The Importance of Animation

I'm watching Shrek on Cartoon Network, and aside from the editing of Shrek calling Donkey a jack-ass pissing me off, I was surprised by how poorly the animating has aged. I remember a documentary about the production, where an animator talked about how everything they were using was cutting edge. He chuckled as admitting that it would all be totally out-of-date before the movie even released.

Comparing this to the documentary on Pixar where in the early days of the company, they were desperate to find a real animator to bring life to all of their math. That's how they hooked up with John Lasseter. The amazing way that the animation of Toy Story 2 and A Bug's Life has aged, even as ever-greater advances in technology have rendered (pun not intended) the old technology nearly antediluvian, is hugely impressive. It shows how the fundamentals of animation hold up and remain contemporary regardless of when they're done.

For a direct comparison, look at the animation of Monsters Inc. and Shrek. They both came out in 2001 and likely had similar development cycles. I've posted a clip of Monsters Inc., which won't likely be up for much longer, and the trailer for Shrek. Just look at how much more flexible the Pixar characters are. Look at how much more fluid the movements are. The differences are stark.





By Shrek 2, the Dreakworks guys had either hired better animators or gotten the hang of squeezing character out of their more rigid model designs.

Another Jessica Rabbit Wallpaper

Here's another permutation of my first Jessica Rabbit. It's not really feasible to post everything that I could, so if you have any requests, feel free to comment.

4:3 ratio

From Cartoon Vixens Wallpapers

16:10 ratio

From Cartoon Vixens Wallpapers

Jessica Rabbit Wallpaper 2

I worked up a logo for Jessica Rabbit based on the Roger Rabbit logo.

4:3 ratio

From Cartoon Vixens Wallpapers

16:10 ratio

From Cartoon Vixens Wallpapers

Betty Boop Film Class 11

This will be a very short class, I'm only posting this because it so perfectly embodies Fleischer's early philosophy of cartoon production. It was something that was both brilliant, and his ultimate downfall.



This cartoon makes NO sense. There's essentially no plot. It's just Betty and company put into an environment, wacky shit takes place, and it's over. No narrative. No script. Basically no dialog. It is cartoon entertainment brought to its most basic. Unfortunately, unlike Disney, Fleischer was never able to leave this paradigm behind and move towards a more refined concept of animation. Now, with hindsight and 100 years of animation development, we can see that both ideas are legitimate. Hell, Fleischer's paradigm is what damn-near all television cartoons follow (Hello, Spongebob). But at the time, Disney is what pushed the evolution of animation while Fleischer stagnated. And in a nascent industry, the company that evolves is the company that dominates.

High Resolution Jessica Rabbit

Here is the image of Jessica that I made for the wallpapers. This is a very high-res version of her and should be sufficient for whatever you might want to use the image. It's very important to make sure that you download the image from the gallery and not the image link that takes you to the image alone. Click on the "belongs to" link to the right and then select it from the full gallery. It's the only way Picasa allows you to download the full-resolution file.

From Cartoon Vixens Wallpapers

First Jessica Rabbit Wallpaper!

Yay! Jessica is done! And with cold weather ahead of me, I'll have plenty of time inside to work on even more! I've formatted her first as a standard Windows, right-aligned desktop wallpaper. I'll create a few more with this image and I'll also upload a very high-resolution image of her for your own use.

4:3 ratio

From Cartoon Vixens Wallpapers

16:10 ratio

From Cartoon Vixens Wallpapers

Nearing Completion of First Jessica Rabbit

I'm almost done with my first Jessica Rabbit. It's looking really great. It took much longer than I anticipated and the complexity caused me to lose interest on a number of occasions. I'm maybe two days away from finally putting out something that isn't just a silhouette. I'd give you a preview, but I'm so nearly done it would be pointless. I ended up scrapping most of my earlier work in favor of a less-complex layout.