It really did

Thankfully they’re learning this and we get movies that are starting to look less like plastic cgi and are using painted textures and drawn in motion blur like in k pop demon hunters which gives the movies more character and makes them look like a mix of the old and the new

I think animation, when the animators care, has improved. Yes treasure planet looks better fight me. But I think the problem is that there is more shit animation now, and we have forgotten the shit animation of the past.

yeap

Yeah I feel old too.

That behind said, I don't think a modern drawing tool is inherently less capable than an older one to produce magic. Digital painting used to have limitations in comparison with traditional technics, but a good 2d illustrator can do gorgeous drawings with a tablet nowadays.

When I see magic in animated movies, its when people do things by love and passions, and not for seeking additional profit. Flow and Arcane are examples of animation with such ingredients.

The original Mobile Suit Gundam 0079. The US cartoons from the 1960's and 70's were the best with plenty of lessons from Wile E. Coyote.

When's the last time you watched the original MSG? I too love the old Gundam series... I've actually been rewatching the og recently but there's been more than a few instances where I've seen some very dodgy and poorly drawn frames pop on screen. I say this with love and respect but it's not a great example for good animation. There are beautifully drawn examples to draw from. 0083 Stardust Memory comes to mind. Absolutely gorgeously drawn and animated. 08th MS Team is another great looking one.

A lot are still "painted by hand", the use of vector graphics isn't as prevalent in other cartoon producing countries as it is in the US

really?
I know of zero studios that are still doing any painting. they are all digital. sk, china, japan - no one uses paint filmed one cel at a time, or any of the old analog processes anymore. I'd be happy to be wrong, but I don't know of anyone that's still doing painted cels recorded on film.
Even Ghibli. https://www.dqindia.com/features/studio-ghibli-blending-tradition-and-technology-in-the-age-of-animation-8921913
"Ghibli's selective integration of technology, primarily digital ink-and-paint techniques facilitated by software like OpenToonz, stands in stark contrast to the unbridled embrace of AI in the recent Ghibli-style art phenomenon."
- I didn't say that they were painting on paper
  Digital painting by hand is still qualifies as "painted by hand"

They used a lot of rotoscoping back in the day. Basically they filmed a scene normally with real people, then traced over every frame to give us those fantastic moments of fluid movement in things like Snow White, Mary Poppins, and Beauty and the Beast (which also used 3D by the way).

Fun fact, some of the more impressive examples from that era (like Mary Poppins) primarily used the sodium vapor process to get perfect mattes directly in-camera, no rotoscoping needed. It's a fascinating and impressive bit of tech: https://www.historicmysteries.com/science/disney-prism/39484/
- That is indeed a fun fact! I am somewhat obsessed with sodium vapor lights and the bandwidth of light they produce. I would love to have seen the original camera rig and their special prisms, but apparently they only made three and they've been lost.
Ralph Bakshi used it in the 1978 LOTR. It made the battle scene confusing.
- Dude Ralph Bashki made things weird for fun. Maybe if I volunteer to watch the Bashki LOTR with my wife, who loves that movie, I can convince her to watch Wizards with me. I have been wanting to watch that.
Rotoscoping is quite old, too. I think it even predates ww1.

My kid got into Lady and the Tramp, so I watched it about a dozen times in a row, and Holeee shiiit is that thing beautifully animated. The backgrounds are needlessly lavish, and look at this...

I'm in awe of the work done on Tramp's ears. The expressiveness, and the subtle balance of flexibility and internal structure is exquisite. You can find other examples of masterfully-done materials all throughout the movie.

Other movies might get more attention, but Lady and the Tramp is worth looking at for some peak Disney animation.

It was the only Disney movie that I liked as a child.
So how many frames is this, do we think, just for this clip...
- 24fps, nearly 3 seconds long, so somewhere near 72 frames total, BUT... these animations were done on 2's - meaning every other frame. https://businessofanimation.com/why-animation-studios-are-animating-on-2s/
- Films are 24fps. I can't say that frames weren't removed in the making of the gif, but for sake of argument if we assume they're all there, the gif is roughly 4 seconds long, so there would be around 96 frames there.
I am not a big fan of Pinocchio in general, but the animation is absolutely nuts. The part with the whale is truly remarkable.
It's one of my favourites!

They are still being being painted by hand. On a graphics tablet, for example.

Exactly, it's not the medium. It's like saying movies like Up aren't beautiful because of CG.
- Yep.
  Those older movies are beautiful achievements for sure. But it's disingenuous to say that there isn't a plethora of movies and shows today that rival and surpass those older examples visually. Not to speak of just how much more fluent animation has become.
  Many of the people who worked on those older masterpieces are still in animation today, and have only become better at their art.
- I don't think it actually looks very good. The computer generated look is pretty fugly. Story is a different matte
It's not the same. Of course things can be beautiful if painted on a tablet, but differently beautiful.
- I guess it's a matter of taste then. I really enjoy the vibrancy and fluidity of animation we get today. And I find them to be no less expressive.

Fun fact: 101 Dalmatians was the first Disney movie to be produced with the help of xerox. This was as a result of the financial flop that was Sleeping Beauty, that almost bankrupted the company and cut their budgets for future movies all the way from the 60s to the financial success of the little mermaid in 1989. This is why Disney movies within that time period has a rougher look when it comes to the characters' lineart and the more simple backgrounds compared to the very detailed, painted backgrounds and colored lineart of all Disney movies up until 101 Dalmatians.

The xerox was a cost cutting method to save time and money and while it absolutely killed Walt Disney to have to compromise on the art, it also paved the way for a new look and feel that, especially in the case of 101 Dalmatians, created a timeless look that still looks as fresh and modern today as the day it was made.

Without the invention and utilization of the xerox, there most likely would have been no Disney company today.

BuT nO! ReAl ArT uSeS nO sHoRtCuTsOrTecH!
The Disney corporation is a better person when it's poor.
- Not arguing with you there xD I have basically boycotted Disney. Last straw for me was their Mulan remake.
  Didn't watch it. Heard it was trash like all the other remakes, but the thing that did it for me was when I learned they had used actual concentration camp prisoners for free labor on the movie. That was it for me.

Interestingly enough, 101 Dalmatians was the first Disney film to adopt the process of Xeroxing the animators' drawings directly to cels, rather than hand-tracing them. It's still a beautiful movie of course, but it's also an advance in animation technology that often gets over-looked!

Thanks. Fascinating read. However...
The character Roger Radcliffe in Dalmatians was entirely outlined in black
This is not true, as you can see in their provided still. Some internal "outlines" are not in black, especially his hat and shoes (hard to tell with his jacket after dark brown or black). It is similar to their Sleeping Beauty (supposedly) counter-exanple.

Actual, handmade art and films are why so many of us look back on the 80's nostalgically, whether it's the Muppets, or Freddy's handmade makeup and practical effects, or the Goonies' crew building a whole-ass pirate ship on a soundstage. Practical effects will always be 100% better than CGI or some crap spat out by an LLM.

The reason why so many people look on the 80s nostalgically is because they were children or teens during the 80s.
- And had virtually no responsibility, with tons of free time, and friends, and play.
This was 1961 which is definitely not the ‘80s. However, I get your point; practical effects may have been — and were often — jank, but it was real and tangible and I loved it, warts and all.
- Sauce on that gif por favor?
My theory is that since practical effects ultimately rely on physics of the world we occupy, that despite their unpolished look, they feel more real. The hyper realistic, but completely reality breaking effects of today just hit the same way cartoons do.
Speaking of cartoons, I love finding the shortcuts that animators would take, there’s something so artistic about how they did it.
I am just so much more engaged when I can watch a movie while also trying to figure out how they pulled off an effect.
- The line has blurred enough for make it difficult to draw a clean line between true practical effects and special effects. Visual effects studios can and do merge real photography with digital rendering or retouching. Over 20 years ago, Andy Serkis had to don a special motion capture suit to play Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, but the advances since then now allow for more subtle (or less subtle) transformation of characters. The Mandalorian made extensive use of digitally rendered scenes actually projected on set so that the reflections and actor interactions feel more real in a computer-generated environment.
  And of course, actual movie editing tricks have always been around, where cuts and multiple takes can create real footage presented in a fictional sequence: a single actor playing twins/doppelgangers by simply filming each side's lines separately, and then editing them together. Plus things like costume design and wardrobe, set design, props, etc.
  The effectiveness of all these tricks do depend a lot on the skill and effort of the people involved, and that often means budget (including time). Rush jobs, or farming the work out to cheaper/less skilled workers, on any of these mean that corners will be cut and the end result will be less convincing, regardless of actual method.
- *just don't hit
Facts, it's why the thing is still my favorite horror movie.
Same here. I occasionally look back at 80s stuff and even the limited animation stuff of the era still made me realize that a whole army of people had to draw all of these by hand. So even if some stuff was 'bad' due to time and budget constraints, the sheer effort they had to put in was incredible.
For me I use AI for one thing only: furry porn, and stupid furry porn at that. I did write stories and novels before the Trump gang fucked with my creativity in ways I dont want to talk about. Using AI for any serious creative purpose is insulting to me.
Regarding "CGI is bad" - pls watch this Video series, it's not that simple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo&t=2
Bunch of old people here in the comments
- And young ones too. Also, the middle-aged.

I totally agree, Disney’s Robin Hood from 1973 is peak hand-drawn cartoon

Eeeeeeh... Maybe not. It's pretty good, but there is so much recycled animation that you might aswell call the Jungle book the best aswell.
Forgot about Fantasia?
Lion king?
Don bluth cartoons?
Anything made by Miyazaki.
- I’m with you on the studio Ghibli stuff; and the Lion King while a better movie is very polished and to me lacks the hand made feel of Robin Hood
You dropped this -> /s
- I don't think they did...

TBF it was also a time before the corporate entity realized maximum short term profit doesn't come from perfected products.

I just recently rewatched 101 Dalmatians and actually cried multiple times just from really soaking it in. Just the way so much of it comes to life. The imperfections genuinely make it feel so much more alive.

Modern Hollywood animation is incredibly sterile and perfected. A major studio now would never imagine releasing something with visible sketch lines.

Sure it wasn't nostalgia? Sounds like the same symptoms
- I don’t think so. I’ve been watching a lot of classics from my childhood lately and most of them weren’t hitting me that hard. Maybe it’s that the actual story and the horror of it sunk in properly for the first time as an adult. Hadn’t seen it since I was young. The voice acting from the pups is just incredible. That probably didn’t help.

Same with the OG Lilo and Stitch:

https://youtu.be/uGVZFLukUZI

IIRC last film to use honest to god water colors. And it shows.

Was this before or after the lion king, because they really started leaning on cgi from then on
- Lion king was 5-10 years before this

They were more interested in telling a memorable story than making a quick buck

The only counter argument would probably be something like Flow. But what Zilbalodis did was perhaps as handcrafted as 3D animation can get.

the opening to beauty and the beast remains my favourite piece of animation ever <3

Beauty and the Beast features computer animation, by the way. I think it's only in the ballroom scene though.
- thanks! i'm not an expert so i wasn't sure (i know they did switch sometime in the 90s but i thought 91 would have been too early for computer/cgi)

I’m sorry to say that a AI could recreate that look in a flash. And within 5 years you could have a completely consistent, feature length film done in that look.

Let’s not minimize the threat. If we want to avoid being replaced by computers, it’s now the fight has to be had.

Fatal mistake.
There is a venn diagram of anti ai including both people who believe ai is incapable of producing value and people who believe it will take their jobs,
But they do not mix nor understand how the other exists.
- I’m not really sure if your comment is a reaction against my statement, in support of my statement ir adding further nuance to my statement.
  I certainly believe AI is capable of producing value. I certainly believe AI will take people’s jobs. Exactly because it is able to produce value.
  I’ve seen both things first thing, many times, already.
  My statement was meant to highlight that it is exactly because it is producing value and taking people’s jobs that we ought to have a debate about whether it should and who it will benefit (and who will lose out) from that great replacement.
  Right now, all I see is a further concentration of wealth built on the backs of thousands of years of human creativity. It’s the ultimate rent seeking.

Careful, there’s a lot of “artists” around lemmy that will get incredibly upset about this.

Flow knocks the crap out of Dalmatians.

I would love cartoons that don't traumatize children, that would be awesome. I watched bambi when I was young and got so traumatized I can't wach animal movies anymore, than I went to see Elio with my niece and she was crying so hard I had to apologize to her parents.

Life is horrible enough lets make cartoons nice

I disagree that this is an actual problem, we have so few sources anymore that show any kind of reality that kids can connect with.
It's worse than ever. It's a world of AI slop that is often far more disturbing, youtube kid's channels that are completely lacking in value or education. Life lessons are avoided like the plague in media and in families now. Parents avoid "hard topics" with their kids at a level that has left an entire generation of adults unable to function under any level of pressure, or unable to do basic things like count change and make eye contact.
Will seeing Bambi's parents die help with that? Not directly, but there is a type of psychological "grounding" that can come from careful exposure to distressing topics as a child.
Life is horrible, but avoiding it makes the problems worse. Avoiding something distressing because you can't take negative emotions is a valid choice but it doesn't make you stronger. Your mental capacity, your emotions and your perceptions are all muscles that wither and die without exercise.
If we taught our children that bad things happen but it's okay and we can recover, maybe there would be less fear and scared adults who cling to violence as a means to feel in control.
I just don't like the idea of sanitizing and shaving every hard corner off a world that desperately needs people with mental and emotional strength like never before.
- I don't think we lack nice cartoons. My siblings children watch Bluey and Daniel Tiger's Neighbourhood and they are both great. they also watch the unavoidable paw patrol bu I like this too. My older niece lover frozen but she FF the part where the parents die lol
You should try The Fox and the Hound. It’s uplifting.
- or brave little toaster T_T
There are like five popular Disney movies where a parent or both parents dont get murdered in order to drive the story forward. Of those left a handful has the parents dead before the story even starts.
Disney really seems to love killing parents. Someone ought to talk to them, seems like an unhealthy obsession.
- Aren't they animations of existing fairy tales, at least the early ones?
- Coco and Encanto, Moana and Brave, it seems like in the newer movies they're not as addicted to killing the parents, so maybe someone did? I haven't seen wish or raya so idk. The parents are also alive in Tangled I think but she's kidnapped so I don't think we can really count it as no parental trauma (or we could count it as 3 parents?)
Was it the melting child scene? That caught me off guard.
- Yeah, that came out of no where. I thought it was great, but also figured it would likely traumatize a number of kids.
  I was sad the movie didn't do better in the box office. It wasn't the best, but it was a fun original story.
- Also this, but she was watching with me, her aunt, and her parents were not there so she kept asking me if her parents were going to die too. At the end she was crying and saying "i don't want to live with you I want to live with mom and dad" lol. Didn't take offense. I also want her to live with her parents hahaha
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi fucked me up, nightmares about snakes for a couple of years. And having Orson Wells narrate didn't help a bit.

A computer will most likely not only recreate but create better, one day.

Life can be much better with AI, if we don't starve to death. The problem is not AI but other humans who don't share their resources.

When I see something impressive generated by a computer, I may go "wow", but when I see something, displayed on a computer or not, that I know a person went and handcrafted so many details on, I am inspired by that dedication to the craft. The human elements within art are a big part of what makes it meaningful.
If someone wants to use AI for the parts of a work they don't care about (or as placeholders) so they can pour their heart into a different aspect of the work, fine. If they want the computer to do all the work for them, they have created slop. This is independent of whether we live in a society that values gross resource accumulation or one that shares equally.
I will say that the push towards slop primarily stems from our societal zeitgeist. The mentality is "I need to make as much money with as little effort as possible", and sometimes people really do need that money to pay bills. I think that's a big reason why it's such a problem. There is little monetary value in actual expression for the effort required when compared with mass produced "content" for dollars.
- Unless humans are magic, AI will be able to feel. I would assume that AI will be able to feel much deeper and much stronger. So one day, AI will use art to tell us about things that are beyond our horizon.

I guess we're gonna just whitewash the systemic exploitation of "betweener" labor, then? Oh, good. 🖕🏽

So a couple things, do you have a link where I can read up on the history of betweener labor because now I'm curious? But secondly what are you talking about? What this post or the comments implies anything to do with race? I don't understand where you're getting that from
- I think there is nothing about race at all. Whitewash as in the meaning: to make something bad seem acceptable by hiding the truth.

Just for the sake of comparison. This was made by chatgpt.

Of course art is very subjective but boy did it come close.

Edit: guys. I know you don't like AI. But if you're not willing to be objective about the fact that is just a COMPARISON keep your bile to yourself.

I would say exactly the opposite - it proves the point. The sameness of the two dogs and the lack of the corresponding marriage ceremony in the background rob the image of most of its significance, and the background is a copy that wouldn't exist if the original hadn't existed.
- This was more of a technical demo than anything else. The real issue I had was that the movie is still under copyright and I had a find a prompt that would allow it to make that much. But I wanted it be as identical to the original as possible to see if it could replicate the soul of the original.
  It's not there I would agree, there is a certain... Flavor missing but it's very close.
  More so I would agree that llms will not be able to ever replicate individual human nuance especially in art.
- I don't use it but isn't that just additional prompts?
  "Add a marriage ceremony shadowed in the background."
  "Change the dog on the right."
  I would think the entire style could be built up with enough prompts. It's no different than digital artists using photoshop and picking a brush that does "watercolor" and then applying a hand paint texture. I have made Photoshops that mimic Van Gogh with a few clicks.
  I'm in the camp of if you aren't actually painting, you have no reason to complain about AI art.
When 101 Dalmatians is in the training data, I'm not sure ChatGPT deserves that much credit for its style 😆
- Comment removed due to it not being relevant to the comment above.
This is garbage. What are you on about? It is art as an affection. Style as an algorithm. It's got no sense of balance or intent. It looks like what it is, a copy that doesn't actually understand what made the original great.
- Again art is very subjective. Your own personal bias place role to how much you like or dislike that particular picture however from an absolutely technical standpoint it's very close to the original not quite there but close.
That ain’t Perdita! That’s Pongo x 2.