So I was brain storming ideas for what my ideal DC cartoon would be like and one of those things included making more use of colors in creative fitting ways like in comics.
But why don't Cartoons make use of colors as creatively as comics? Cartoons usually stick to a template of set colors and rarely veer off into comic book colors territory.
Is it because colorists in animation don't have the mind set of comic book colorists? Is it too expensive or time consuming? Is it that these colors would lose its novelty over time?
I HATE the DC animated bland as fuck art style they use every time. Also that weird thing where everybody pauses between pieces of dialogue, it's really awkward. Anyone else notice that?
Xavier Thompson
Unambitious animators working in a field that doesn't pay all that well, isn't very rewarding, and was a bitch to actually get into. Probably? Very cookie cutter. Why do you think good animators are usually well known instead of being a blanket of faceless bad animators in a company like WB?
Gabriel Ramirez
animators aren't trained to be creative, they're trained like factory workers. "this is the way you do it, now go do that ten thousand times then go home for the day"
Austin Myers
Why the fuck would anyone want to be an animator in this day and age?
Henry Nelson
As if animators are in charge of colors.
Isaac Rogers
Season 5 of Samurai Jack had a lot of shots that reminded me of Hellboy, with the way that they used colors.
It also has a lot of influence of Frank Miller work, and even paneling overral.
Ethan Martinez
Same reason all re-releases of the Killing Joke have those recolors: Dave Gibbons fucking hated the original comic's inks. Re-inked the whole thing himself, which is what the usual versions you see are.
James Hughes
I fuckin hate the new colors. Wonder if we'll ever get a reprint with the old ones.
Eli Jenkins
I'm a pretty big DC fag and while I still love TAS, JL and all those shows I've never gotten the hype around DC cartoon movies. TDK was fuckin awful and awkward, exactly as you say with the dialogue. and it just seems they either need to move on from the flat shitty style or just go full ball-deep again on the diniverse style.
Jeremiah Smith
perhaps they should be taking a page from David Productions
Justin Gray
How could anyone stand like that?
Nathaniel Russell
An invisible knight is holding him up
Samuel Bailey
that's a cartoon, user. that's the point.
Jace Cook
>hype Aside from UtRH and a few earlier movies, I have not seen any hype towards the recent ones (except for Return of the Caped Crusaders). Quite the opposite actually.
Dominic Bailey
That's because after Flashpoint and TDKR, they've all ben absolute shit; and it's not even because they are using N52 stories, they're just poorly written and they try to cram too much into a hour.
Noah Richardson
Gonna repost this
My biggest problem is with the animation It looks like SHIT Even this guy fanmade looks better youtube.com/watch?v=uFEHTAnsmGU
The Batgirl plot was also shit And the voice acting, Hamill felt off and this guy did it better youtube.com/watch?v=NC16orUje4M
Timm disappointed me
Jason Davis
Color is important to translate emotion in a scene. It's especially bad if you chose to abandon it from something that did had it, it just shows how much it added in the first place.
Grayson Gray
I imagine it'd get a bit overwhelming to look at in motion. When it's just still images it's much more digestible
Jeremiah King
animation is expensive
Luke Gomez
>Timm disappointed me Fucking this, when I saw the animation and the style of this movie in the trailer I was only unimpressed but when I learned that Timm was involved in it and apparently didn't feel the need to make it look good, I just became disappointed in both him and the film.
John Nguyen
That commercial is fucking awesome, if only for how needlessly flamboyant all the animation is.
Ryan Anderson
>Dave Gibbons
Bryan Bolland
Jonathan Walker
Big letdown compared to the DCAU/Gods and Monsters
you are allowed to be way more creative in anime but they pay you with spare buttons.
Cameron Perez
unironically, watch the david productions adaption of jojo for something like this
Lincoln Phillips
>not Madhouse's Redline You had one job
Jaxon Green
There are two main reasons, one being much more forgivable than the other:
1) Consistency. In comics, it's very easy to have drastically different color schemes and visual styles between panels in order to give a certain effect to the reader. It's one of the biggest advantages of the medium. Animation on the other hand has to have some sort of visual transition between frames, and if it's too jarring it can come off as choppy. This includes framing, colors, and even art style.
2) Money. Many top animators are able to do really creative things with colors and style that can produce extremely impressive results. However top animators are expensive. and DC is cheap as fuck with these movies, opting to outsource all of their animation to bargain Korean studios.
Grayson Morales
They are pretty good, I admit.
Lucas Bailey
Can you clarify? When you say money do you mean the better colors cost more than bland colors or the talent that would use them cost more than talent that stick to bland colors?
Hudson Clark
they used to honestly i found it distracting, the rest of the time i mentally filtered it out. like literally until just now i forgot they did it but they did it a lot
Benjamin Long
They're a disgrace, and he's the only person who likes them.
Jonathan Brown
>the talent that would use them cost more than talent that stick to bland colors?
this one
Daniel Nguyen
>generic "serious tone takes a comedic turn for the rest of the trailer" music
I don't think I can watch a DCAU movie anymore.
Ethan Lopez
You are both correct with bland animation, but is correct, the colors for scenes are a preproduction thing. Actual production is putting those pre-chosen colors in the lines.
Bentley White
The DCAU is great, it ended with the Justice League Unlimited Everything that came after isn't part of the DCAU, including this new Harley/Batman movie with Timm artstyle
Jack Richardson
Because it Cost too much money to use the Select tool and change the hue cause they needed it for Hamill, Conroy, and Strong for the nostalgia
Gabriel Russell
It looks like the recolor.
Joshua Murphy
The normies said the colors are weird and don't look realistic.
Kevin Peterson
The movie is based on the recolored version of the comic by the original artist Brian Bolland.
Ian Ward
>Brian Bolland >Neal Adams
What is with these classic artists going back and """fixing""" their old works? Did they all get a look at the Star Wars special editions and think what a great idea they were?
Brandon Roberts
God those are both awful.
Owen Robinson
In Bolland's defense, a lot of his best work is printed in B&W, relatively unaltered by comparison to the final product of TKJ. He, and apparently Neal Adams judging by your pic, seem to just be a bit autistic with making their work look as "realistic" as possible, without really paying mind to more abstract and appealing aesthetic qualities the original color prints had. Their POV's aren't necessarily focused on the big picture and getting it wrong, they're just highlighting/improving the effort they put into their original outlines for themselves, because if that's the only thing you're focusing on, everything else looks too 'plain'.
Basically, it's exactly like your George Lucas analogy. Instead of accepting his final cut theatrical releases to be a unique and endearingly imperfect team effort, he made the franchise all about himself and treated his films like they're his own private pet project to butcher and cobble back together as he pleases, rather than something that's meant to be enjoyed by audiences.
Cameron Jackson
I kinda wonder if something went down for them to use what looked like a tvshow cartoon budget to make this. It's something that people have been waiting forever for and I figure with Timm at the head, it would have extra care taken to make sure it looked good even if they couldn't match the style 1:1 because they are only covering less than a hour really of animation.
Hudson Watson
I thought the new coloring was terrible the original inks gave it a different feel that matched the book more
Brody Lopez
The recolor works better in this particular scene, but the carnival ones are so much better in the original version. I wonder why collected editions don't come with both versions, considering it's a rather short comic.
Nolan Jenkins
You literally posted the one scene that looks better in the recolour.
The fucking Batcave should not have rainbow lighting.
Ian Long
Animation is expensive enough as it is and digital colouring is a lot cheaper if you stick to one pallet. The people paying for it think why spend the extra money if you can't guarantee that it'll be more successful? Risk/reward and all that jazz.
>Kevin Michael Richardson doing the same voice again
For fucks sake, why does this guy keep getting work?
Flat colours are looked down upon as products of a bygone era.
Brandon James
Because colors aren't part of the global pipeline used to dialog with animation slaves in Asia. yuo get storyboard for view, symbols for for models and that's it.
Evan Cruz
I also think that glossy, shaded toons like in Space Jam lose a ton of everything. Especially when they are NOT used in mixed media. I understand that Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam *needed* shading so the toons meshed better with the RL enviroments.
But the glossy shading became the standard for high budget animation, which sucked in my opinion because the storyboards often didn't adapt to the stylistic choice. Characters looked more like part of the landscape.
Jordan Martin
when stuff is moving fast, and you dont have as much time to take in each frame, its more important to have contrast the top panel has red on top of another red, with a red BG, so unless its a still frame you might not catch everything the bottom one has more realistic colors and a realistic BG, so your eye naturally fills you in on what you saw, its easier to differentiate between things on the panel
Tyler Davis
When people like Snyder do that in 300 or BvS you manchildren claim it doesnt have colors. I saw a post in this board saying Alien covenant was grimdark and didnt had "good colors".
Anyway, what looks good on paper and the limitations of one media can produce quality work in that same media, forcing creators to be creative, when translated to a different one those limitations are gone
Benjamin Richardson
>You literally posted the one scene that looks better in the recolour. So the BatCAVE should be so well lit that not even the computer screen effects the rest of the lighting, as oppose to a cave so dark that the screen has to contribute to about 90% of the lighting
Carson Brown
This
Camden Nelson
Acting as if this isn't a CONSISTENT "problem" (I would simply say the norm) is absolutely absurd. Almost no artists show the batcave as being a dark, unlit place. Especially with an established batman.
This is, I assume, when you post that one artist, I'll further assume your favorite, who draws a dark batcave.
Joseph Johnson
wild colors don't work in animation like it does in print, duh
Andrew Thompson
It works for David Productions.
Jonathan Wood
Never seen the JoJo. I have to assume you have bad taste and that it doesn't work nearly as well as you believe. After all, the JoJo manga has always had a way of getting away with mediocrity by being "weird", so I assume that the anime is the same.
Owen Jones
>I have never seen [thing] >but let me tell you why [thing] is mediocre and why you should feel like shit for having bad taste. I mean, it's okay if you have an opinion but at least be informed first.
Zachary Nelson
I am. How good could an anime based off of JoJo really be? Good adaptations in general are a dime a dozen.
Joseph Bell
>expensive
I can't wrap my head around that statement. Animation used to be a physical process of drawing cells, redrawing same thing ad nauseam, assembling it, using fancy equipment to compose everything. Just making a parallax effect was complicated as fuck.
It's all fucking digital now. You can rectify any mistake with a simple click. I sometimes watch streams of animators who make things frame by frame and it's laborious, of course, but a team of animators should be able to storm through a frame by frame animated 20 minute episode rather quickly. It's not that it's so friggin' expensive, it's that the studios are fucking cheap and they are unable to make a decent pipeline without outsourcing inbetweens to Indonesian children.
Owen Myers
It's actually a pretty faithful adaptation to the source material.
Gotta warn you though, the video contains a spoiler to the end of Part 3 but it's the only video I could find that didn't have commentary on it.
Camden Morgan
if they don't someone else will do it in their place eventually
Jordan Gomez
Redline was a passion project that took 7 years to make. It's not really a fair comparison
Jayden Long
Just because it's all digital now, doesn't make it cheap. Labor costs are still extremely high and animation software are at ludicrous prices. When you include all other expenses, animation ends up costing millions of dollars. That's a pretty significant investment, which is why all modern cartoon companies prefer to play it safe and just cater to children.
Matthew Lewis
Silver Chariot works very well, actually.
Isaac Campbell
>unironically, watch the david productions adaption of jojo for something like this
Yeah Jojo seems to be one of the only cartoons with a style that really relishes in the fact that it is based on a comic book.
Ian White
Wow, and I thought the gay scene was complicated.
Noah Campbell
Then there is something wrong with the system. Also, software is not that expensive if you're not a moron that goes for whatever is marketed best. Besides 3D animations is consedered to be cheaper while 3D software and rendering tend to be more costly. And labour is labour, you have to pay people either way for their time and skill. Whether it's rigging models or drawing cells.
A driven solitary artist is able to provide high quality animation, both 2D and 3D. Making it a company effort should make it cheaper not more expensive.
Brody Powell
The New Adventures of Lucky Luke cartoon, did this kind of style.
>Is it because colorists in animation don't have the mind set of comic book colorists? Is it too expensive or time consuming? Is it that these colors would lose its novelty over time?
If you give a commission to some mindless korean sweatshop studio with no rules or mindless direction then you get this. Yes, I stopped watching DC animation because this.
>The New Adventures of Lucky Luke cartoon, did this kind of style. Good shoutout, although it did feel jarring, maybe because they just overused it at nonsensical moments. It felt more like adding more colors to keep the kids' attention.
