Hey Sup Forums, which is better: traditional animation or computer animation?

Hey Sup Forums, which is better: traditional animation or computer animation?

Cel animation > digital animation > computer animation

Neither medium is inherently better or worse than the other. Good animation, regardless of medium, requires heart, hard work, and time.

But I'm sure the 300 guaranteed replies will be more than happy to rabidly defend their preferred medium as the superior art form.

No, tradition animation is always superior compared to cgi

If you do everything by hand it's going to look like everything was done by hand.

If you do it all digitally, it's going to look digital.

Some people prefer one aesthetic over the other. I prefer hand drawn. I like stuff to look like a person made it.

>implying Shrek is not the pinnacle of animation achievement

Philistine

> I like stuff to look like a person made it.

CGI doesn't look any less "like a person made it" than hand-drawn. Every CGI film is ultimately made by people, not computers. It'd be like me saying hand-drawn doesn't look like a person made it because it was made by pencils.

Pencils are to hand-drawn as computers are to CGI. Tools for a person to create.

Hand drawn animation on a computer

Why stopmotion when you can cgi?

>Hey Sup Forums, which is better:

Good Animation > Bad animation

Fite me

The traditional style of animation developed by Walt Disney in the 40's has a "warmness" to it that hasn't been duplicated by modern computers. Whenever they do modern 2D annimation it just feels too "slick".

The closest thing that still does this well is Anime, and even modern anime just feels really slick compared to Anime of the 80's and 90's.

That being said, computers have done a lot to improve animation that might not have been very good otherwise. Compare the Scooby-Doo shows of the 70's to Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorperated.

Computer Animation hasn't existed for that long and even today animators are still progressing the medium

Not to say it's worse than traditional, but it doesn't have the century of evolution under its belt

I would think it's for the textures

Your comparison is bad.
A better comparison would be an oil painting and a photograph.
If you want realism, a photograph is much better.
If you want the artist's expression, an oil painting is much more versatile, but takes a lot more work.

Now SOME photos are very artistic and expressive, but it takes special editing to make them that way, while paintings are INTRINSICALLY the result of the very human motion of a person's hand, not the calculations of a computer or the imprint of light on a CCD.

Hand-drawn animation hit its stride about 30 years after it first commercially manufactured, which is where 3D animation is now. The first feature-length animated film, Snow White, is the equivalent of Toy Story.

CG will keep becoming more advanced while hand-drawn will forever remain limited by a single artist's ability to draw. One day CG will be able to fully emulate hand-drawn animation and be indistinguishable from it.

But we're not there yet.

>One day CG will be able to fully emulate hand-drawn animation and be indistinguishable from it.
It won't though, ever.

Thus far, I haven't seen much CGI that exudes such personal style in the animation that it can be tied to one specific animator. I can tell individual animators who worked on a scene in old 2D cartoons and anime, but not with 3D except for the more esoteric ones. At best, there are "house styles" like Pixar vs Sony vs Blue Sky.

This is the nature of the beast, CGI usually requiring huge staffs such that individual expression must be muted to make a consistent product. But it's also because more of the decision making process in 2D rests completely with the artist. It's more personal hands down.

Much of the innovation in CGI cartoons nowadays aren't being made in the animation, but in the rendering, the effects, tied to ever increasing processing power. Can anyone name the leading "artists" in those areas?

It can already do cutout animation (South Park) and stop-motion animation (Coraline) and it almost does hand-drawn animation (Paperman) so give it time.

>Can anyone name the leading "artists" in those areas?
All the CG nerds from ConceptArt, probably. You think Average Joe can name an animation artist outside of Walt Disney and The Warner Brothers?

It won't though.
Digital animation can't even replicate cel animation, CGI won't ever be able to do it.

>All the CG nerds from ConceptArt, probably.

No. They can tell you which tools were used, but they're not going to be able to pick out which animator did what scene in a CGI movie, which artist did the lighting. If they could, someone messed up.

>You think Average Joe can name an animation artist outside of Walt Disney and The Warner Brothers?

Not the Average Joe, but the slightly more involved fans (i.e. many people on Sup Forums and Sup Forums) can.

I don't say this as a diss to CGI, it's just the nature of the medium, and it's probably what many posters mean when they say CGI is impersonal.

This here It all crumbles down on vision, idea, plot and execution.

The problem is CGI is a little bit easier for people that cant draw to make films.
Or that some directors or studios think that cgi is important and need to make it a full blown cgi feast.
That drags the whole cgi down that some make movies with nothing solid underneath.

And this

two:
traditional animation done on a digitizer doing its best impression of physical media

computer animation done like stop-motion, by touching the cg models with your "hands" in 3d space (but also the models have to look good, most 3d models are just ugly)