As a sort of tangential follow up to Patrick's post about the switch from video cassette to DVD, I wanted to post a little about the repercussions of moving from a traditional, hand-drawn style of animation to the new digital style of animation.
I'm currently working on a presentation on Disney's newest movie Frozen and am reading through the art book that Disney has published. One of my only serious critiques of the movie is that the digital animation is really ineffective at portraying subtle emotions, mostly because the technology available is not as sophisticated as it should be yet. One of the pictures in the art book is a series of sketches hand-drawn by John Ripa of Elsa singing "Let It Go" while he was watching Idina Menzel record the song for the film. The sketches are very, very rough - but they capture the intensity of the emotion of Menzel's performance and her voice. In the final film, I sometimes feel like the digitally animated Elsa just doesn't capture that raw energy, which I think is just a product of the limitations of digital animation. There are several other examples throughout the book of character sketches that look infinitely more detailed and where hand-drawn animation sketches look much better than their final digital renderings (Jin Kim's sketches of Krisoff - as an example - are more expressive and better looking than the final digital rendering on the opposite page).
No comments:
Post a Comment