People say traditional animation is more expensive than CGI

>People say traditional animation is more expensive than CGI

>Literally every single film on this list is a CGI film

Why the fuck was Tangled so expensive to make
It didn't even look that impressive

That hair man.

10 years of development hell, multiple retart from scratch. iirc it was supposed to be 2D at first

Development Hell, and they had a lot of experimentation time with Punzie's hair.

Pic related only cost $75 million and it's 2D, CG, and live-action rolled together. The medium is irrelevant to the cost.

It also looked like shit.

And a filter technique to make it look like watercolor (part of the reason for a delay) that they were never able to get to work right.

Most of Tangled's backgrounds look like paintings but are the result of experimental shaders the studio developed for that purpose. It took a lot of time and the project was backburnered repeatedly esp. during the whole kerfuffle with Pixar and Disney diverting efforts into a division to make Pixar sequels without Pixar that ultimately disappeared when the two kissed and made up.

nah

>user fails to take into account that the cost includes marketing and VA salaries
CGI is cheaper, they just spend the saved money on marketing and voice actors now. It wasn't about trying to save money, it was just about shifting the wages from the artists and animators(nobodies) to the voice actors(celebrities).

Here are the approximate budgets of various 2D animated films (adjusted for inflation).

The Little Mermaid - 81 million

Beauty and the Beast - 45 million

Aladdin - 50 million

The Lion King - 75 million

A) Everything on that list is from the past 10 years
B) Inflation naturally makes newer movies cost bigger numbers than older movies because prices rise over time
C) Most of those budgets are the advertising/marketing costs, which have ballooned incredibly in the last two decades - Dreamworks Captain Underpants movie looks as good as most of those and it 'only' cost $30 million to make
D) People don't claim that Traditional is cheaper - 'Disney movie' quality CGI is more expensive than 'Disney movie' quality 2D animation, but 2D animation for TV is more expensive than cheap TV CGI

Tangled was originally supposed to use a variation of the Paperman engine to give the whole film a moving watercolor look. It turned out that the engine wasn't nearly as close to completion as they thought it was. There was also a point where they tried to salvage it by turning it into an Emperor's New Groove or Shrek-like comedy, but that version was also scrapped completely.

>2D animation for TV is more expensive than cheap TV CGI
That is BULLSHIT. Quality 2D may or may not be more expensive, but the cheapest 2D is ALWAYS less expensive than the cheapest CG.

2D animation is more expensive now because it's a niche thing. Princess and the Frog cost 100 million to make, even with modern cost-cutting measures.

I still prefer the Jack Black prince, fuck disney

Only morons would say that.

It's a well-known fact that CGI is a lot more expensive BUT that traditional animation takes more time AND that more people are willing to see CGI animated films for some reason.

It's not irrelevant to the cost. CGI costs more. Point blank.

And Winnie the Pooh cost 30 million.

I dunno, you could probably make something CG with 12 oz Mouse's budget if you really wanted to. It wouldn't look good, but you could do it.

It isn’t that 2D is more expensive, it’s that 2D is way more time consuming. 3D required way more in the beginning, but from there, it become reusable, 2D doesn’t offer that flexibility.

>more people are willing to see CGI animated films for some reason

Bullshit. The only reason CGI movies are more successful is because there's so much more of them.

No, you couldn't. CG has much higher fixed costs.

We're talking talking Flash (yes, I know most cartoons arn't flash bring it up) we're talking traditional animation.

It is far easier and cheaper to make a bunch of stock models and use them like a puppet show than to pay a korean sweat shop to draw every frame of a cartoon.
Caveat - I mean a typical cartoon series, a single short it'd be cheaper to draw, but the longer a cartoon goes for, the more economic benefit to using CGI

Does this list factor in inflation? The Emperor's New Groove would have cost $140 million in today's money, which while not quite making the list is pretty close.

I could make a show about talking cubes in Blender and it would take about the same time as it would to make a show in Flash.

>about talking cubes
No, I mean for any arbitrary script. Not one you cherry-picked to make the comparison unfair.

I've adjusted a lot of older 2D animated films for inflation, and a lot of them, like Don Bluth's films, are pretty cheap.

>cheap ass 2D animation
>some guy still needs to draw every single frame regardless of how bad the artwork or animation is
>cheap ass 3D
>some guy spends 20 minutes slapping together a scene, sets up basic movements, goes out for lunch while the machine renders it
No, 3D only gets pricey when you want to do something better than early 90's sub-flash-tier CGI or Foodfight. Then you need to license decent programs, work on quality textures and whatnot. Until that point, crappy 3D is practically free.

>We're NOT* talking talking Flash

>but the longer a cartoon goes for, the more economic benefit to using CGI
The more relative benefit, yes, simply because fixed costs become less important. But does it ever become cheaper overall though?

Talking Cubes would still probably look better than 12 Oz Mouse.

>2d animation is actually incredibly cheap because all you have to do is draw and process the video, the only real cost is licensing the programs, which are cheap enough that most students can afford it. Hell, there re still enough programs that you could theoretically do it with a literal 0 budget

>check 3d animation out
>only blender is free and its kind of shitty
>all the programs cost an arm and a leg and are clearly meant to be super exclusive to rich studios
>on top of modeling, rigging, texturing, animating, and in some cases special programming for stuff like lighting and specific types of shading, you also need to render it out and the only way to do it without leaving your computer running for several weeks is to fucking rent out a render farm

I think its a scam to be honest.

THIS
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>only blender is free and its kind of shitty
Blender WAS kind of shitty for a long time. For the last few years it's been largely on-par with the big name programs, but still has the stigma attached from when it was a shitty freebie program.

C) Most of those budgets are the advertising/marketing costs, which have ballooned incredibly in the last two decades - Dreamworks Captain Underpants movie looks as good as most of those and it 'only' cost $30 million to make

How much would those movies have cost to make in 2D, though? I think if you made them in 2D, it would cost more.

As I've mentioned multiple times, a lot of older 2D-animated films (like Don Bluth's work and the early Disney Renaissance films) are actually pretty cheap when adjusted for inflation.

>CGI is cheaper,
stop that meme. It's not, especially not for movies. The reason people believe it's cheaper is that you technically make the models once but the initial cost of making each model is tremendous, so you'd need to reuse the exact same set of models for several movies to start seing the cost saving. IT's the same problem with TV series, that would technically see the financial benefits over time, if stories and need to keep it fresh wouldn't prevent a show to survive if you did 20 episodes with the same 10 assets (even Sonic boom has extras from time to time, including villains of the week)

Yes, but it does save costs. Despicable Me only had 2 new setpieces and a small handful of new character models. Nearly every other asset was recycled from the first movie, so it only cost 70 million to make even with the inflated costs of the getting the voice cast back.

Then there's poor old stop motion.
>need talented artists to make real puppets
>need studio space and all the associated headaches and costs
>need assloads of time from talented artists, driving up costs even further
>even though it's a minor cost, you still need to factor in materials to make the props and sets and all
It's kind of sad really.

Harvey Weinstein was the one who popularized and pushed 3D as the next big thing in animation.

That doesn't really prove anything. CG is obviously cheaper than traditional.

Alright, so people keep bringing up inflation. Well, there's an inflation calculator online, and I adjusted some older 2D-animated films, and here are the approximate results.

The Secret of NIMH – 18 million

An American Tail – 20 million

All Dogs Go to Heaven – 26 million

The Little Mermaid – 81 million

Beauty and the Beast – 45 million

Aladdin – 50 million

The Lion King – 75 million

>That doesn't really prove anything. CG is obviously cheaper than traditional.
Fuck off you illiterate baitposter.

>Bullshit.

Bullshit on that bullshit, there were way more 2D than CGI in the early 90's and CGI fucking TROUNCED 2D every time. Disney and Dreamworks both didn't have a SINGLE 2D movie that made 300 million at the box office, but you know what did?

Ice Age. The first one. It's competition? Lilo and fucking Stitch.

>All of these cost less than RIO, that shitty bird movie from 2011.

Holy shit

Because...

1: CGI was a brand new thing.

2: Most 2D animated films from the time either weren't very good, or weren't advertised very much. Home on the Range coud've been CG and the Incredibles 2D, and the result would've been similar.

>early 90'

Early 2000's, I meant to say. Whoops.

>2: Most 2D animated films from the time either weren't very good, or weren't advertised very much.

Again, Ice Age beat Lilo and Stitch.

Or are you going to claim a big budget Diseny movie got less marketing push than the first movie of a company who's only clout was a short called Bunny? Or alternatively at the time that people were raving about Ice Age and not Lilo and Stitch?

Lilo and Stitch was still a profitable film, and got good reviews.

If that weren't the case, it wouldn't be the huge franchise it later became.

The first Ice Age had unusually great writing, even compared to L&S. Not a fair comparison.

>All those $150,000,000+ flops

And people say movies aren't money laundering.

>Lilo and Stitch was still a profitable film, and got good reviews.

But it failed to actually be a major success, that's why it's second movie went straight to DVD. But more importantly, the point was the original question was a 2D movie would make just as much money as a CGI one if they were flipped, and yet a well reviewed massively pushed movie from one of the biggest names in animation got it's ass beat by Scrat Shorts, the movie, in a year with plenty of 2D movies as well so it wasn't 'there was more of them'. Likewise there was a ton in 2003, and Finding Nemo destoryed everyone.

Lolu

As another user pointed out, the first Ice Age was actually really well-received compared to the mediocre sequels.

And like I said before, CG films were still really new, so it made sense a lot of people would be really interested in them.