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MillimeterThe Animation Dance: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Jan 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Michael Mallory
Digital and Traditional Animation Become Co-Dependent The past decade has wrought more technological changes within the animation industry than in the 90 years prior, with the result that there is practically no cartooning being doneanywhere without some kind of digital input. But as the medium leaps ahead technologically, many animators and producers are looking to the past for creative inspiration.
The last hold-out for the traditional way of doing things was Chuck Jones Film Productions, headed up by the legendary creator of the Road Runner, Marvin the Martian, and Michigan J. Frog. Over the past few years, Jones has attempted to revive the theatrical cartoon format that flourished in the 1940s and '50s with new shorts such as Chariots of Fur and Another Froggy Evening, which were completely hand-made every step of the way, from initial storyboard through painted cels.
Similarly, Fox's animated primetime hit King of the Hill, co-created by Beavis and Butt-head's Mike Judge, still does it the old way-almost. "We don't use any of the new digital technology in the final production of the program," states Mike Wolf, animation producer for Film Roman, Hollywood, "although we do use a lot of computers in the process."
Before the animation of an episode begins, key layout poses of the characters are scanned into Film Roman's Mac-based system and created as files. Working primarily in Adobe Premiere and Illustrator, toon technicians assemble the files and match the whole to the pre-recorded dialogue and a rough M&E track. The resulting animatic gives a rough idea of what the half-hour episode will look like. This process, which is common in animated features but rare in television, is used primarily as a tool for the writers.
"We're using TV writers and writers who are not familiar with animation," Wolf says, "and they're able to watch the show and give comments and re-write jokes, and maybe give additional acting direction to the animator, much like they were doing with dry-runs in a sitcom."
For series like King of the Hill and The Simpsons, the script is not only the starting point, but the most important element. Some TV producers, though, are trying to return to animation's roots by recreating the so-called "lost art" of stretch-and-squash gag animation in the six-minute format.
In particular, The Wacky World of Tex Avery, a syndicated show produced by France's Les Studios Tex (in which DIC Entertainment is a partner) and a paean to the great cartoon director Tex Avery, is employing modern techniques, such as digital ink-and-paint, to go retro.
"Digital ink and paint has come a long way in the past five years," says Robby London, executive vice president of creative development for DIC, Burbank, and the series' executive producer. "What's terrific is that it fits it; it doesn't feel like a hodge-podge blend of technologies where you're trying to marry something that looks very hard and technical with something that's hand-drawn." It was also one of the techniques that enabled the studio to turn out 195 six-minute cartoons in a year and a half.
The desire to go retro has infiltrated even the computer-laden halls of Digital Domain. For a new Taco Bell spot titled "Mario Kart," which hypes a promotional giveaway through the chain restaurants, CGI supervisor and lead animator Mark Glaser (a proud member of the studio's "NT Group") brought Nintendo game stars Mario and Donkey Kong to life for a wild auto race, using Lightwave. The spot, agencied by Seattle's Big Bang Idea Engineering, offered the digital artists at D2 a rare chance to work with cartoony, rather than photorealistic, characters.
"There's a lot of people here who want to push character animation, and now we're doing it," says Glaser. "I think most of the push is trying to be done on the SGI platform using Softimage, but this product had a really short schedule [five weeks], and we've proven many times that using Lightwave on NT, you get things done a lot faster."
Before building the character models in the computer, the artists made a videomatic of Mario Kart's storyboard to see how the scenes fit together. "In some cases we've retooled entire scenes," says effects supervisor Michael Gibson. "We saw that there were three or four scenes that were not working as well as we'd hoped, and we came up with new ways to handle them, so it looks a lot more exciting now."
Perhaps the ultimate in digital cartoons is being done by the tiny Dallas-based toon shop DNA, which produced a half-hour, all-CGI cartoon special for ABC titled Santa Versus the Snowman. Having started with regional ads, DNA achieved notoriety in sick and twisted circles for their traditionally animated but truly demented Nana & Li'l Puss-Puss shorts.
Now the company specializes in CGI, but with a squash-and-stretch sensibility. "It's pretty much straight-ahead 3-D," says DNA co-owner John Davis. "The main thing that makes it more cartoony is the design. It is also being textured and lit to be colorful and more cartoonish."
According to Davis, Santa Versus the Snowman set a number of milestones: He calls it the first all 3-D network special, as well as being the first one done in Lightwave (on NT), and also stresses the record speed of production. "We produced this in about three months with about 12 people," Davis says. "Since we were able to design and write the show, it was all designed and written to be very animation-friendly. We designed scenes that work for the story and have a lot of movement, but are easy to pull off in a short turnaround."
If computer techniques were eagerly welcomed by DNA's directors, veteran feature animation filmmakers Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, producer/directors of Anastasia, were far more skeptical when tapped to run 20th Century Fox's new digital animation dream factory in Phoenix, Arizona.
"[Digital technology] frightens me a lot," confesses Bluth, whose past films include The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, and Thumbelina. But after realizing such advantages as the ability to fix paint colors instantly by keystroke, Bluth converted. "The computer suddenly said, 'Hey, don't be afraid of me, I'm your friend,'" he claims.
For Anastasia, which was filmed in Cinemascope's 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the actual animation was done on paper, with the animators frequently referring to live-action study footage shot by Bluth on a stage and then scanned.
To populate many of Anastasia's epic-sized scenes, the original animation was replicated, re-colored and often re-sized and placed elsewhere in the shot, using Toonz, which comes from Italy's Digital Video. This process allowed for the creation of shots, such as one set in bustling St. Petersburg, that contain some 940 moving figures.
Even in less challenging scenes, the interaction of the characters was coordinated through the computer. "An animator will draw it and we'll composite it for them with the other characters, and they'll see how it's working," says Mark Weathers, Fox Animation Studios' director of computer technology. "The iterative process at our studio was very, very intense to get things right."
By the time the characters, props, sets and special effects consisting of everything from 2-D fireworks to 3-D snow were composited, some scenes contained as many as 100 separate layers (contrast this with cel animation, where colors begin to shift more than six layers down). Weathers says that in the final year of production time (Anastasia took 30 months to complete), the entire film was rendered at least eight times, averaging 7,000 to 10,000 frames a night. "The big threshold for us was when we went over a terabyte of online disk space," he says, "and with a terabyte, we could still only keep about 10 percent of the movie online."
While Anastasia is being touted as the first completely digital 2-D film, Touchstone's new thriller Deep Rising holds the distinction of featuring the first movie creature created entirely in CGI with no practical or animatronic parts. Designed by monster-master Rob Bottin and brought to life by animators at Dream Quest Images, Deep Rising's creature (nicknamed "Crusty" by the crew) is a multi-tentacled, octopus-like beast, with the voracity of Jaws and the attitude of Alien.
And unlike some CGI monsters, whose textures tend to show a telltale translucence when composited into the live action, Crusty looks horrifyingly real. "It is rendered in Alias [on SGI]," explains CG creature supervisor Rob Dressel. "Most of the big movies are all done in RenderMan, and it's touted as the great renderer. But using Alias's layered shaders we were able to get a nice, raw skin with a thick, gooey surface to it."
Adds digital effects supervisor Dan DeLeeuw: "It became evident from a lot of the CG we had seen that they never really rendered for the full color range of film. We're able to scan the full range of the negative and look into the blacks and the lower parts of the color range to make sure our CG matches that."
One reality-threatening problem, though, was the tendency of the creature's tentacles to pass through one another. "In early tests you see one tentacle slice right through another tentacle, and there's nothing to stop it from doing that," says DeLeeuw. "The animator had to roughly block it out then come back and refine all the spots where it penetrates."
One thing Deep Rising proves is that synthetic creatures have now advanced to a degree where they can carry a picture through a performance, rather than simply a series of "boo-scares." But having reached that goal, DeLeeuw predicts the industry will now step back from fantastical creatures and concentrate more on commonplace figures.
"You've seen things like dinosaurs, alligators, dragons and sea serpents; we've kind of run the gamut of scales and wet-looking skin," he says. "The next brave frontier is getting into human skin, and the next state-of-the-art place to go is with hair."
Like all that hair covering Mighty Joe Young, perhaps?
With everything from painted mice on cels to digital lip-synch for pigs now covered under the heading "animation," it is getting harder to define the parameters of the medium. For most, this is not a big concern. But for the International Animation Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, which every Fall bestows its "Annie" awards for Excellence in Animation, it is a challenge that will always be faced.
"You could say: 'Is something like Space Jam an animated feature?'" asks ASIFA-Hollywood president Antran Manoogian. "That is subjective, but our feeling is, if it's incorporating a great deal of animation, it's considered an animated film."
For the record, Space Jam was pitted against Hercules and Cats Don't Dance for this year's best feature Annie.
The waters are likely to be muddied further by such films as Lost World: Jurassic Park 2, whose dinos can hardly be ignored as animation achievements, but are considered special effects by mainstream Hollywood.
"It's always going to be a challenge," he states. "Some people are saying there should be a computer animation category. But you try to make it work. You do it and see what people say, then proceed accordingly."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
