CGI in Animation

CGI and animation seem like an obvious combination, but before computers and digital software, the pencil and paper were the creators. Cel animation has it's charm. Below is a quick overview of the transformation of animation.

In America, the classic example of cel animation will be a Disney film. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, among the first feature length animated films, was completely hand drawn. Cel animation is called cel because of the celluloid paper that's used to draw the frames (imagine a roll of camera film). I think of it like tracing paper in that it's thin and slightly transparent which helps when overlaying it on the background. The animator flips back and forth making slight changes between each frame and those incremental changes lead to the illusion of movement on screen.

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The background is stationary, either a photo graph or painting. Snow White moves "before" the background, which is different from computer generated backgrounds.

Rescuers Down Under, as I learned, was the first fully computer animated film. The characters have a higher lifelike quality. There is also a consistency between the background and the character, that is visible even in the picture in Snow White. This is 2D computer animation, which is different from 3D animation.

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 3D computer animation are films like The Lorax. It's a whole different look from cel animation. A wider range of color and better control over detail. If you look at the trees you can see a texture. If you look at the Lorax you can see beyond his profil, which is where 2D animation falls short.

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Note how you can see the individual hairs on Sully (the monster) where on the rabbit it's a smooth surface. Computer Animation expands the concept of motion. Not only do the characters move with smoothness, but the clothing, hair or fur as well.

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Last is the combination of hand drawn and computer generated animation in Howl's Moving Castle. The back ground and castle are all hand drawn (that's intense detail!) while the characters themselves are 2D animations.

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