BRING BACK TRADITIONAL ANIMATION ALREADY GODDAMMIT

[spatch]

Just saw the trailer for Hoodwinked.

Holy crap. It looks terrible. It doesn't even look like someone's demo reel from back when teapots, brushed chrome spheres and checkerboards were all the rage. I did better animation with my 486/66, a copy of POVray, and two nights' worth of rendering. (It was called Purvis The Blob and it wibbled.)

And this one defies all logic. Or maybe you'd like to explain to me why the cows (as evidenced by their udders) are speaking in tough guy voices?

I don't want to hear anything about how it's supposed to be for the kids, blah blah woof woof. Kids deserve better.

Comments

[rabswom.livejournal.com]

im less annoyed by the voices and more annoyed by the 'what happens in the barn, stays in the barn' line at the end.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I saw the "Hoodwinked" trailer a little while back and was appalled by it too. But I can't really blame it on CGI. What's happening is that we started out with the CGI equivalents of "Snow White" and "Fantasia" from Pixar, and now the medium's Hanna-Barberas and Filmations are getting in on the action with low-end garbage.

[mr-bad-example.livejournal.com]

It doesn't look great, but I will admit that the "And Granny, what big eyes you have!" "ARE WE JUST GONNA SIT AROUND TALKIN' ABOUT HOW BIG I'M GETTIN'?" bit cracks me up every time I see it.

[mybadhairlife.livejournal.com]

You seem to be having an effect. When I went to the link, the trailer I got had no cows and no "what happens in the barn" line at all.

I'm picturing an animation supervisor smacking a bunch of poor little pasty, young, urban animators in the head screaming "COWS ARE THE GIRLS" and "YOU IDIOTS."

But that may be too much to hope for.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

That is not a tagline for a children's movie. It is a tagline for a movie told through flashback, with a frame-story involving a sympathetic therapist.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Wow. There are so, so many things wrong with that, above and beyond the animation. The Foamy ripoff? The 'Beans?' gag? The jive-talkin' black cop?
BURN.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, kids also deserve fairy tales not filtered through some "hip" satyrical lens. Y'know, these stories have been around for hundreds of years ... maybe there's something in them that's actually valuable in itself, not just as fodder for parody to show everyone how cool you are.

Noah

[rigel.livejournal.com]

As much as I miss traditional animation (and I do, for several reasons, including my mother being an animation art dealer) and as much as doesn't look terribly good, I didn't take that as due to the animation style. I don't mind CGI.

I do mind the feeling that it's supposed to be more trendy / "cute" than interesting, and both the story and portrayal seem to be dragging it down. While I can't say for certain that mmcirvin is correct, it does seem entirely plausible.

The problem, to me, is not that CGI is becoming so popular. It's that it has such a potential for being crappy given how easy it is to crank out crappy CGI movies these days.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

Why are we talking about these (also, Over the Hedge looks terrible), and not Purvis the Blob, coming in 2007?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the hipster attitude is almost certainly the result of some suit saying "Shrek and Shrek 2 made a lot of money; let's do another thing like that."

[spatch]

89 minutes of wibbling sounds great on paper, but believe you me, there's some serious story problems that'd need to be worked out first.

[spatch]

Good point. The parade of cheap studios has begun!

[spatch]

"And don't forget to make Grandma do a rap. That stuff's hilarious!"

[cheezdanish.livejournal.com]

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

That's what they said about The Passion of The Christ. Listen, you get some actors desperate for a hit (Ben Affleck) to do the voice work, throw in a catchy song sung by someone other than Ben Affleck (over the credits even), release it in 3-D IMAX in select cities, and it'll make $100 million and get two Oscar nominations.

Make Purvis eat Santa Claus and burp out his hat; they'll show it every year on TBS and you'll get residuals for the rest of your life.

[argentla.livejournal.com]

I read the script for Hoodwinked and worked with the Edwards Brothers on another project that didn't get off the ground. The script is sporadically very funny (I agree that the animation looks godawful, but I rarely like animation anyway; Pixar movies give me a headache).

The Edwards Bros. have little grasp of story, and they suffer the "anything for a laugh" syndrome that often caused Mel Brooks and Zucker Brothers movies to be only sporadically good -- they'll sacrifice anything (internal logic, consistent character POV, good taste, rational judgement) if they can get a gag out of it. The result of writing that way is that whether the movie is any good or not is something of a crap shoot. If you have enough gags that work, you can get the audience to forgive the ones that don't. If too many of the jokes end up being stinkers, you've got nothing left.

[argentla.livejournal.com]

No, that's why the Weinsteins bought it. The Edwards Brothers wrote it that way just because that's what they think is funny.

[groggenspiel.livejournal.com]

I just bought The Incredibles DVD set and have been watching it over and over. For me, Pixar is usually guaranteed to provide some pretty addictive visual crack.

There's a saying along the lines of "even if you could eat filet mignon every day, some days you'd still want a hamburger," though it's apparently not analogous in the world of CG animation, at least for me.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Pixar isn't perfect. Both Toy Story movies were good, and The Incredibles is a masterpiece, but A Bug's Life was only mediocre (the Dreamworks knockoff Antz was funnier) and the teaser for Cars made it look pretty hard to take. Technical excellence only gets you so far; when Pixar scores a hit it's because they also paid attention to basic virtues of story and character.

[groggenspiel.livejournal.com]

Granted. I really have little interest in Cars. I guess I was just thinking Toy Story and Finding Nemo, along with their little shorts. But still, I'll take A Bug's Life over the crap Spatch cites in this post.

[heliopsis.livejournal.com]

One of the wonderful things about this era, is the democratization of media. As video cameras and computers improve in quality, it becomes possible for an ever wider range of people to produce movies, music, etc. at ever lower cost. Geniuses abound, awaiting discovery, and now their creative voices can be unleashed.

Sadly, most of them--most of us--have absolutely nothing to say.