Everyone's a Critic

Many leading authorities on animation have written about the limitations of computer animation and the superiority of traditional drawn animation. If you are caught up in the media of a movie it tells me there is something wrong with the story.

I’ve seen movies with budgetary constraints that have transcended their limitations and have become classics because of their entertainment value and not the media they were executed in.

Story has proven to be everything. If traditional drawn animation were the criteria that determine the validity of good animation we wouldn’t have had the idiotic proclamation: drawn animation is dead and the long string of poorly received films which prompted the opinion.

The awful truth is animation in any form is hard to pull off. It is an art and art is subjective. You may not like Picasso or you might think he is a genius. Animation is a collective endeavor done by individual artists pooling their talents to form a work that will connect emotionally and aesthetically with a broad range of people with different life styles, political beliefs and religious convictions. Sound like a hard thing to accomplish?

The complaints of floaty, weightless, plastic characters that are disconnected with their environments are ludicrous when you examine the sliding feet on walk cycles and other glaring violations of physics seen in a majority of drawn animation from top leading studios. It tells me there is something deeper with the complaints than the fact it was computer animated.

I’ve seen traditional drawn animated films that were expertly drawn with beautiful attention to detail and design that have tanked. Not because they were drawn but because the story was bad. The characters were insincere and unbelievable. They reacted wrong in situations and people just couldn’t connect.

I’m not a snob for any media. I have done drawn, stop-motion, and computer animation and believe the strength and magic of animation is not about what style or technique you employ. It is story and characters that prove the success of animation. It is an art form and art is subjective.