Right, so about animation. I have to say that I have always found it a bit interesting. When I was younger, I was beyond amazed to discover that The Lion King was actually over thousands and THOUSANDS of pages meticulously drawn and filmed. I was even more shocked to find that different people contributed by each doing their own characters and scenes... [Although I ahve to admit it made much more sense than one person sitting about and etching for days on end.] When I found out that full-length features took a couple years I was just amazed at the amount of dedication it took to create one 90 minute movie. Crazy!
I had always noticed animation and special effects. In older movies they used them to create the opening credits. [Quite fancy for the times.] I also watched Animaiacs after school. I always hated anime [not a fan of the Japanese lined eyes and huge tear drop to show stress... just didn't do it for me.] My first real Disney movie was Aladdin, so I never saw the classics until I was older. I never knew I was missing anything. I have an artist friend who makes a joke of the animation of The Lion King versus Bambi. "Simba... everything before you is poorly animated and based on Bamabi." Loathed as I am to admit it... so true!
Walt Disney was the first to use a new type of animation that required different cells. Panoramic scenes would be layered. So the camera could actually zoom through the layers giving the scene much more depth and movement. Amazing! So while Bambi is full of color, shades, and depth... The Lion King is full of brightness, line, and relies heavily on fantastic characters singing and moving to Sir Elton John's musical genius.
I can't say that I know much about animation. It has always fascinated me, but I've never really looked at it in depth. Looking back from where we've come from the thaumatrope all the way to Pixar's beautiful 3-d animation features. To be honest, I'm nto quite sure how far we'll go with animation. I think the most recent step forward has been work like that of the recent film Beowulf. Realtime and animation have been combined before such as the Alice Comedies, Walt Disney's early work before Mickey. It puts real characters in a fictitious world and vice versa. But Beowulf was first filmed in realtime then finshed with animation. I can't possibly fathom going any further with animation, but then again I'm not at the forefront of animation.
With advent of computers and the amazing things they've done for production and animation, I would think that the next step would really just be combining some of the best attributes of different forms of film and production. Granted there is "digital enhancement" for classic animation, but my hope is that animation will not continue to reinvent itself by becoming more complex. I think it would be quite an interesting turn to see an amalgamation of different forms of animation. For instance, using Walt Disney's technique of layering with 3-d animations to create more vivid and deep scenes giving the characters more life while allowing the background and scene to be just as full of motion and vibrance.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I am willing to bet that in the cse of animation, the next step forward will be the child of boundless creativity.
