Oddly related to the passing of Barbara Bel Geddes is this WSJ piece of two days ago on the end of hand-drawn animation at Disney. DisneyToon Studios Australia, its last bastion, will be shutting down next year. For most of us, it’s not to difficult to see the difference between digital work, terrific as it can be in films like The Incredibles, and the hand-drawn leaves of Bambi. This is one of the reasons some of us are so in awe of artists like Miyakzaki who are carrying on this tradition. On my most recent trip to Japan, I accidentally visited a small museum where his individual animation drawings for Spirited Away were displayed in giant stacks. It’s hard to conceive one human being could accomplish so much (maybe his day lasts sixty hours).
Why is this related to Bel Geddes? Of course there are many reasons for the cinema’s decline, but sometimes I worry that, for all its vaunted ease of use and accessibility, the digital revolution isn’t a part of the increasing disappearance of film as an art or even as a significant cultural institution. Others vastly more accomplished evidently have the same fear. John Canemaker concluded his WSJ article this way:
As Disney’s great admirer Steven Spielberg recently said, “If storytelling becomes a byproduct of the digital revolution, then the medium itself is corrupted.”
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35 Comments
1. Baron Bodissey:Pixar illustrates how digital animation can make a superior product, but it is not the digital process that makes it superior. The obviously inferior digital movies (e.g. Madagascar, IMHO) lack the requisite genius in story, design, character development, etc. — all of which was also true of the inferior hand-drawn animated features.
Pixar has an incredible (no pun intended) pool of talent to draw from, and it shows in their features. The Disney animated feature long ago lost what made it special. It’s sad to see it end, but it has been on life support for decades.
Aug 11, 2005 - 8:06 am 2. madawaskan:Ugh -um I love animation-the actual drawing part.
Actually it was my first love and tried to sign up for art courses without claiming it as my major and could not get in-that is a big regret….probably would be more useful now than my the degree i did persue.
American kids are going crazy for the Japanese Anime-but I am not sure of the techniques being used.
Give me the old fashion Disney’s Bambi and for some reason particularly the backgrounds I find Disney’s Peter Pan to be beautiful-I watched it over and over just for that and the color scheme. so sad news.
As for the connection to Bel Geddes-
I don’t know much about movies but Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Lifeboat, Stranger’s on a Train , Marnie, The Man who Knew Too Much are my favorites.
I think today’s special effects drown out what I love about those Hitchcock films-
The story line.
Aug 11, 2005 - 8:14 am 3. Silicon valley Jim:One of the perplexing things about art is that, as the technology for producing it improves, the art gets worse. Bach, for example, never heard a piano until the last few years of his life, nor did he have available to him today’s flute, a piston trumpet, a valve horn, or a clarinet. Mozart had a clarinet available to him (although only an A clarinet, not a B-flat or E-flat clarinet, I think, and not, I think, with the Boehm fingering system) and a piano of sorts (with only sixty-four keys, a wooden frame, and a primitive escapement mechanism). The quality of the music that they wrote, however, has seldom been approached, and never equaled.
Aug 11, 2005 - 8:48 am 4. photoncourier.blogspot.com:And if we look at it just from a business standpoint: In a world of pure digital animation, isn’t Disney’s competitive advantage reduced? I don’t really know enough about animation to do more than just speculate, but it seems that Disney had a unique asset in its hand-animation people–in the digital world, others will be able to acquire comparable skill levels more easily. If this is true, then some of the value moves away from the studio and down the value chain to the makers of the animation software.
Aug 11, 2005 - 9:03 am 5. Patrick Tyson:I’ve written before that right now Pixar and Studio Ghibli are the standard where animation is concerned. To date, Disney (Buena Vista) distributes the output of both in the U.S. and of Pixar everywhere.
Barbara Bel Geddes had a wonderful voice and it must have been something special just to listen to her, Ben Gazzara, Burl Ives, Mildred Dunnock, Pat Hingle and Madeleine Sherwood give voice to the major roles in the original production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Something amusing…
You showed her Platoon when she was eight years old?
No, Oliver did. He wanted feedback.
—Entourage, Episode 18: “The Bat Mitzvah”
Aug 11, 2005 - 9:26 am 6. Kyda Sylvester:Our house was full of grandnieces and nephews this past weekend and, among other things, we watched a tape of an old animated short feature titled Mickey and the Beanstalk (frankly, I always thought the duck was the real talent and that it was only the speech impediment that kept him languishing in second banana roles). It had been a long time since I watched hand drawn animation and I was repeatedly struck by the vibrance and beauty of the artwork (the cartoon itself was hardly one of Disney’s stellar efforts). Uncle Walt showed us in detail, decades ago on one of his tv shows, the creative process of animation. I was in awe then and remain so today. I’m not in awe of much that can be done on a computer.
As a photohobbist, I see the same effects of the digital revolution on that artform. Kodak recently announced that it is discontinuing making B&W paper for the darkroom. How sad.
(Patrick, I saw that episode just last night. You and I appear to have similar tastes in tv.)
Aug 11, 2005 - 10:13 am 7. Brown Line:Jim, with all respect, I think that’s a false dichotomy. Improvements in technology have often led to superior art.
For example, the invention of oil paint in the late Renaissance led to achievements by Dutch, Spanish, and Italian painters that just wouldn’t have been possible with fresco or egg-tempera media. In Bach’s time, the organ was itself a technological marvel, whose powers Bach himself exploited to the fullest. Although Bach was a conservative composer, he was well aware of changes in musical technology; for example, his “Well-Tempered Clavier” was in effect a treatise in favor of the even tempering of keyboard instruments, which was a hot new topic in his day.
God knows there’s room for both computerized and hand-drawn animation. Each has strengths to offer the creative artist. For example, in the scene in “The Incredibles” when Bob is dining with Mirage, look at how the light from the lava wall illuminates the wine in Bob’s glass, and how the glass itself reflects the characters. It’s pure beauty – and something that I dare say would be nearly impossible with hand-drawn animation. On the other hand, look at, say “The Jungle Book”, and see how Mowgli walks, his shoulders dipping, hands dancing, head bobbing – a fluidity of motion that, I think, would be extremely difficult to capture in the computer medium.
I only hope that both Pixar and and Studio Ghibli are around to delight us for many years to come.
Aug 11, 2005 - 10:27 am 8. TedN:Story is almost supremely important. That’s why even though the Disney shorts came to have somewhat superior artwork to the Warner shorts, the classic humor of the Warner shorts makes them superior works. I say almost because really bad art can ruin a great story. For that matter, the Anime sense of design is often so off-putting to me that I have trouble with the stories there as well.
Aug 11, 2005 - 10:54 am 9. Syl:“If storytelling becomes a byproduct of the digital revolution, then the medium itself is corrupted.”
That’s a BIG if. Not only that, it would be only temporary.
It takes time for artists to embrace a new medium to the extent that it becomes merely a tool. The digital revolution is a process not an end.
The transition from traditional to digital for some is painful, for others impossible. Note the popularity of the program Painter which imitates traditional brushes on canvas. Some artists use it because they can’t make the leap to pure digital, other use it to make wonderful animations like the United Airlines ads.
But go beyond Painter and entirely new skill sets are required. If an artist does not tell a story, it is still his own fault no matter what medium he uses. And many simply haven’t been able to get past the 5-finger exercises to the fugue stage yet.
I think most people think the computers do the hard work so it should be easier for artists. This is far from true. Having wrestled with digital art (and music) programs for twenty years now, I can say that the promise of assistance in getting your vision out there is exciting, but the reality is never quite there at any moment in time. It’s inconsistent. Some things become easier to accomplish which make other things now stand out as huge problems.
Take trees.
Count polygons.
Consider how much memory your pc has.
Then figure out ways to make it look like there’s lots of foliage in a nature scene when you have as little chance of getting a forest inside your pc as you have of pouring two gallons of lemonade in an 8oz glass.
Take Midi.
Please.
A standard that was created WAY too early and effectively froze innovation in music software. So now we’re left with sequences of digital sounds in WAV files because MIDI wasn’t good enough. The state of computer music is pathetic.
And there is another aspect of digital art and animation that people mis-characterize I think. There’s more cooperation and collaberation between artists now than ever before. No, it’s not between an artist’s/director’s vision and some technicians fulfilling his dream, it’s different artists with different skill sets (some texturing, some modeling, etc.) tossing their work out there as seeds for other artists to use.
I also think part of the problem people perceive is simply the wow factor that digital artists indulge in at times. Wow. I can do this! So they do.
But they can do more and use their artistic abilities to fill the gaps always there in the technology and still tell a story.
All we have to do is reward those who do, and criticize those who don’t.
That has always been true, the digital age is no different.
Aug 11, 2005 - 12:16 pm 10. Baron Bodissey:Silicon valley Jim — there is a general technological/information system theory (can’t remember whose) that goes something like this: Any information structure is not fully realized until the time of its ascendancy is past.
An example is Bach, whose Baroque technique was by far the finest, but whose works were produced just as musical taste and instrument technology were pushing Baroque music into the dustbin of history.
Another was the sailing ship, whose apotheosis was the clipper ship. The fastest and most beautiful clipper ships were built after steam had already made them obsolete.
A final example: vinyl records. The durable scratch-resistent hi-fi record emerged just as CDs made it a thing of the past.
I’ll bet there are lots of other examples.
Aug 11, 2005 - 12:38 pm 11. Silicon valley Jim:Brown Line,
Thank you for a thoughtful response. I take some of your points. I do think that the organ somewhat predates Bach; there is a famous story about Bach walking for several days to hear Buxtehude (born forty-eight years before Bach) play the organ. There are other examples of musical technology’s advancement during Bach’s time. Stradivarius, who not only made great violins, but established the standard size for a violin’s body, was still alive and building violins when Bach was born. Bach wrote the suites for cello at least in part to demonstrate the superiority of the cello over the viola da gamba. I’m sure that there are others, in addition, of course, to “The Well-Tempered Clavier” (and someday I must find out how Bach was able to measure that tuning).
With regard to oil paints, I have no doubt that you’re right. Rembrandt’s work with them would then parallel, for example, Mozart’s composition of his marvelous clarinet concerto, when the clarinet was an exciting new instrument.
Perhaps the question, then, is why the introduction of, for example, acrylic paints and various musical instruments that require electricity hasn’t had the same result.
Aug 11, 2005 - 12:52 pm 12. Vexorg:While I can appreciate the quality and technical wizardry of the product that’s been coming consistiently out of Pixar for years now, I’ll still take Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Mel Blanc, Carl Stalling and Hanna and Barbera (Their MGM stuff anyway, I have to agree that most of the stuff to come out of the Hanna-Barbera studio is dreck) anyday. I’m pretty sure we’ll never see cartoons the likes of which came out of Termite Terrace and MGM again, partially because that style of animation took a bigger budget than anyone’s willing to allow these days, and partially because the political correctness of the day wouldn’t allow it.
Aug 11, 2005 - 1:01 pm 13. Silicon valley Jim:Baron Bodissey:
The durable scratch-resistent hi-fi record emerged just as CDs made it a thing of the past.
The hi-fi LP was first sold in 1948. The stereo LP was first sold in 1958. The CD was first sold in 1982 (Europe) or 1983 (the United States). The gap is quite a long time relative to the length of time that sound has been recorded.
Bach, whose Baroque technique was by far the finest, but whose works were produced just as musical taste and instrument technology were pushing Baroque music into the dustbin of history.
Bach was never pushed into the dustbin of history. His works for larger ensembles, e.g., cantatas and oratorios, were largely unplayed from Bach’s death in 1750 until Mendelssohn conducted a performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, but his keyboard works continued to be widely played during that period. Other Baroque composers, of course, were largely unheard until the 1960s.
Minor quibbles on my part, however. You raise a thought-provoking point with wide validity.
Aug 11, 2005 - 1:06 pm 14. Kevin P:Roger:
It may be at a low ebb right now but if the new technology can’t produce art with soul eventually the hand drawn style will come back. Maybe not at the commercial scale that made Disney great but in a boutique form. I have strong luddite tendencies myself and I usually am drawn to arguments like yours but since I have found myself on the wrong side of the argument so many times I am going to have faith that if their is an artist with soul they will be able to produce great animation within the framework of the new machines or there will be a return to the old form eventually. In the long run all great art and even great commercial art comes from the heart and the mind.
Kevin Peters
Aug 11, 2005 - 1:12 pm 15. Syl:“It may be at a low ebb right now but if the new technology can’t produce art with soul eventually the hand drawn style will come back.”
Kevin, please.
It’s not technology doing the art, it’s people using the technology.
You know, like guns don’t kill, people using guns do.
The whole question is ridiculous anyway.
Aug 11, 2005 - 1:30 pm 16. Baron Bodissey:Jim — I don’t really mean that Bach & Baroque music were pushed into the dustbin of history. It was just my hyperbolic way of saying that Baroque music went out of fashion before Bach died. Also, he was largely forgotten for a number of decades — I’m not sure when the Bach revival started, but I’ll bet one of our music experts here can tell us.
The important thing about vinyl records was the scratch-resistant part. I remember the easily-scratched records persisting well into the ’70s. Or maybe I just bought inferior labels.
I thought of another example — tempered steel swords and other steel weapons weren’t really perfected until after gunpowder came in.
Probably the perfect dental filling material will be developed right after the first effective cavity-preventing treatment is invented. Wait and see.
Aug 11, 2005 - 2:47 pm 17. photoncourier.blogspot.com:Baron…I don’t think that steam had made the clipper ships obsolete when they first appeared, because early steam engines were such fuel hogs that a ship couldn’t carry all the fuel necessary for a very long voyage. But certainly, the end was in sight for those few who could extrapolate.
I’ve heard it said thusly: Things reach their peak of perfection when they are about to disappear.
Aug 11, 2005 - 3:01 pm 18. Mr. Davis:Art is a matter of taste, and mine tells me that it is not a coincidence that generally movies have been in decline since the demise of the Hays office.
Aug 11, 2005 - 3:15 pm 19. Kevin P:Syl:
I wasn’t being clear. Roger is mourning the passing of a technique of animation and thinks that the new technology will not be able to deliver the same quality. I wasn’t trying to imply that the machinery itself was creating the art. The way I presented my thought was muddy but the last line about heart and mind points to human artistry, not machines.
Aug 11, 2005 - 3:21 pm 20. Silicon valley Jim:Baron -
Perhaps I bought even more inferior records, because I never did find any that seemed to be notably scratch-resistant
As for Bach being forgotten for a number of decades, I was trying to point out that that’s only partly true. His choral works were forgotten from approximately his death in 1750 until Felix Mendelssohn revived interest when he conducted the St. Matthew Passion in 1829 (when Mendelssohn was 19!) His solo keyboard works remained at least reasonably popular during that period. I’m not ready to claim that I’m a music expert, but I’m reasonably knowledgeable.
The dental filling example is a good one. We haven’t yet eliminated cavities, but, at least here in America, those born in 1960 or after have far fewer cavities than those born before 1960. Fluoridated toothpaste (Crest was the only one at the time) hit the market in 1960; Crest held approximately a 70% market share by 1961. The new composites for filling teeth are considerably better than the amalgam that served (and served well) from the mid-1940s (I think) until the mid-1990s, but it wouldn’t surprise me that dentists today do more work replacing fillings in those born before 1960 than putting new fillings in.
Aug 11, 2005 - 3:49 pm 21. Buddy Larsen:Maybe things seem to reach their last or highest stage of evolution just before they’re obsoleted or fall out of fashion, because that is the point at which people quit trying to improve or exploit them, since they’re becoming obsolete anyway and the next new thing is beckoning away the talent and energy.
Aug 11, 2005 - 4:14 pm 22. richard mcenroe:Technically, there’s no reason you can’t do 2-D (Hand-drawn) animation on a computer. The machine would simply replace the inking and coloring of cells and the shooting of film. You still need the talent to create the original characters and stories tho. Chuck Jones would have been a genius in film or Shockwave Flash. Check out his biographies for the technological primitiveness of the Warner’s animation lash-up.
Aug 11, 2005 - 5:22 pm 23. Syl:Kevin
I still disagree. I’m not dissing you personally, this is just something that annoys me no end.
There’s this fantasy that technology is some kind of demon robbing people of themselves. And the notion that the soul of the artist may come through _despite_ the machines is just silly.
Come on.
Technology is nothing more than new tools. It’s not a beast come to devour us or our souls.
Technology is fine for bloggers but not for artists? Give me a break.
It’s fine to mourn the passing of great artists, artisans, and their styles, and I do so myself. But to think that there may never be the same quality again because of something vague, mysterious, and sinister is bunk.
What DID pass that we won’t get back again has nothing to do with how the artists did their work for Disney. There was an innocence back then that we’ve lost.
Nobody could do Bambi today.
But that’s not because of computers.
Aug 11, 2005 - 5:33 pm 24. Mark Poling:I hate to sound cold, but no one paints on cave walls these days, do they?
Old art forms decay because new forms are easier, cheaper, more accessibly, more lucrative, whatever.
Hopefully our age can do a better job of keeping what has been passed than others have done. As has been said “We have the technology…” Hopefully in this age it will be lucrative, etc. to retain what has gone before.
But yeah, I love the traditional stuff. I’m just resigned not to see much more of it, while at the same time I’m excited by the new stuff coming on.
It’s the end of the world as I know it, and I feel fine.
Aug 11, 2005 - 5:53 pm 25. Mike:Roger,
You mentioned Miyazaki’s work; while I’m willing to concede that individual cells may be stunning, I’ve never understood the acclaim he receives for his “animation.”
I’m a life-long fan of the art, with a strong preference for the work coming from the boys on the Termite Terrace over at Warner Bros.
Apart from the stellar writing and direction, what remains mesmerizing about them is the fluidity of the movement, the way the animators were able to capture how things, people, shadows, move and interact with each other in two dimensions, creating the illusion of 3-D.
Disney and MGM demonstrated the same flair thru the 40s, with eye-popping colors and incredible background work.
Anime, while boasting interesting and unfamiliar settings and themes, has some of the choppiest, awful animation this side of Speed Racer!
Seriously, to my eyes, Spirited Away looks little better than the flip-book animations we used to draw in fifth grade.
Yeah, yeah; great story, wonderful visuals, music, yadda yadda.
But the animation sucks. It would work much better as a graphic novel — Manga — at 0 fps, rather than the 5 fps they use to approximate the look and feel of a Wang Chung music video.
Aug 11, 2005 - 6:06 pm 26. Mike:TedN,
As you may have surmised from my post above, I couldn’t agree with you more.
Aug 11, 2005 - 6:09 pm 27. mythusmage:Theatrical anime is tied to its television predecessor, strengths and weaknesses both. American animation grew up with American cinema. The higher standards required produced work of higher quality. Japanese animation grew up with Japanese television, and Japanese animation has yet to to adapt to the new medium. What works or can be overlooked on the small screen, fails on the large. Compare make-up work for tv and make-up work for movies some time.
At the same time those who invent a new style, a new manner of representation are often the least likely to innovate using it. The drawings are flat and two-dimensional in theatrical anime because drawings are flat and two dimensional in tv anime. Often it takes an outsider to see a style in a new way, and bring that new way to light.
Consider the cover for Privateer Press’ Iron Kingdoms: World Guide. The artist is a fellow by the name of Matt Wilson. His style is heavily influenced by anime and manga. It is also three dimensional. It has depth.
It is also a work that tells you much of the world it represents. A world of contradictions and change. A world in transition. Matt Wilson takes the tropes of manga and anime and makes them more effective.
Right now the West is using digital animation, because it’s new and exciting. Japan (and Korea) use hand drawn animation in the Japanese style because their audience expects it, and its affordable. In the future we could see the West returning to hand drawn animation, incorporating Japanese anime with innovations by artists such as Matt Wilson. However it works out, it would change the world of animation.
Aug 11, 2005 - 6:41 pm 28. Dymphna:This has been a fascinating thread. At the risk of bringing a bright-flash ending to a very very long marriage, may I introduce you to the art work of Baron Bodissey.
Chromatism
And now I am going into hiding until the mushroom cloud dissipates a little and I can leave the bunker without getting radiation burns.
See you.
Aug 11, 2005 - 6:59 pm 29. Syl:Wonderful stuff, Dymphna. I didn’t quite understand his explanation for the technique in the paintings and they were a bit small to study detail, but I love the compositions and the overall feel. And I find fractals of any kind a delight! Evening’s Empire is special!
Thanks for the link!
Aug 11, 2005 - 7:42 pm 30. Buddy Larsen:I like “persistance of vision” a lot. Tho they’re all very innerstin’ works. Thanks, D–hope you don’t get nuked.
Aug 11, 2005 - 8:27 pm 31. Kevin P:Syl:
I never said that quality could not be produced with the new techniques. I said that if from some reason they couldn’t the old form would come back. When I said that I was ignoring my habit to distrust new techniques because of the numerous times I had been wrong I was saying that I would be suprised if the talent and imagination of the artist could not use the new methods and produce quality art. I only mentioned the possibility of it’s failure by saying if that was the case the old form would return, in other words, I think the new form will work out just fine.
Aug 11, 2005 - 10:02 pm 32. Syl:Kevin
I’m sorry. Really, shouldn’t have brought you into my screed at all. please forgive.
This is simply an area that hits all my buttons and I go off. Any trigger will do, imagined or not.
There is fierce resistance to all things digital by the mainstream of ‘traditional’ artists. To the point they dismiss the output as not art at all and claim it was ‘computer generated’. When someone I know actually gets prints of his artwork included in a local show, it makes news in our community because it’s so rare.
They seem to think it’s a turf battle and are fiercely defensive. Traditional art is not going away, a new form has come along to sit beside it.
I think we have to wait for new generations of artists who embrace the new possibilities from childhood before the questions ‘Is it art?’, ‘Is it good enough?’ will end.
This artist lives in a monastery in Brazil. He uses Bryce, Poser, and Photoshop. I’ll let his artwork speak for itself:
http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=gevidal
Aug 12, 2005 - 7:29 am 33. Syl:Excuse please. Argentina, not Brazil.
Aug 12, 2005 - 10:21 am 34. Kevin P:Syl:
You are right. It’s nostalgia and it’s fear of the new. The strange thing is that some of what passes for art, pure garbage produced with old techniques is lauded as visionary but the new tools are ignored before they have been examined fully. I love history, I lean towards the traditional in my taste in art, and nostalgia is my default position. But the new tools should be allowed to bear fruit before they are rejected out of hand. I am sure that the puppet community was laughing at the first attempts at animation. Their seems to be a growing market for cells from animated films and I imagine the art will survive in some form.
Kevin Peters
Aug 12, 2005 - 12:04 pm 35. John Thacker:American kids are going crazy for the Japanese Anime-but I am not sure of the techniques being used.
There’s some all-CG, and some with hand-drawn cels, and some with handdrawn keyframes and computer generated inbetweens. Inbetweening is really thankless work, especially for some of the insane Disney works like Bambi– most Japanese anime, including Miyazaki’s work, doesn’t include nearly as much going on in the background as many of the Disney classics.
There are very 3D CG looking shows, like the Incredibles. There are also lots of animation that uses computer aided drawing but looks very similar to hand-drawn cels. Studio Ghibli’s latest works definitely used computers to do at least inbetween cels.
Aug 12, 2005 - 3:39 pm