, I LOVE YOU, TIM BURTON!

[Rook]

when was it ever declared dead at all? I always thought 2D held its position.

[Youko Recca]

Wouldn't call it dead, just not superiorly prominent anymore. I respect that opinion though. Leave the animation to the ones with talent.

[Woulfe]

It's not dead, it's mearly resting....
Resting ? You nailed it to the perch !

Okay, sorry, just had to do that bit ;)

As long as there are indepentant films traditional animation will have an outlet, only in Hollywood it's dead & buried in light of CG only animated fare, however Tim is right, all it will take is 1 traditional animated film that makes a small fortune for Hollwood to change it's tune real fast....

I for one think there is room for both, after all look at how well Dis blended the two to make the ballroom scene in B&B, or the stampeed in TLK, just to name two off the top of my head, at one point I was saying if they keep getting better at blending the two we'd see something that would of blown our socks off, however what might of been is now a moot point.....

CG shouldn't have replaced traditional, it should of just been seen as yet another way to animate, like cut-outs, clay and other methods....

Woulfe
* my $0.02 give or take for inflation, taxes, yadda yadda yadda *

[Mary_mari]

The 3D vs 2D war?? Yes, it scares me. Mainly because I'm studying in university right now to become a 2D animator. And one of my core classes is 3D conceptual design! Why?? Well, to broaden my horizons, although it's still a required credit for a BA in Graphic Design.

But I'm sure 2D can make a come back. And not through flash...flash is terribe! :D (unless you count the Gorillaz's music videos, though those are variations of media. Beautiful! But variations~*)

[Mr.E]

Too bad Curious George hasn't seen the light of a poster, a promo shot, an ad, or any type of public exposure when it's coming out this Spring...it's gonna bomb, I think.
Geez, thanks for the postive encouragemnet.

[SirLemming]

But I'm sure 2D can make a come back. And not through flash...flash is terribe! :D (unless you count the Gorillaz's music videos, though those are variations of media. Beautiful! But variations~*) Easy there. Flash is only terrible when people use it terribly. You probably can't get studio-quality results or anything, but if someone actually cares about character design and uses Tweens properly and isn't, well, just plain lazy (though even the least lazy person has his limits when trying to solo-animate something), they can do some danged good stuff.

It more or less shouldn't be used for TV shows, of course, unless it's kind of a reductionist style. Then again, a lot of TV animation is kind of reductionist these days.

[I.R Joey]

Tim Burton is a very, very wise man it appears. He's right on in what he's saying. It will be a sad day indeed when some big shot at Disney decides they better "get in" on this hand drawn animated feature thing.



Easy there. Flash is only terrible when people use it terribly. You probably can't get studio-quality results or anything, but if someone actually cares about character design and uses Tweens properly and isn't, well, just plain lazy (though even the least lazy person has his limits when trying to solo-animate something), they can do some danged good stuff.

It more or less shouldn't be used for TV shows, of course, unless it's kind of a reductionist style. Then again, a lot of TV animation is kind of reductionist these days.
It is entierly possible that Flash might be the salvation of the traditional artform. Flash is a nice program, and you can get some pretty interesting stuff out of it if you give it a try. I think traditional animators would have a leg up though since it tries to emulate alot of the things that traditional animators do. You can "flip" the frames just like a 2d film by going back and forth, you can see through the current frame to the previous one just like a lightbox would do. It's very friendly to traditional animation.

Your comment on reductionism is really interesting. Not to long ago I had a conversation with an animator on a flash show (a popular one) and when I said that Flash is best used for limited animation he contended that it was quite a bit more versitile than I was giving it credit for. I'm not one to question his opinion, especially since he has way more experiance, but I still can't shake the idea that a program originally designed for web animation is best used for simplistic designs.

Anyway, they'll take the pencils from our cold dead hands.

[MonkeyFunk]

Yeah, but... Tim Burton also says Betty is hotter than Wilma.

[Mr.E]

The 3D vs 2D war?? Yes, it scares me. Mainly because I'm studying in university right now to become a 2D animator. And one of my core classes is 3D conceptual design! Why?? Well, to broaden my horizons, although it's still a required credit for a BA in Graphic Design.

But I'm sure 2D can make a come back. And not through flash...flash is terribe! :D (unless you count the Gorillaz's music videos, though those are variations of media. Beautiful! But variations~*)

Flash isn't that bad, a recent coca puffs cereal commerical combined animation cels and flash and it looked great.

['Stute Fish]

What studio is coming out with Curious George? I hope it'll have that same soothing guitar music the old limited animation shorts did. Unless it goes eXtreem or something...

Glad to read that comment by Burton, especially since 2-D's not his medium of choice.

I think Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and Harvey Birdman both do Flash proud.

[Nobody You Know]

Flash is not bad.

Bad Flash is bad.

Trust me. I've seen shorts (on Newgrounds and elsewhere) that do wonderful things with it... And shorts that do horrible things.

It's a shelter from the storm for 2D animation, and that's what it needs, right now.

At least until we get a strong leader, willing to back well-designed, hand-drawn 2D animation...

...

...

...

...

...

... Yeah. Flash is it, right now.

[SirLemming]

Your comment on reductionism is really interesting. Not to long ago I had a conversation with an animator on a flash show (a popular one) and when I said that Flash is best used for limited animation he contended that it was quite a bit more versitile than I was giving it credit for. I'm not one to question his opinion, especially since he has way more experiance, but I still can't shake the idea that a program originally designed for web animation is best used for simplistic designs. Certainly, it's what you make of it. You can go entirely frame-by-frame if you want to, really, instead of using some amount of tweening for, like, moving arms and stuff. In the end, though, if you want to make a really great frame-by-frame product, you should probably be using some other method.

The only reason to use Flash for something non-reductionist, basically, is if you're just some guy in high school or college, or if you don't have a big budget. But that happens to be a very valid reason that applies to a lot of people.

One of the best-looking Flash toons I've ever seen is Andrew Kauervane's recently updated pilot for My God, Robots! http://www.deviantart.com/view/22594104/ It's pretty awesome. It certainly still has some directing and pacing problems, but it's beautiful.

[Discloner]

What studio is coming out with Curious George? I hope it'll have that same soothing guitar music the old limited animation shorts did. Unless it goes eXtreem or something...I think its Universal.

[Mary_mari]

Flash isn't that bad, a recent coca puffs cereal commerical combined animation cels and flash and it looked great.
When you combine cel and flash, it always looks great. I love how smoothly flash runs (most of the time), but it usually seems "cheap" looking. I suppose, though, that quality depends on the type of progam used to create it (and the skill used to create it, of course!). It's just that flash seems extremely 2D, extremely flat from what I've seen. This is a pretty narrow view, let me tell you. THEREFORE...there.

Flash has certainly advanced over the last few years. And technology advances everyday, so I'll probably be eating my own words next week* :p

[I.R Joey]

Flash is not bad.

Bad Flash is bad.

Trust me. I've seen shorts (on Newgrounds and elsewhere) that do wonderful things with it... And shorts that do horrible things.

It's a shelter from the storm for 2D animation, and that's what it needs, right now.

At least until we get a strong leader, willing to back well-designed, hand-drawn 2D animation...

...

...

...

...

...

... Yeah. Flash is it, right now.

Yeah Lazy "tweening" can be a problem with Flash. It also can absolutely kill the sense of weight and gravity in the charecter animation. But then again some people don't really seem to mind it. That's one thing I really complimented the flash animator I met on.

Foster's Home for Imaginary friends (the show he works on in case you're wondering) always has charecters with a defined sense of weight. And each of the charecters moves diffrently. I commented on Wilt who has a really well put together walk cycle. His movement while walking goes up and down in a very nice way, the kind of way that you might see in a traditional animation book like Illusion of life or Preston Blair's book. When he's moving there's always the sense that he has mass and form even though the show has a very flat, graphic art style. It's the same thing with Bloo who kind of bobs from side to side while walking, Eduardo who has that hunch in his walk, or Mr. Herriman who has that heavy bounce "or hippity hop" to quote one of the episodes . Each of the charecter's moves diffrently than the others. I think it reinforces SirLemming's and some of the other poster's points. These are things that most flash shows don't do, and yet it shows how people with a knowledge of traditional animation mechanics can really raise the bar with what Flash can do.

[SirLemming]

The "cheapness" of Flash can also be a frame rate issue, sometimes. I find that that's an issue with lots of digitally assisted animation, not just Flash. The first season of Justice League is a perfect example. Sometimes it looked very static, and more often than not, camera pans and character flight looked "too smooth". Too smooth because they didn't gel with the lower framerate that everything was actually animated at. It's a symptom of a lot of newer shows, including anime like Scryed. It must be avoided.

Lower framerate is clearly not a bad thing to a certain extent; I mean, it's basically the easiest way to tell the difference between a movie and a soap opera.

[Hordesman]

The 3D vs 2D war?? Yes, it scares me. Mainly because I'm studying in university right now to become a 2D animator. And one of my core classes is 3D conceptual design! Why?? Well, to broaden my horizons, although it's still a required credit for a BA in Graphic Design.

Shortly after Dreamworks cast the voices for SharkTale (then called Sharkslayer) they sent representives to a comic con with character sketches and rendered CGI images of characters. And really, aside from color and 3D graphics, it was the same. Nothing make CGI without being preplanned in 2D.

And believe it or not, Pixar is more interested in recruiting people with stop-motion experience over computer. That can be taught on-the-job, worst case scenario.

[Donald Duck 12]

I think that pretty much sums it up. And it makes sense that Burton would be concerned with Disney closing their 2D, since he got his start their. Yes it isn't dead.

[AdamYJ]

Wow. I may not care much for Tim Burton's movies, but I like his attitude toward animation. I think that sometimes in general, people focus way too much on technology in regards to entertainment. There's this attitude of "planned obsolescence" about it, like it were a computer that needs to be constantly upgraded. What people don't seem to realize about Pixar and Dreamworks and companies like those is that they still mainly survive by virtue of their characters and stories and how good of a job their artists do. Just like with hand-drawn cel animation, there can be both good (Shrek, Toy Story, The Incredibles, etc) and crappy (Shark Tale, Dinosaur, etc.) CGI movies. Pixar's strength has always been that they've got really good creative people. Anyway, it'll probably all happen in a cycle anyway. I remember there was a big chunk of time when Disney wasn't making any major animated movies at all. Then they released The Little Mermaid and suddenly we were getting one almost every year.

[RayChuang]

The thing that really hurt Disney's use of hand-drawn animation was that they had a spate of sub-par animated films from their own people, while they watched with envy the enormous success of Pixar-created CGI-animated features. I personally believe that soon-to-retire Disney CEO Michael Eisner over-reacted to this issue, much to the detriment of the company itself.

But yet, traditional 2-D animation is not as hand-drawn as it used to be. Thanks to FujiFilm phasing out the production of the cellular sheets used for hand-drawn animation in the late 1990's, Japanese animation companies had no choice but to start heavily investing in computer technology for their 2-D animation for TV and movies. Note that many anime series done since 2000 use computers to assemble the final animated product--essentially Disney's CAPS "on the cheap." Also, note that highly-successful 2-D animated series coming out of Europe also make extensive use of computer technology. Marathon's Totally Spies, SPI Animations' W.I.T.C.H., and Rainbow S.r.l's Winx Club are done this way.

In short, we've reach the point that what looks like 2-D animation are actually done on high-end computer workstations instead of being hand-drawn cel-by-cel.

By the way, it should be noted that Corpse Bride made use of CGI technology in many parts of the film.

[Roman Legion]

But yet, traditional 2-D animation is not as hand-drawn as it used to be . . . In short, we've reach the point that what looks like 2-D animation are actually done on high-end computer workstations instead of being hand-drawn cel-by-cel.Almost all of it's still technically drawn by hand, though. Unless it's really cheap Flash, it's not like the computers will magically draw everything for you...

--Romey

[Edd]

By the way, it should be noted that Corpse Bride made use of CGI technology in many parts of the film.And it should be noted that Burton never said CGI was a bad thing and that Corpse Bride isn't hand-drawn 2D animation. ;) CGI has been used in hand-drawn animated films, like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, but they were still hand-drawn. Personally, I don't mind computers doing some elements, but I think there's something human and real about hand-drawn animation (as well as stop-motion, since you've brought up Corpse Bride) that can never be captured with computer generated 3D animation.

You've cited some 2D animation that use computers, and, though not in all cases, many of them still lack that quality of hand-drawn animation. While Totally Spies is sucessful and encourages more productions like it, as an animation enthusist I can't say I'm happy about that.

[EinBebop]

They said claymation was dead, too. :cool: