Animation And Technology

By Alan

With Pixar's release of the movie “Up!” they continue the huge string of successful films they've crafted since 1995. These movies, produced by a group of individuals who felt that the future of animation was with computer animation, not by hand-drawn still images. Critics of the computer animation methodologies lack warmth or character. In fact, staying with the old school method of drawing was probably a great downfall of the Disney Studio's animation department. The acquisition of Pixar by Disney was a recognition that using computers as tools for animation is necessary to complete films on time and on budget with what Hollywood wants. Hollywood isn't really about making entertainment. Hollywood is about making money. Pixar had one shot with Toy Story, and if they hadn't pulled it off, they (and the computer animation methods) might have been set back by years.

Modern animation tools free the animators from saying “draw a line for this part of the forearm” to “draw these polygons that make the forearm” to “the arm angle is this much, and rotate the shoulder joint by this many degrees” for every single scene. Now, they can describe “swing the arm, using a normal motion, until the character's hand runs in a wall, and then figure out how the hand should react, based on the speed, angle, and materials it hits.”

However, like all things, with the change of tools, the movies are bound to change as well. Look at the milestone movies of computer aided or computer generated animation film over the years.

1990 – Rescuers Down Under: The first digitally created feature film. The characters and most of the backgrounds were still hand drawn, but the coloration and some scenes were rendered by computer, and the full set were recorded digitally.

1991 - Beauty and the Beast: Still hand drawn, but was one of the first major animated movies to a fully computed three dimensional background for a scene. The Ballroom scene was considered the bell-weather of animation in cartooning. If the scene was able to be rendered by computer and have hand drawn characters overlaid, then perhaps the jobs of backgrounds could be done by computer.

1992 – Aladdin: Fully rendered computer backgrounds, and a new technology for generating the flying carpet as 3D rendered.

1994 – The Lion King: Still hand drawn animated characters, but there was the awe inspiring wildebeest scene in which the producers created several wildebeest models, and had them run along random paths through the canyons. This allowed the animators to simulate a thousand of the beests [sic] to be shown with out having to draw four thousand legs and dividing by four. This was one of the first efforts towards what is called “procedural animation.” The randomness was contained, but still this was a situation in which the animators were not directly creating each and every movement of the characters or objects on the screen. It was possible to have actions or motions that the animators did not explicitly do. That scene was 2 ½ minutes long, and took 5 technicians almost 2 years to complete.

1995 – The stunning fully computer generated movie “Toy Story” was unleashed on an unsuspecting but willing public. While significant amounts of drawing were needed for the preparation of storyboards and sketches, the actual objects were all modeled in 3-D. They generated code which allowed them to describe the materials they were using (including flexibility, shininess, texture, etc). They described the joints and range of motion for each character. Interestingly enough, rigid plastic Buzz Lightyear was easier to render than floppy fabric based Woody. Stuffed cloth can flop in lots of different ways, where as plastic joints follow simple paths. But the paths where predictable. Anything that occurred in the movie were a result of direct planning. There were elements of procedural animation (such as the scene in the arcade when Buzz is under “The Claw” with the alien squeeze toys), where they could randomly vary the postures and positions of the various similar critters in a confined space.

More movies start to follow that possible method of “crowd animation.” Dreamworks did “Antz,” Pixar did “A Bug's Life” which have the quintessential crowd characters: Ants.

Skip ahead a few years. Movies such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and Wall-E, have all had increasingly sophisticated methods of generating crowds or interesting movements.

Up! has upped the ante. They are now providing crowd animation to the background. While the balloons are certainly important to the movie, but can't really be considered characters.

There is a fascinating article from CNN about this process. There is actually a portion of the movie's critical house launching scene, when the procedural animation changed the scene, and the animators through the computer's version was better than what they anticipated. Read How technology lifts Pixar's 'Up'

Where could this end? We already know that some animation studios (and software houses) are experimenting with “automated animation.” This means that you give voices to the characters, and they generate the proper mouth and body animation just from the dialog. What about computer generated voices, and computer scene, with computer generated scores?

Perhaps. But we've got some technological hurdles to get past before it's going to be that easy to create animated films. More importantly, how long will we as the audience enjoy watching them. Because, when you think about it, the main reason movies like Toy Story were such a success wasn't so much the animation, as it was the people behind the characters. The voices and the cleverness of the animators. The technology behind creating these films is amazing. But alas, it still comes down to real people.