Sunday, February 27, 2011

Disney Stealing From Itself

I post this video not to disparage Disney. Truly, anyone who's ever tried to animate realistic movements of a basic skeleton knows how hard it it is to get it right. So I don't blame Disney for developing one that's really excellent and then using it repeatedly. I also don't find it surprising that the skeletons reused are mostly for dancing. Early animated dancing was either poor, or it was rotoscoped from a live dancer. Hell, when animators didn't use rotoscoping, it was a big deal. Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood's first dance sequence was so well done, everyone assumed that it was a real person being traced, even though it was all free-hand.

WATCH THIS: The Saga of Bjorn

This is a perfectly staged, timed, and animated short about a viking trying to get into Valhalla. Moral of the story: Christians suck.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

What?


I'm watching some cgi film called, inventively, Race. It's in the same category of "films no one cares about" that Kaena, Battle for Terra, and Delgo. I have no idea how this got money to be made. The dialog is bad, the acting is sub-standard, and the animation is just appalling. It's worse than The Clone Wars, and better than Re-Boot only in a technical sense.

The character designs border on insulting. The faces look like most of them have some sort of developmental issue, the women all have gigantic boobs and waists measured in millimeters. Plot? Not really. The story is like a crappy video game (This impression is only amplified by the hooters), and the staging is like the pod racing scene from Star Wars Episode 1 crossed with Wipeout.

This is a truly awful film.