Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Style vs Style

I ran across the cool promotional video for Kevin Dart's art book,“Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7,” on Cartoon Brew.

Although the design is lovely I feel it suffers from the curse digital animation seems to promote and that is a tendency toward robotic hinged movement. It's understandable because the method is to literally cut the artwork up into pieces and assemble it like paper cut-outs. The limbs rotate from fixed pivot points and everything is flat flat flat.

The argument is an aesthetic one where the artist has deliberately chosen that look. This may be true, it certainly is becoming wide spread.

I love high styled designs in animation but I think I would have done some hand drawn animation on top for hair and clothing to ease some of the stiffness.

Stylistically the design could have been the same and treated in a more graceful way emulating traditional drawn animation. Take a look at one example of high styled limited animation from the opening of "I Dream of Jeanie" and try and imagine the World of Yuki trailer retaining the graphic style but moving like that.

Now before you get all upset let me clarify that I understand this trailer was done on a very short schedule and I think they did a brilliant job but I would love to see the same graphic style in a more lush manner.

"A Kiss From Tokyo" Theatrical trailer from Stephane coedel on Vimeo.



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