|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Charles Jannuzi
|| 2. In his last two films, his studio does use computers, but
|| please, please,
|| don't tell me Antz or Bug's Life rivals Miyazaki's animation. I think
|| Wallace and Gromit or Chicken Run are better than any of that
|| computer stuff
Heartily agreed. What I mean is you can do something like Shrek or Final Fantasy and then run it through filters and shaders to make it look hand-painted. Most cel animation nowadays (the kind with the 2D flat-shaded look) is done in 3D and goes through a cel shader. Ghibli's workflow, OTOH, starts with hand-drawn outline sketches, which are scanned. The cel painting is done digitally and is semiautomated, but the final output still has to be photographed frame by frame. The 3D - to - 2D process is radically different. 3D characters have "intelligent" bodies that know how to bend and flex, objects have physical properties, fabric acts like fabric, water acts like water, rubber bounces, glass breaks, etc. Anything can be automated: If you lay down a mouth's speech movements once all you have to do is provide a speech soundtrack for your character to "talk". You can always override these automated features by recording the movements of actors and applying them to their CG counterparts, or through manual tweaking. All this simplifies things greatly so you can spend more time tweaking and less time slaving away at drawing tweens. Take WB's Iron Giant, which is a hybrid CGI / hand-drawn production: The CGI robot allowed the traditional animators to take more time refining their work.
|| I'm always willing to give Greenaway one last chance with
|| each new film,
|| so there must be something about his stuff that I find compelling.
Greenaway's work has been condemned by some perfectly good filmmakers so I guess both sides of the argument are equally valid. My enjoyment of Prospero is like what I enjoy in a painting: The marks left by the artist's hand that lead me into his/her mind, where I'm always delighted to find things I recognize, and to enlightening new connections between those things which had never occurred to me. This process is inhibited by the pseudoreality of narration. You then have to make an effort to distance yourself from the narrative in order to see the work.
Hakki