The collapse of American 2D animation is so sad. 3D animation has its place and charms too, I’m not knocking it, but 2D animation has a certain magic that’s incredibly difficult to replicate in 3D. It’s a beautiful art form that deserves better.
One worry of mine is that it won’t make a comeback before the masters who worked at Disney, WB, Cartoon Network, etc all pass away and all of that knowledge and expertise will be lost.
I'm not sure of the veracity of this, but apparently the Disney set the film Treasure Planet up to fail specifically so it could wash its hands of the very cool but expensive hybrid technology the film used where traditional animation and CGI were combined.
Personally I'm really sad this kind of technique never caught on more in Western films, Treasure Planet was panned at the time but I think it's actually a bit of an overlooked classic. The art style works really well, take Long John Silver for example whose body is traditionally animated but his cybernetic limbs are CGI - this looked fantastic in 2002 so imagine what could be done now.
No need to imagine. That kind of hybrid is frequently used in modern anime, though it's getting less and less visible with time. These days it's basically only apparent with low-budget productions, or by looking for scenes that are animated too smoothly and consistently.
One of the major determining factors of if CG blends well with 2D animation is if the 3D was farmed out to another studio or done in-house. All of the biggest 2D-3D hybrid success stories in anime (such a ufotable, the studio behind Demon Slayer) have an in-house CG team that works in tandem with the 2D and compositing teams.
There is a rich pipeline of mangas (comics) to anime (2D animation) that is alive and well there.
The U.S. is obsessed with massive studio efforts that all resolve to the exact same character design and animation style (people want the familiar!) But there is a ton of innovation (including AI and 3D usage) as well as a system to support skill handoff that exists outside of Hollywood.
Oh I know, I’ve been keeping up with anime for the past 20+ years. It has its own set of concerns, mainly centered around worker conditions and oversaturation, but there’s plenty of good stuff to be found.
It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.
The Anime Industry may be getting popular right now, but internally what's happening is getting highly unsustainable. The industry has lost alot of the confidence in return for excessive risk-tasking today, with the complete decline of ambitious originals and OVAs in favour of continous adapatations and remakes. But they're running of material to adapt now, but they won't do originals, which is leaving between a rock and a hard place.
I've come to accept that a large amount of poorly made slop is simply a necessary part of the ecosystem. It means funding is aplenty and new hires have cheap projects to work on. The philosophy of only funding big budget winner projects means every new project is ride or die, and leads to less risk-taking. You need to give projects the opportunity to fail in order to get truly interesting media.
Unfortunately it's actually the opposite. The 90s and 2000s which had far less funding and popularity also coincided with a large amount of ambitious originals and OVAs. We can almost directly correlate the increasing popularity of the medium since 2015 and the decline of such originals in favour of cheap adaptations and remakes.
The thing about all that extra funding is that most of it goes to the committee, not to the studios and animators working on it. And because the total manpower of the industry is so limited, that means that an excessive number of projects crowds out the labour that it becomes much harder to try out risky, experimental new things as one might have a decade ago. As the director of Code Geass stated; It would be literally impossible to air Code;Geass today. And the industry does suffer for it, because while there may have been many mega hits, they all largely lack lasting impressionns and fail to reach the legends of the past.
Lulwut. Economics have been bad for anime studios and there have been tons of closures in recent years. Outsourcing to other countries has been standard practice since the '70s -- lots of production is moving to China and donghua popularity is growing (just look at To Be Hero X)... TV series season lengths have been cut in half for the last decade+ and the amount of variety in shows produced has gone through the floor...
For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai.
Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.
There probably needs to be a change in financing models if the Japanese animation industry is to remain healthy long-term.
Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too.
With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.
Actual 2D animation has been dead everywhere for 20 years, yes. The death was pretty much simultaneous in the US and Japan with Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? & Astro Boy (2003) being the last shows fully animated on cels, in 2003.
Sazae-san used cels for the openings and endings up until 2013.
Kind of a tangent, but I had a bunch of friends finishing their animation programs at SVA in the early 2000s and they had to do everything traditionally and they all made a huge push to "#Save2D". I personally spent several months helping most of them scan their thesis projects for free.
Despite a lot of willingness the studio support just wasn't there and even with all of them established in their careers now there's just no hope of doing anything that way. I kinda felt bad that they were trained in and judged against a process that's basically dead. Not to say they didn't learn anything but a tremendous amount of their time and money was effectively wasted.
And then so many of them spent their first few years working in industry heavily exploited by the local studios, including years of unpaid work in most cases.
"actual 2D animation" being limited to pen/paper on animation cels is a narrow definition. Shows such as Primal are digitally animated using modern techniques, but it's still hand drawn rather than being fully puppeted like many other shows
The question is how much is hand drawn? In the context of animators 20 years ago talking about "save 2d" they were talking about animation on twos (or even ones or threes).
Nowadays with hand drawn stuff you're mostly seeing keyframe work being done and the computer doing all of the heavy lifting with inbetweening with maybe some tweaking here and there by junior animators.
The tools are good enough now where it doesn't even look like shitty Flash animation anymore.
Also don't know what you're trying to show me with this 10 minute video. There's maybe 15 seconds of animation work being done this whole video? I see storyboarding and background painting and audio work but this shows shockingly little animation process...(and what I can see clearly is someone drawing keys...)
I agree it wasn't the best example for the point I was trying to make, but it was the best I could find in short notice. It just sounded to me like the "save 2D" people you described were more focused on preserving a very particular kind of 2D animation methodology, and saying because this methodology is dead the entire medium is dead. I was trying to propose that 2D animation that imitates the old style very well does exist in the modern era.
I'll admit, though, that while I know and have talked to some people in the animation industry it is not my area of expertise, so I could be completely off base with my observations.
*Hand-drawn 2D animation. There's tons of 2D animation out there right now, and I hate it all from "A little bit" to "It's unbearable to look at".
Animation rigging, squeezing and bouncing every part of the character to convince the viewer it's alive, but all it's doing is calling computer routines to wobble each part, instead of actually animating the damn character. Everything is shortcuts now.
Recently, I started re-watching Dexter's lab. It's great. No CGI at all, no computer-assisted calarts. Trying to watch anything modern from the same creator, everything is just unbearable to look at. Everything looks like disjointed parts, and screams low-effort. All the flash animators of the 2000s grew up, and they're now running things. And everything just looks like wobbly flash.
There's some shows that did this modern animation style well though. But not many.
So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people.
> Recently, I started re-watching Dexter's lab. It's great. No CGI at all, no computer-assisted calarts.
"CalArts" as a pejorative really has lost any meaning, if it ever had one beyond "animation I don't like". The creator of Dexter's Lab literally went to CalArts and made the first iteration of it as one of his projects while he was there.
The overly dynamic Flash animation style kind of worked for the era Flash was really popular in. I think it is sort of a late gen-X/early Millenial thing. Tools and sharing became so much more accessible as we were growing up, so part of the joke was this self-deprecating thing where the creators (who were amateurs and barely knew what they were doing) were just turning on every toggle, and uploading the results. The line between incompetence and self-parody is blurry, it works.
The joke doesn’t make any sense on cable TV though, because there’s no real reason for stuff on TV to have ever sucked in that way.
Compare to stuff like Harvey Birdman or Sealab 2021, they make a lot more sense because they were parodying the medium they existed in.
There are some studios that’ve managed to achieve a more subdued, near-hand-animated look with puppets (Titmouse with Star Trek: Lower Decks comes to mind), but yes it’s rather bizarre seeing something that’d be more at home on Newgrounds airing on broadcast TV.
> So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people.
That’s really it. The medium is just a medium and not why people show up.
Anyone who says this method or that method are superior are missing the point. Humans connect with characters and stories, not with meshes or acetate sheets. Oral, written, photographed, painted, sung, performed, filmed, drawn, animated - all these are in service to the message being communicated.
The technique might get immediate attention, but substance is what makes a classic.
> The medium is just a medium and not why people show up.
I sort of disagree with this.
Sometimes the medium is the message. Or part of the message. Like how LAIKA studios could have made Coraline or Kubo fully in CGI, or live action, but instead chose puppets (for the most part). It matters that these are puppets and not CGI, anime-style drawings or live action people. It matters to them and it matters to me.
Not saying story doesn't matter, but in movies it's sometimes overrated. You can have a gorgeous movie with barely any plot, and it can be engaging.
Though spanish, the Netflix movie Klaus from a few years back was a real surprise. It looked so lovely, almost film like. I hoped its success would have sparked more such movies but apparently not.
Uhhh…Cartoon Network is cable funded network TV. I don’t know if you noticed the downward slump for cable but Cartoon Network/Adult Swim have drastically reduced their production output the last few years. I think Adult Swim doesn’t even produce new shows beyond Rick and Morty anymore.
Especially as investors fund Llm shops generating art instead of artists drawing art.
They've (somewhat) recently produced Smiling Friends, a show spear-headed by two creators who had their start in animation in the early youtube era. And I'd say it's pretty successful given it's recently starting its 3rd season.
But my point was that they at least halved their production output. Not that they don’t have great shows. How many of those shows you listed are distribution deals rather than actually produced and developed. Go to their front page and what do you see My Adventures with Superman or Rick and Morty?
Adult Swim just released a new series ‘Women Wearing Shoulder Pads’, which happens to be animated with stop-motion maquettes. So I think it’s safe to say they’re still going.
Eh, if you look at old tv animation , it’s pretty piss poor. Not very quality at all. Even the 70’s animation always had hairs and dirt on the frames. Really annoyed me as a kid.
If we’re talking cheap productions like Hanna-Barbara stuff, yeah for sure.
There’s plenty of good American animation too, though. Disney movies were always top class, as were most of the Looney Toons and Tom & Jerry among other TV animation. Donald Bluth movies also come to mind.
I find my favorite YT animators to be SO INSPIRING specifically because they get pretty darn good and their impetus is their passion. They are fueled by merch and patreon these days, so I am happy to see they can make it work, however when industry trends to a race to the bottom, to the point where many layers of contracting lead to illegal North Korean labor being part of the process (the whole INVINCIBLE affair) it leaves a vacuum for upstarts and its awesome.
I've noticed recently that a lot of the 3D movies have been doing more to steal the look and feel of hand-drawn animation. More smudging, better textures, variable frame rates, more clever character design, etc. Obviously the Spiderverse movies were a love letter to traditional animation, but even kids movies like the Bad Guys and the most recent Puss in Boots look amazing.
It's no replacement for hand-drawn and animated movies. But on the other hand (pun semi-intended) our ability to draw by hand these movies will never go away, and we have the ability to make new ones anytime in the future that someone has the passion and energy to do it (commercial success be damned!). The important thing is that all of the tricks, shorthand, and other collective learnings of a century of animation has not gone unappreciated, and is being absorbed into the new medium. That's pretty neat!
A lot of knowledge on the hand drawn animation process is actually lost. Studios like Disney and what not did not meticulously write down how this stuff was done. This wasn’t lab work, this was artists with near unilateral control over process with no documentation write up as that takes longer than just not doing that and racing to completion. Assuming the industry would never change and it would never need to be documented on a historical level, and when it did orders from on high preferred work is done in the new style with the new tooling not distribute labor to archiving an old process they aren’t doing anymore just for humanity’s sake.
Sure they’d be happy to answer if you called one of these old animators up to explain the process but there is probably plenty of details they themselves forgot over retirement. Maybe the animators passed away already and that door is closed. Either way there is plenty that isn’t written down.
That might be true for the particular recording equipment that was used, or some of the old-school VFX tricks, but the drawing and animation techniques are preserved in the final product.
And as evidenced by the long history of independent 2D animated movies put out by auteurs, it doesn't seem like there is any problem innovating new recording or movie making techniques.
Disney made many technological breakthroughs that allowed for things like parallax layers, glow and other effects, and compositing without green screens back in the days when everything had to be done in-camera. But the use of the techniques those technological breakthroughs allowed is entirely possible without that specific technology, and in fact can be done much easier nowadays with computers.
“It’s the story stupid.” seems like a good mantra from hollywood execs to internalize.
Toy Story, Shrek and their ilk were partially successful because of the new fresh medium but mostly successful because they told stories that resonated with people with well thought out and relatable characters. Of course not to say esthetics don’t play a part, but all secondary to story.
> “It’s the story stupid.” seems like a good mantra from hollywood execs to internalize.
I love how Kpop Demon Hunters is having a moment right now and Hollywood is scratching its head. Great original story and the soundtrack is filled with bangers.
I agree the story (sometimes [1]) matter, but for those of us who also appreciate the artistry, the medium also matters.
The same story can be told in 3D or 2D, but it seems mainstream studios always pick 3D now. And I miss the 2D days. I love 2D.
[1] Though there's something to be said about spectacle over substance. Not everything needs to have an actual story, sometimes the visuals are the story, and that's fine.
I don't think the problem is 2D vs 3D. It's trying to put in as little effort (read: money) as possible. It's completely possible to make stunning 3d animation, but that takes effort hollywood largely isn't interested in putting in.
Take Arcane for example. It's 3d animation but it's gorgeous. It's art. Studios switching to 3d are a symptom of not putting in enough effort, not the cause of it.
> It's completely possible to make stunning 3d animation
I completely agree, but that wasn't my objection. My objection is that I miss 2D, which is seldom picked by major studios anymore, because I love 2D, not because I think all 3D is bad.
Arcane indeed looks wonderful. As do the latest works by Sony animation, like Spiderverse or K-Pop Demon Hunters!
> Studios switching to 3d are a symptom of not putting in enough effort, not the cause of it.
What's interesting is that, as mentioned by TFA -- based on interviews by Pixar employees, former and current -- 3D can be more expensive in terms of time and effort than 2D. This surprised me, I always thought 3D was picked because it was easier to work with, but Pixar employees argue otherwise. So I guess it's only badly done 3D that's easier? Like, my daughter was watching Disney's "The Adventures of Puss in Boots" (2015. A show, not a movie) and holy crap was it bad -- terrible models, terrible animation, terrible everything. Or something Skylander... Skylander Academy? Awful, minimum effort, cheaply done. I wonder if these things wouldn't look better in 2D. Or maybe they'd be just as crap.
I've heard it described as 3d having the effort front-loaded: you make models that need to look good from ~all angles, but then you can basically play with them like dolls.
2d on the other hand has the effort more spread out: you don't need to do much up front, but you need to do a drawing for everysingleframe.
I can see how 3d would be worth it, even if more effort total, if you expect to make sequels.
I think another issue is there's too much design by committee going on, too much aiming for "sure things", too many studio notes. Not enough trying to make something good. It's hardly surprising that if you don't aim to make something good you won't make something good. That's not a dig on the animators etc involved, I'm sure they are giving their best but they are operating in a system that does not have as goal to make art.
> But Hollywood is a strange business. Certain decisions get made based on the buzzwords or slogans going around the corporate offices that day. If it sounds good, and it appears to help the bottom line, even a myth can become common sense.
That's not strange at all. It's not rational, exactly, but it's business as usual.
Movies always part business, and part art, but I think that for Hollywood studios the business part has grown, and the art bit has been pushed aside.
Hollywood doesn't really do small movies, be it hand drawn or not. The article mentions that Nobody is done at a $10 million budget, I don't think that's really interesting for corporate Hollywood. Sure if it becomes massively successful, it's great, if not it was a lot of work for very little or no profit. That's fine for smaller studios, but if you expect all your movies to gross $1 billion, then trying to do it with a $10 million budget seems unrealistic.
The smaller studios and independent movie makers can have their little project, and if they happen to make something good, Hollywood can just buy them and have them make a squeal at 10x the budget and milk the fans.
It’s cyclical. People will stop seeing movies because they’re repetitive and dull. Who really wants to see the avengers again?
Then some unexpected hit will pop up out of nowhere and make a ton of money and studios will fund all kinds of off the wall things trying to create a new success formula. Along the way we’ll get a lot of fun movies again, but eventually they’ll figure out what is getting people into theaters and beat that concept until it’s dead. Repeat.
> Hollywood doesn't really do small movies, be it hand drawn or not. The article mentions that Nobody is done at a $10 million budget, I don't think that's really interesting for corporate Hollywood. Sure if it becomes massively successful, it's great, if not it was a lot of work for very little or no profit. That's fine for smaller studios, but if you expect all your movies to gross $1 billion, then trying to do it with a $10 million budget seems unrealistic.
There’s also the issue of Hollywood accounting. The people and studios funding the movies don’t see an all or nothing P&L because they own the companies actually producing the film (that’s how the zero net profit accounting is legally implemented in the industry). An EP like Spielberg putting down $10 million might see $8 million of that back before the film even releases because the project will use their studio for VFX or to shoot part of the movie.
That leaves the costs that are spent outside the industry like advertising and marketing. If you have to spend $100 million on marketing anyway, it just doesn’t make sense to worry about production losses on a $10 million vs $100 million movie.
Hollywood accounting refers to businesses screwing each other out of compensation with loosely defined terms in business contracts.
For the purposes of reporting financial figures to the SEC or calculating tax liabilities, the businesses still have to follow GAAP and other property methods of accounting.
If a business like Disney or Sony contracts with Spielberg, they aren't going to be fooled by him contracting out to his other businesses, they are going to know that is part of the terms. And surely, by this point, all the actors and other contractors are sophisticated enough to know the game also. Even the wikipedia page for Hollywood accounting cites actors telling everyone to only settle for percentage of gross.
> Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in _taxes_ and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.
First and foremost it’s a tax dodge because nobody falls for points net anymore unless they’re brand new to the industry and people dropping millions to finance a movie are rarely that uninformed. But that’s the why.
I’m describing the how: Hollywood accounting is GAAP accounting where the financiers direct a significant fraction of the capital towards businesses they have an ownership stake in. They have both control over the client and how much the vendor charges, driving profit in the topline organization to zero and sending it downstream.
The people/studios financing the films are okay with it because they own the downstream vendors. Neither the studios nor Spielberg are under any illusions about how this works - they structure it that way on purpose. They can’t just zero out their profit and say too bad to the taxman and all the contracts on net profit. No judge would let that slide if it came to a lawsuit (and it frequently does).
None of this is a mystery to anyone who has worked on the financial side of the industry but because of how that money moves around within a production, it creates economic incentives that favor expensive productions rather than smaller budget ones, at least within Hollywood.
How is the tax dodged? If business A doesn't show a profit because it pays business B, then business B has a profit on which to pay tax.
The point is the revenue and expenses for an individual film can be altered, for the purposes of screwing someone who agreed to a share of the profit, but the revenue and expenses for all of the businesses put together cannot.
If a business made money, it has to show up somewhere, in someone's account.
Yes the money has to show up in someone's account but where and when it is taxed is very important. The profit is shifted to entities with tax credits or industry specific tax incentives, timed net operating losses, lower rates altogether, or different state/foreign rules so the total cash taxes fall in absolute number.
If you want more info on how this all works look into single-purpose production LLCs (aka SPVs, which is where the accounting happens) and federal consolidated groups for how its taxed. That this all allows screwing over anyone ignorant enough to accept points net in their contract is just a bonus that happens to have cemented itself in Hollywood pop-history.
At least in software there’s corners of the industry where cooler minds prevail and proven methods don’t get binned because they’re not compliant with whatever happens to be getting hyped up that month.
That's true, but the same applies to movies as well. Indie films exist, and for good or bad they have a lot more soul than the Hollywood blockbusters. The big name Hollywood stuff is the movie equivalent of AAA games (which also suck these days, for the most part).
TL;DR is that good storytelling (via plot and character development) is what matters.
Pixar was successful because they mastered that via a culture that wanted to make the best of a new technology for movies. It’s the same for Studio Ghibli with traditional animation.
The issue with “Hollywood” (and American business in general) is that accountants seem to eventually take over and they don’t see the forest for the trees.
IMO the article is being a little unfair to being highly misleading by only talking about box-office numbers, they're a much more complicated discussion than the article treats them (especially so since it includes a number of pandemic years). Additionally it's ignoring the reason _why_ CG is so popular and there's so many flops - you can make then a lot quicker than hand-drawn animation.
Tons of hugely successful CG movies came out in the past few years that are not mentioned in the article (Inside Out 2, Frozen 2, Mario movie, Moana 2, Spider-man, etc.) - all of those movies had a higher box-office gross than every hand-drawn animated movie ever except for the Lion King in '94. I'm not saying they're _better_, but rather that box office numbers aren't a great reason to argue for hand-drawn animation, I don't think Disney and other companies are very concerned about the flops when the successes rake in so much money.
Good storytelling matters a lot, but it's not the only thing that matters.
The visuals and the medium matter as well. The same story told as 3D vs 2D animation, or in photorealistic vs stylized fashion, or in live action, or color vs black & white, is not the same.
In some works of art, the story doesn't even matter.
It's OK, we'll sh*t out 5 more sequels to Shrek with a few celeb cameos and maybe another 20 fast n furious' and the hollywood economy will be just fine.
I think the author meant "mostly 2D animation" when they say "hand-drawn", in contrast to the fully 3D rendered movies such as Toy Story. They mentioned Suzume as a hand-drawn movie, even though it was a mix of 2D animation and 3D CG.
Even Hollywood's 3DCG doesn't compare to China's Nezha (2019) & Nezha (2025). Problem is that Hollywood's animation is so expensive that it has to appeal to everyone while japan is ok with anime for niche markets like CITY and My Dress-up Darling.
> There’s no doubt that Sinbad, Home on the Range and other projects did poorly in theaters during the ‘00s — or that CG films (even some that critics panned) did well. The numbers tell the tale.
If even the poorly reviewed CG films do well, of course the executives only funded that. People, unsurprisingly, prefer a guarantee of making money to a chance of making money.
Focusing on theatrical releases creates a bit of a false impression. There are clearly still cartoons in production, it's just that it's intended for TV or streaming. I suppose Spongebob Squarepants getting a 15th season isn't very romantic, but I'm sure the artists working on it appreciate the work.
As much as artists see generative AI as a goddamned abomination for a variety of good reasons, classical animation is a place where it can do a lot, such as inbetweening or providing alternative backgrounds to an existing scene.
Imho the big failure of AI for real artists (besides IP rights concerns and the fact that it automates art instead of tedium) is mostly a UI one right now. The first studio to figure a good workflow for doing inbetweening using AI or the ability to feed character sheet and storyboards to get back rough keyframes will have a total game changer.
not being fair to 3d artists when i say this but the loss of american ability to produce high quality animated movies feels like it plays into our inability to build maglev trains or non-highway transit
There is a thriving cult following of 2d animation on Youtube, but like many things this has a fractured audience, no longer a unified pop culture. Sparklehorse has Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss. Glitch Productions has The Amazing Digital Circus which is retro-3d, but seems to also be producing the former Disney Owl House creator to make Knights of Guinevere.
Only a matter of time before talented keyframe artists can get AI to slop the inbetweens into nice vector formats and build out an efficient workflow. I feel like the floor for hybrid traditional animation is going to get dramatically lower than 3D pipeline.
I agree. Super excited to see what people are going to be able to make as the number of people/resources needed per piece of work keeps going down. Are we about to hit a printing press/word processor moment for TV/film? Going to be wild to see a feature level piece of media with one author/credit.
WAN 2.2 FFLF2V (first-frame last-frame to video) could get you close to the tweening between key-frames today.
KPop Demon Hunters (which I like!) is such an oddball. It has a primarily Korean main cast (both voice actors and singers), and one of the directors/creators is Canadian (Korean-Canadian, but she lived in Canada since she was five). The show is a Neflix "Western" production, not a Korean production.
It has a lot of insight into K-Pop (idealized/distorted at times, but still with an occasional biting critique), but as a phenomenon K-Pop itself has become distorted in its "Korean-ness", right? Many bands now sing in English, and its intended audience lies outside of Korea as much as within.
The movie's take on "demon hunting" seems influenced by international expectations rather than by traditional Korean folklore. In Korean folklore, as far as I know, priestesses appease spirits/demons, they do not destroy them. And there is no such thing as a "demon king", nor is there a "soul" that "demons" seek to steal... that's such a Western concept!
Again, I think KPop Demon Hunters is a good movie! My daughter and I enjoyed it immensely. But it's a mish-mash of Korean and Western expectations, I wouldn't call it "authentically" Korean even though a large part of the cast is.
In which universe is Disney's alladin an "homage" to Arab culture? It's a western stereotype of a different culture. Not, as you allude to, OF a different culture.
In the universe where you and I can both easily identify the film as rooted in Arab culture. The same thing applies to eastern animes as well - Vinland saga is about Vikings, but it’s obviously an eastern interpretation of them.
>Vinland saga is about Vikings, but it’s obviously an eastern interpretation of them.
Vinland Saga, Frieren and other anime often put a lot more effort into cultural and historical authenticity than Disney ever has. That's due to those anime being based on manga where the historical setting is often the hyperfixation of the mangaka (obviously there are exceptions, see the "nuns are mikos" trope.)
Disney, meanwhile, only ever shits out racist minstrel stereotypes that appeal to white people because that's the fastest way to make a buck.
It's obviously not rooted in Arab culture at all. I can imagine this being confusing to someone whose experience with Arabic culture consists entirely of having seen Aladdin, however.
Bluth's last feature was Titan A.E., in 2000. He's 87 years old. The Dragon's Lair feature he tried to Kickstart in 2015 was cancelled at around half its goal.
He was an important figure in the 80s and 90s feature animation world but I don't think he's really relevant to a discussion of current feature 2D productions.
I want the cinematography from Vamps and the Hammer films and a live action movie of Incal with only special effects made pre 1990. It should be under two hours.
This will be difficult.
The comic book will be taken as the story board. All of the film will be done with bilingual French and English actors and will be billed as a double feature with one movie in French with English subtitles and vice versa. It will have as large a cast as possible with thousands of extras. None of the actors should have prior big budget releases. John Difool should be ugly.
The brain is 2-D and 3-D is imposed on it from our technology. Hochberg called this 3-D embedded in 2-D pictorialization and it's inherently more fun than the sterility of enforced, computed 3-D.
CGI and 3-D were simply off-ramps to nowhere.
"Human vision is fundamentally a two-dimensional process where the retinas in our eyes capture flat, 2D images. The perception of three dimensions, or depth, is a complex mental construct, really an illusion, created by the brain using stereoscopic vision, which compares slight differences between the two 2D images from each eye, and other visual cues like shadows, motion parallax, and relative size."
One worry of mine is that it won’t make a comeback before the masters who worked at Disney, WB, Cartoon Network, etc all pass away and all of that knowledge and expertise will be lost.
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