Forum - View topicChicks On Anime - A Look at Key Animation
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reanimator
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"Keyer" is key animators and "tweening" is inbetweening for people who got confused with the lingo. Anyway, john K's is a good site to check when it comes to technical side of 2D animation. After all, he is anti-Disney thus his "ugly" designs. I don't doubt the fact that every Flinstone animator has his own individuality. However, I don't think their individuality is better than Japanese counterparts, just different that's all. We had glory days, now can we revive glory days with new approach? Japanese appears to keep their own creative independence under their context for decades. Yet it seems like we're having difficult time maintaining some kind of creative independence for our 2D commercial animation thus fueling John K's endless rant. We have talented artists yearning to make something new. Japanese showed their unique way of approaching animation making and opened another possibility to make animation. Off the subject: You know...I dont know why you bothered to spell "anime" with accented "e". It makes you look like an outsider who don't deal with anime fans despite your numerous postings. |
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reanimator
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This is why I hate about our animation production.This practice of "Feature quality or else" mentality discourages young talent learn to become better animator through trial and error. It prevents more people to pursue career as animator and be more experimental with their craft.
We don't know that yet. We know that Japanese have been outsourcing for two decades. That was because they don't have enough man power to handle ever-increasing titles and the industry was pretty much oblivious to changing economy. From What I know, JANICA is formed to balance runaway cost and local cost while trying win the support from sponsors. |
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enurtsol
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I agree. Unfortunately, there are not much openings for basic TV work. Students have to learn to go straight to "upper production" TV staff without the experience of starter level work like tweening. So go feature, or go independent then get hired for feature. And people have to realize that cheats and compromises aren't necessarily evil given time or resource constraints, when done well. I always compare it to Hitchcock - he didn't have the modern innovations we enjoy now, but he used what he had to great cinematography that it still works to this day. As per anime, the cinematographic techniques and shot composition are to compensate for the lack of fluidity/budget. The Japanese animators have worked with "limited"[*] animation so much that they've refined many techniques and "cheats" to make it work. [*] Perhaps the term "limited" is ill-conceived because it suggests that something is missing or is of a "limited" degree of quality. Even the famous Jules Engels has said that there is really "no such thing as limited animation, only limited talent... Each style of graphic and each kind of gesture has its own requirements for motion."
We know from the past that the American TV industry wasn't able to shoulder the cost. 
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Iritscen
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A few quick responses:
- I'm not actually a fan of John K.'s style either, but after a while spent reading his blog (most of which is about other people's work, not his), I realized that he knows a lot of interesting stuff. It doesn't make me like Ren & Stimpy more, but leaving his own oeuvre out of the picture, I can still enjoy his posts on things like the Flintstones. - I didn't mean to imply that Flintstones or other limited animation had any leg up on animé. Just that it's an interesting case study. I have huge admiration for the techniques Japan has built up over the years; I think that on a technical level (as opposed to an expressive level), they've far surpassed any other country. (On an expressive level, I think classic Disney wins, but I could be wrong.) - I don't think I always bother with the é in animé, reanimator, but maybe you're not on a Mac, where it's super-easy: option-e, then 'e' again. If Windows didn't make foreign/accented characters so hard to type, everyone would be using the special letters more frequently. So, just because they're not doing so, why should I sink to the level of their user-unfriendly OS? Besides, after all these years, I still can't get used to seeing it written without the accent. P.S.: Just look at my avatar and you can see that, actual age notwithstanding, I'm already a crusty old-timer at heart. Kids today, they're too lazy to even type accents, nuts to them. 
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reanimator
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Iritscen,
You're not wrong on Disney level of character expressions. Sometimes I wish Anime to have better expressions for certain emotions. We know that Disney has a small army of animators and their assistants to produce one of the most complicated gestures and facial expressions. Because they focus their manpower on 2-hour project, they have luxury to animate all kinds of emotion on characters. We have blessing of top-grade animation, yet it's not wisely applied to modern day. What I don't understand about Flintstones production is that Hanna Barbera had the similar situation as Anime in terms of tight budget and creatively independent animators. Despite the similarities, something went really wrong and we're not seeing any latest show from Hanna Barbera. I'm apologize about questioning your spelling of Animé. I use PC. It's just that those non-fan critics tend to spell that way. enurtsol, For US TV animation production is concerned, something is not quite right. Let's see.. media owners of TV networks, including satellite and cable, makes billions of dollars on advertisement money. We know that TV production budget is always small, but how small? Our TV animations look like Flash animation or farmed out completely to oversea. I read that Sponge Bob Square pants budget is a lot higher than usual anime. Are TV production just inefficient? I often wondered how Japanese industry coped with changing living standard for decades. There is a saying in their industry, "if you can draw one good inbetween drawing, you can afford a bowl of ramen". Of course, such statement is outdated. |
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yojimboray
Posts: 108 |
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Reanimator-
Are you in the anime or animation industry? You seem to have a very solid grasp of this subject. p.s. I don't think it's fair to compare Disney to your everyday anime series. Disney has the $$$ to hire an army of animators to work on a single hour and a half film that will probably generate more revenue than 10 anime series combined. Rather, the more equitable way to compare the two is on a "pound-for-pound" basis- something along the lines of, who does the most with what they've got? |
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enurtsol
Posts: 14761 |
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Because of more constraints, anime has to resort to "shortcuts" like the giant sweatdrop and bulging veins to exaggerate the emotions instead of animating the subtle movements of real life. But that's also because...
... you and yojimboray are correct. It's not an equitable comparison.
I know from some small independent American studios that for a typical half-hour traditional animation, there's no way they could do it for much less than US$300k. For the same work, a small anime studio (pretty much most of them are) could do it for 1/3 of that. For the same price, the anime studio could hire more workers to do much more than the basics. American animators have to eat and have more benefits than their Japanese counterparts. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to earn an animation degree in America, so it's to be expected that their craft should fetch a good price (would anyone expect to pay doctors pennies for their degrees?). Add in the costs of voice-over talents, recording studio, etc. TV networks just aren't willing to pay, despite if the show is earning gazillions off merchandise and license fees. When forced to increase salaries, they'd rather sacrifice the animators. Lastly, I'd just like to add this... plus it kinda increases the cost too even if just from the increased efforts of both the animation and voice sides to pay attention to it: Because that's how Disney (a.k.a. American animation) has done it for decades, so Americans got used to good lip-sync. And technically, that's the correct way to do animation. Japanese studios just don't do it because it's too costly for them, so they're forced to settle for less. The Japanese don't, mostly because keeping the lips synch (usually via the process of recording the voices first then animating it) is more expensive and too time-consuming for the large amount of output they have to churn out in a more restricted amount of time and budget. But just because anime passes the minimal level to count as "lip synch," don't let that fool you, the proper way to do animation is still to synch the lips - that's what they're there for. If you read in-depth technical critical reviews of animation, you'd see that they actually pay attention to that technical aspect. The reason dubs do it is because American (read: Disney) animation had for decades already established lip-synching as a norm (because they can do it and have the resources to do it), so the American public already expects nothing less from their cartoons. So dubs can't completely get away from that accepted convention/expectation. |
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Leedar
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A 'proper way' to do animation?
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enurtsol
Posts: 14761 |
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In terms of syncing the lips, yes. That's what they're there for. (Otherwise, why even animate the lips?) Unless, of course, there's an intentional purpose not to, like making fun of kung-fu dubs.
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