it’s kind of incredible how much pixar has backpedaled over the last couple of years, from the standpoint of character design
these were the kind of characters designs they had when they did their first movie with humans as their main cast
despite being cg all of the characters are visually distinct from each other and they look like 2d figures translated into a 3d environment
now it’s just???
all their human characters kind of lack that visual distinction and they’re all just? cute?
Alright, I wasn’t gonna comment b/c it’s kind of a waste of time, but I see a lotta folks tryin to pass off “Incredibles” designs as ‘an attempt to avoid Uncanny Valley with primitive tech’ or ‘resembling comic book art’, and a lot of other…. un-design-savvy comments.
Brad Bird had come from a background in traditional animation, he’s the guy behind this
So Lasseter (Pixar) rings up Bird like “Hey you wanna make a CG movie with us” and Bird’s like “Yeah, lemme bring my guys”, artists like Lou Romano, Teddy Newton, Tony Fucile, and Albert Lozano, who worked with Bird previously.
This may have been Pixar’s first production to feature an entirely human cast, but I think mostly what the excellence in designs boils down to is simply good artists with good taste.
And then have the fantastic designs in “Ratatouille”, also by Bird and his boys
We’ve also got the film “Up”, directed by Pete Doctor. Animated films rely on several artists for the designs of characters, set, props, ect, but it often leans towards one artist’s work. Putting other artists in charge gives “Up” a distinctive visual difference in style to Bird’s films.
You could place the blame on all these newer movies featuring mostly children characters, but I mean…..
Come on. Way to drop the ball on the chance to play with evolution in a fictional, animated setting. The issue isn’t what the tech was or wasn’t, is or isn’t capable of. This comes down to the artistic choices.
Anyway, I wish I could get more in-depth with this, but it’s difficult to find the information I need online in a timely manner, and I don’t have my books here with me.
If you’re interested in the designs/work that goes into animated films, check out the “Art Of __” books. The older ones I mean, that have actual raw concept art done for production and not just a bunch of cutsie drawings of characters b/c that’s what sells.
The difference between then and now is simply that Pixar was bought out by Disney, and is now one of Disney’s biggest money-spinners. They make superhero movies focus-grouped for boys, princess movies focus-grouped for girls, and since Pixar movies are supposed to appeal to both those genders equally you get, well, that. A neutered, generically cute art style that lends itself to big-eyed dolls with brushable hair and cute animal plush toys that make noises when you squeeze them. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again; Disney (and by extension, Pixar) don’t make art any more. With a few scant exceptions they haven’t made art for decades. What they make is money. What they’re selling is a brand. Their last few passion projects spent years in development hell, hemorrhaging money the entire time, so what would eventually become Tangled, Frozen, and The Good Dinosaur ended up as bland and generic simply to recoup some of that enormous loss. And by being bland and generic, they ended up turning a massive profit, so you can expect that trend to continue. A corporation that sells everything from kid-friendly cruise holidays to mickey-themed wedding packages is not going to make art. A studio that’s so creatively bankrupt that it’s now rebooting every good movie it’s ever made is not going to make art. If you want art, look to smaller studios (Laika, Reel FX), smaller, lower-budget projects (Captain Underpants), and anything that Hollywood considers ‘risky’. Expecting Disney (and Pixar) to make anything that doesn’t blandly appeal to everyone at this point is like expecting blood to come out of a stone.
#reblogging this makes me feel like a boomer complaining that everything used to be better when i was young
Nah, there’s more good content, real art coming out now than ever before, it’s just not coming out of Disney.
“We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”
Michael Eisner-former CEO of Disney
This is also why the Disney Renaissance was, well, the Disney Renaissance. Disney took a lot of risks on a lot of projects that have since become cult classics, but weren’t at all popular when they came out–and the decade in which they came out was also negatively marked by the departure of Don Bluth and much of the senior animating team. (Yes, that Don Bluth.)
Like, just as an example. My favorite Disney movie of all time. The Great Mouse Detective. Is it a musical movie? Not really, but it’s not really not one, either. There are only three songs, two performed by the villain and one performed by one of the villain’s patsies, who is also a stripteasing mouse in a bar. (And while we’re on the topic: how the fuck did a burlesque striptease make it into a Disney movie??? Like, the fact that it’s performed by a mouse is the least-weird part of that entire sentence.) It was Disney’s first foray into CGI–while almost the entirety of the movie is hand-drawn, the backgrounds in the Big Ben sequence were computer-rendered, and at the time that was insanely expensive. There are multiple sequences that would be way, way too graphic and disturbing, in terms of violence, for a children’s movie today: Ratigan threatening Olivia to motivate Flavisham, sabotaging the automaton, the deathtrap for Basil and Dawson, the Big Ben sequence, for fuck’s sake the big fuckoff villain song includes a character being eaten alive. Our introduction to our hero involves him pulling a gun on a complete stranger and firing it.
Is it a brilliant movie? I think so, yeah! There’s a lot of heart packed in there, and if there’s one Disney movie I wouldn’t mind a sequel to, Mouse Detective is it. (Although it would have to be traditional animation, and sadly these days I would mind it quite a lot because Barrie Ingham, the voice of Basil–who also wanted a sequel, incidentally, every single VA who’s talked about the film has said they wanted to do it again–has passed on and there just is no replacing him.)
(Also! The female characters are in slightly short supply due to the nature of the story! But there’s a female bartender and she’s allowed to be ugly!)
Do I have any fucking idea who the target audience of this animated movie, based upon a children’s book but full of guns and murder plots and sex and drugs and alcohol and general nefariousness, was supposed to be? NOT A FUCKING ONE, MATES! Not a single fucking clue! Like yeah, in the 1980s people were a lot more blase about their kids seeing drinking and smoking in movies and this was the decade that brought us stuff like Labyrinth and Neverending Story, but a wholeass bar fight including knives and guns? A burlesque number? The constant onscreen threat of murdering a little girl? Like … . yeah, I love the movie and I wouldn’t change a single fucking thing about it, and it wasn’t a financial disaster in the way of its immediate predecessors, but I am completely unsurprised it didn’t explode. Some people place it, not Little Mermaid, as the start of the Disney Renaissance, but frankly? While it is the film that’s responsible for the Renaissance being allowed to happen, it is way too fucking bizarre to be part of the Renaissance.
There was a time when Disney did great work and tried new, unusual, sometimes frightening things. Hunchback of Notre Dame? Did you know about 40% of Hunchback was CGI? I used to own the “The Art Of” book when I was a kid. All those eight zillion peasants you see in every scene, they’re all randomly generated from an electronic template. That’s why the animation on the main characters is so fucking lush. They used the computer to do the heavy lifting so the hand animators were free to focus on the mains and do, well, that. You’ve seen Hunchback. I don’t have to explain, which is good because I’m not sure I’d have an adequate vocabulary to do it. There isn’t a single sequence in that movie, even the stupid buddy song I think we all like to forget is in there, that doesn’t look absolutely breathtaking. Because they were innovative.
But that time is past. The only way to get Disney back to creating art is to destroy their monopoly, and frankly, there are a lot of other studios out there that deserve your time and attention and don’t need to go through Disney.
