Know the store. Know about more than the store.

I've mentioned the names of many films on here, but I've neglected one crucial thing, how to find them and how to understand the whole of animation history. It seems that most people are either uninterested or incapable of looking at animation from the scope of all its history, and I'm addressing this urgent problem right here now. It's time to push back against these neverending cults of personality.

1. Anticipate and understand that there's more than just what you see in front of you. There's always good films which you haven't seen, even if nobody you know is aware of them. Avoid exaggerative use of the word 'everything'.

2. If you want to discover more films, features especially, start with a timeline of the history of animation and a world political map and work your way down. Break out from what's presented in front of you and heavily advertised. Just start by going over to Wikipedia, and looking at their list of feature length films which you can reach by following this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animated_feature-length_films

3. Don't just wait for a copy of the film to be given a legitimate release, because odds are it won't happen. Fans come before distributors if the distributors come at all.

4. Do not under any circumstances declare one medium to be the only legitimate form of animation nor any philosophy to be the whole of all worthwhile animation. Do not use the term 'traditional animation' except to apply to animated work which was mostly or entirely produced outside of a computer. Understand that even if animation is traditional, that a computer or computer animation may likely have contributed to its existence in some other way.

5. Be the person with the answers even when they aren't pleasant, and give your best advice to where the answers may be found if you do not have them.

6. When you're introducing the person to the films on Wikipedia, expect indifference and plan accordingly. Mention the article, and then give them a second source, a place where they can watch a large number of films that they never heard of for free.

Phrase it cleverly like this, with the important parts first, :

Did you know that all you have to do is think in terms of the timeline of animation's history and the countries that have been around since? You can look up nearly any film on Wikipedia and find something good to watch elsewhere on the internet. Here's a website with some free movies from ___ to get you started.

If somebody says just something simple like "Thanks!" as so often happens, they reaffirm the first two statements while they're almost certainly, truly interested in the third. Then they've got the first two statements sealed with the third in their head, and somebody might confuse their decision and look for their self, and they can always come back to it later if they remember.

7. Please stop assuming that mentioning a few token names like Sylvain Chomet and Yuri Norstein makes you literate about worldwide animation. It does not.

And finally, here's the basic info, the maps with the timeline and websites to find all the films.

All the Maps you Need

Sources:

Most convenient, films that are mostly available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animated_feature-length_films

Most Adequate, but too dry for newbies http://www.animated-divots.net/chrnearl.html

European Animation http://www.animationeurope.com/

Look a bit further on the Animated Divots site, and you'll find even further information, like sites where you can buy more films and all sorts of things. The European animation site will take you to further information on new releases.

The rest you can find on video sites, web stores, and such, which you'll likely arrive at through a simple web search. Here's search engines for nearly every country. This should help get you started if you're not familiar, and I hope you benefit from having all these things in one place. At some point in the future I hope to have a post card or something to pass around, just to disseminate the information quicker.

Actual Post Date April 13, 2010

Swimsuits

If you look at the label for this post, you might accuse me of being postmodern, but that's not what I'm going to write about. I'm going to write about a very disturbing truth of our society that's proven by the evolution of women's swimwear. I'll write about women's swimwear since I'm not interested in talking too much about mankinis.

At the turn of the 20th century, women wore long swimwear and it was the social norm. If you'd asked a person then they would have told you that wearing anything less long was indecent. Nudity is a bit of an anomaly here, since inconvenient swimwear surely convinced more people to swim nude, but people swimming nude probably didn't have much of an impact on the course of swimwear. As for things like swimwear that allows for partial or whole nudity, those are anomalies that are made to drive overanalyzers like me nuts. Not a word on monokinis.

Nowadays, though, swimsuits are much shorter on average, and the smallest, bikinis, are far shorter than that swimwear, a radical polarization from those attitudes. What once wouldn't have even been construed as sufficient clothing is now normal.

Here's why I believe this happened. There wasn't anything left to do but shorten the swimsuit. If you wanted to try a different set of materials, but they were expensive, you had to make a smaller swimsuit. If you wanted to be more creative with its design, you were guided towards creating a smaller swimsuit. The shortage of materials during wartime helped contribute towards smaller women's clothing in general, but this was a hard trend to avoid and such shortages could likely have come from somewhere else.

And let's face it, men liked seeing women wear shorter swimsuits. And that's what our culture is all about right now, getting more for less, or at least, letting the people who desire to do little do it. Nowadays you can wear any size of swimsuit and it's considered if not desirable, acceptable. Now we get to let people wear what they like, the way it should have been all along, right? But it won't last. The game's gotten old and there needs to be a new game to sucker people along, so we've got surfing suits and diving suits. Sure they don't mean much now, but wait until they become a little bit cheaper.

Headline from tomorrow! If you aren't diving 20 feet under the water, then you aren't swimming and we've got a fast maglev train to get you there to the beach quicker than before. Aren't you tired of all the people showing off skin and doing the same old strokes? Meet more people like you who are athletic but like to have fun and help us help you set the sharks on beach bums.

This doesn't mean that a catastrophe can't happen and keep people out of the water or that the people making swimsuits and diving suits aren't talented. You can still bring progress to a halt even in the most mainstream of activities. I'm also not saying that this is the only way to be progressive. But what I am saying is that if nobody's playing this game, there can be no progression at all.

People aren't all that different on the whole, so we have to keep dressing up in new ways to maintain our interest in each other. That way political figures can throw out the word unity without making us all feel cheap. If your neighbors keep dressing up in new outfits you won't have to meet anybody new, and right now we've got a general idea of how many neighbors there are in the world. All we can do if we don't like having so many neighbors is to like less neighbors and hope that the neighbors we don't like are somewhere else. I'm convinced that if every person in the world could stand in a place where they could see each other nude, that would be the end of the world.

All there's left to do is to put on the mask that hasn't been put on yet and keep the costume party going. Find some people who are pretending different things, then keep looking and see where the party game's falling short. No nudity and a name just helps to play the game and helps to spread the blame and all to keep alive the flame that brings us here and lets us call ourselves ourselves and keep us all the same.

It's the material truth that matters, our best guess of what things truly are, what they've been and what they're going to be.

geographic shorthand

You've seen it plenty, but I've never heard it discussed. Like a great number of other cartoon traits, it's rarely seen in features, so this post will be a slight digression.

How many cartoon cities have been shown on the screen like ornate piles in a garbage dump? Who's seen the round the circular globe? What about planets with a little more detail than you'd ever be able to see from that point in space? There's dots on a map to represent the movements of armies. I wish that I could find John Hubley's commissioned short film Urbanissimo, as that's a brilliant example of 60's exaggerated geography in cartoons.

Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2 Century has an interesting use of shorthand, with planets clearly marked with letters of the alphabet, lampooning over-simplified scientific diagrams.

Looking at Dumb Hounded, it's full of these sorts of tricks. The train zooms a bit conveniently over the mountains with fast motion blurs. Its ocean journey is cut short with convenient timing and a fast moving ship, and getting off he moves to a quick plane trip after hopping on his automobile into a hangar, only to take a startlingly quick plane ride over a small set of clouds, ending up in the Canadian wilderness and riding a horse off of the plane into a cabin. Once he discovers Droopy there, he darts represented by a dot, all over America only to end up in an all too clearly defined north pole.

I'm just bringing this up to jog my mind with all the obvious things that I should have talked about in the past. I may add more later.

Aging in Animation (spoilers)

How many other people have noticed that there's been a general neglect of serious aging in animation? For all the hoopla of the "animation renaissance" beginning in the late 80's, and taking full force later in the 90's, it seems that the 70's and 80's, all the decades looked down upon, bring up aging characters better than any other time. Are there films that deal with this afterwards? Triplets of Belleville, Mind Game, and The Prince of Egypt deal with aging, though I didn't find The Prince of Egypt very interesting for other reasons and shut it off before I finished it.

It's too often that animation filmmakers tackle aging with a wink and a nod, a song and dance to signify passing time, or keep it out of the main course of the plot, before and afters thrown in to get "miracle of birth" mileage. And worse yet, it's one birth to another, or birth to marriage. It's yet another unwritten rule to widely be considered "good" animation.

So what are some examples?

One example is Son of the White Mare. You see the main character from conception, with brief but effective moments until he's of age, and it helps bring you into the story.

Then there's Toei's The Wild Swans, where Eliza is shown over the course of years, weaving to save her brothers at the neglect of her personal well being. It adds needed emotional weight to a film with such stock characters.

The Fox and the Hound obeys the birth to marriage trend, but it adds a bit on the way, largely due to its literary pedigree. Tod and Copper are seen from inception to adult age, with attention to them both at many places along the way. It even takes an interesting turn at the end with Tod transitioning to the forest, which gives the process more dramatic character.

Karel Zeman uses aging quite brilliantly in Krabat, focusing on time as the students progress, only to be beaten down by the head wizard. The use of time makes the film interesting, with the main character young but not quite as young as before. The shapeshifting, time, and urgency of the characters make the film interesting, as does Krabat's gradual change within the hierarchy of the wizard's school.

That's about all I plan to post for tonight, though I may add more later. As a final unrelated note, I actually watched Sudsakorn part way through and found it to be filled with ridiculous errors in animation. I really was a bit too impulsive, and now I see why the film hasn't gained much recognition.

What is Hand Drawn Animation, and Computer Animation?

Hand drawn animation, or as many people refer to it, is seen as the dominant form of animation over nearly the entire history of the medium. It's only in recent history that it has been subverted largely by 3D CGI films, but I think there are some deep issues that are largely being avoided.

First, there's the role of hand drawn animation and how it developed early in the history of the medium. For all the time it lasted, how did it change, why, and what does that mean to the history of the medium? Why and how did computer animation gain dominance?

You can easily read on the history of hand drawn animation in the United States, but there's an important thing to talk about here. The fall of Mosfilm which produced puppet and cutout films, and how Soyuzmultfilm delayed the tradition within Russia, tending towards Disney-esque films only to break out of the Disney tradition within hand drawn animation and letting the other forms resume later. This effectively meant that hand drawn animation would be seen as the dominant medium around the globe, at least until the popularity of CGI.

Now that I've got that out of the way, I have to ask the question of the distinction between 3D and 2D CGI. 2D CGI is largely seen by its practitioners as developments of whatever medium they prefer, in spite of the fact that pixels are manipulated instead of cut paper or medium put down on paper. It is, the way I see it, a bunch of clever ways to stroke the hairs on a camel's back, ways to suggest a lot with very, very little though film and animation in general can be described in exactly the same way. The distinction between 2D and 3D CGI today, as far as I can succinctly describe it, seems to boil down to three things: computer modeling based on technical drawing, forward and inverse kinematics, and attempts to produce realistic shading. There's a fair amount of less realistic looking CGI coming out now, but doesn't it seem a bit too much like a clever joke based on a colloquialism?

So when did 2D computer animation become hand drawn animation, and how should a person distinguish between computer scanned imagery colored on the computer from imagery created entirely through the computer? What does it say about human culture that there are so many artforms that are in some manner expressed through the dancing of pixels on screen?

And doesn't it seem like the 'story first' mantra is being too commonly used by Pixar as a cheap way to dodge the issue? Where exactly are these brilliant storytellers? There's too much buddy formula, happy endings, and nostalgic abuses of old shorts. Cars hails back to late 40's Disney shorts, A Bug's Life hails back to Silly Symphonies, toys were the focus of an awful lot of 30's cartoons, Ratatouille plays off a tradition of mice and rats in cartoons, and The Incredibles has enough superhero cartoons preceding it. Finding Nemo was preceded by enough Hollywood short cartoons revolving around fish. WALL-E is a blatant exception, but it's basically Ben Burtt-isms for main characters in a fairly typical sci fi world. PIXAR films don't really get all that deep in my opinion. I think it's really just that the story keeps the audience distracted enough from the technology which the audience supposedly doesn't care for. There's an awful lot of talk about how PIXAR is occasionally willing to try out other mediums, but only rarely and for minor purposes.

We've lost track of something deeper here than the people throwing around the story mantra would have you believe. Hardly anybody really gives a damn about resolution, as the switch to digital technology has proven. And the moment you switch to a digital pixel display, hand drawn animation rendered in pixels is no better than 2D computer animation. It's what's being done that matters, the way things are being moved. It's the way a computer allows us to move things that we need to take into account, not the fact that a computer was used.

I don't believe that there's much a person does that can't eventually be mimicked by machine or that there's anything innately human that another person can't achieve similarly through technology. The moment you bring up a machine though, many traditionalists seem to completely lose appreciation for whatever is being made. I don't suspect that it's that something looks mathematical that most traditionalists despise, but that everything within the nuance of human expression can be interpreted mathematically.

Look at the general ways that things, generally characters, are moved within different mediums.

Stop motion relies on models adjusted frame by frame.

Hand drawn animation relies on a new drawing for each frame.

There's replacement modeling, which relies on a new model for every frame.

Cutouts rely on the exploration of a small number of parts in motion.

3D computer animation is essentially technical drawings reformulated by a computer and rendered over.

So what techniques can you use on the computer? Well, you could use all of them with the right software, but it doesn't seem to have become the norm. Computer animation isn't another medium anymore, it's a means to examine every medium and try out ideas, many of which can lead to new mediums outside of the computer. There's so many hand drawn animators and fans screaming at people deviating from using their standards inside of a computer when they hardly have a medium left anymore. It's all just red herring to keep people from realizing that there's very little left to hand drawn animation as a distinct technique in and of itself. There's a reason why hand drawn animators and fans keep rubbing our noses in tradition: tradition is almost all that's left of hand drawn animation.

I consider hand drawn animation with drawings scanned into the computer to be a thin exception from computer animation despite it's history preceding that of 2D computer animation for the public. Just take a look at SANDDE and Rhonda. These are helping to break the gap between drawing and modeling on the computer and thus forcing the question of what computer animation really means.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaJUJGpmJGI

http://drawn.ca/?s=wireframe+models

Who knows how 3D will blur the distinctions further, but it's time nonetheless, to reevaluate what constitutes hand drawn animation and computer animation. I say that anything animated from entirely within computer constraints is to be classified as computer animation and anybody toeing the line while maintaining an anti-technology stance is to be severely criticized.

The Adventures of Sudsakorn (raw on YouTube)

If you've been looking for The Adventures of Sudsakorn, but haven't been able to find it, I discovered it unsubtitled on YouTube. I posted this the moment I found it, so I don't have any comments yet. It turns out that Payut Ngaokrachang's film has been available since March, but I didn't discover it until now. Hopefully somebody else is inspired by this news. More posts are coming soon, and I have quite a bit to talk about after such a long break.

The nuance in CGI

In CGI, the technology keeps evolving and the look of the films from major studios get progressively more advanced every year. But these advances in technology have come at a very steep price, that filmmakers have used live action as a guide to further the advancement of the medium and have gotten a bit too successful.

It goes without saying that not every CGI film attempts a more realistic style, but even the ones that don't usually try to look like something else. There's the faux-clayish preschool style, the silvery tech commercials/music videos/art films(I can't tell which is which), chinese ink, technological noir, crooked and rundown eyesores, and quite a couple of others.

With just about every approach now, the computer is used as a sandbox tool that largely mimics something else with a few concessions to computer physics. There isn't much of a computer look nowadays that stands out from the real world, and virtual reality has become virtually reality. There still are the rare films that look like they're made on a computer, but mostly from filmmakers who can't afford better rendering or who are aiming to break the mold somewhat self consciously. Earlier computer animators did their best to express their vision within quite restrained technology, and being blatantly computerized was inevitable for every approach.

Nowadays it seems like animation is going through a transitional period where computer animation is considered such a force in and of itself. The other important thing to keep in mind, though, is that even more traditional animators are using computers in their traditions. With computer drawn animation, flash, and computer use in stop motion, media forms are being divided every day. I think that computers are going to be incorporated more as a single essential tool of an overall technique. With the advances in robotics, I suspect that robotic animation will some day develop out of the traditions of stop motion, CGI and animatronics.

The 2D approaches to computer graphics are now effectively overwhelmed by old traditions, except for a few rebels taking inspiration from old video games. It's hardly even considered to be computer animation anymore to work in a 2D format on a computer, since the technology's become so good.

The progress of CGI to me is like a process where box that keeps getting carved into 8 smaller and smaller boxes of the same shape. First it isn't all that interesting because you can easily count the boxes, then it gets a little more interesting because there's enough to be interesting without being overwhelming, then it becomes impressive but unrelatable as there's many boxes to see but far too many to count. Eventually the boxes are microscopic in size, and you're still amazed when you can tell it's there. Finally, as the boxes get perpetually smaller, you work your way down to atoms and you're left with the same box you started with.