Thursday, April 07, 2016

We Would Perhaps Disagree

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How Technological Advancements In Animation Force A Focus On Storytelling

... As technology has advanced, the number of story and artistic limitations imposed by lacking technology has decreased. ...

[P]urely looking at how animation is influenced by technology, it’s pretty clear that technology has improved the storytelling of animated movies. We could get into how Hollywood has lost its creative edge for the sake of investment security, but that’s another topic and has nothing to do with technology. Looking purely at technology, I think anyone who’s been in the industry a long time will tell you that far fewer cuts are being made in stories due to technological limitations today than were made ten years ago. ...

So the storytelling in, say, Dumbo, Pinocchio, or Bambi would be but a pale shadow of the stuff today (The Good Dinosaur?) because of an older, cruder animation technology now 75 years old?

While its true that CG animation has surpassed the older, hand-drawn medium in terms of box office, the prowess of story tellers who were working in the days of paper, pencils, painted cels and three-strip Technicolor were just as nimble and compelling as artists working today.

Creators worked with the technologies they had ... and created movies every bit as potent as the shiny projects of 2016.

2 comments:

Justin said...

I agree Steve. While I do agree with the idea that advanced technology is allowing artists and storytellers to do and show things that they never have before, I think it's silly to say that it forces a focus on storytelling. In fact it may be the opposite: in the olden days you couldn't do certain things, and therefor it was even more important to tell a compelling story to make up for those limitations.

Steve Hulett said...

Movie makers work with the technology they have, not the technology that hasn't arrived yet.

Story-wise, nobody has made a better movie than Dumbo, yet they were working with A) a smaller budget than usual and B) 1941 technology.

Didn't seem to hurt the story-telling. As you say, it might have improved it.

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