Good morning! I just woke up, had some breakfast and now i'm drinking my triple expresso coffee to try and wake my mind up as well. While doing that, i'm staring at my 2 piles of animation dvds and i have a big mixture of 3D and 2D. Most of my 2D is Anime, Japanese animation, but i have one DVD with old Michey Mouse cartoons, Charlie Brown, Familie Guy series, South Park and some awful awful western superhero ones... spiderman, superman and even the 'good' old Dungeons&Dragons series. I say they are awful because... well, they are. The voice acting is so bad, it lacks expression! I don't even know how i didn't realise that when i was a kid. The art is also pretty bad, especially in D&D. Each scene the characters look different, the editing is terrible as well, all the episodes are the same thing, over and over and over again. Seems that the characters hardly develop, and don't get me started on the plot!
But i wont complain too much about 2D, i love 2D animation... and i love tradifional animation over digital 2D. Why? Being a crazy Anime fan, it would be hypocritical to say i like 3D more, or that i would prefer going to the cinema to see a 3D rather than a Studio Ghibli animation. I believe the reason behind this is the fact that Anime usually have people as main characters and i feel like i can be drawn into the story much easier. The development of the characters, either in feature films or series, is very interesting and most of them feel so real i can say i cried many times watching Anime... they can be very profound sometimes.
Last year i did a presentation on the importance of sound in animation, and i had the oportunity to show how voice acting is important. Japanese voice actors are amazingly expressive. Because animation in Japan has always been to them what Hollywood is to the film industry in America, the experience of the Japanese voice actors is unbeatable. For that reason, when watching an Anime in Japanese, you forget those characters and the world they live in are only drawings on a paper.
I could go on and on about Anime, but i'll move on...
In 1995, when ToyStory came out, I was already a CGI freak and when i heard there was a full length feature film done 100% digital... and 3D... i went crazy. I saw ToyStory so many times and i never grew tired of it. The whole concept and idea was new, the voice action was flawless, the characters were so well developed and when i saw it on the cinema i was like 'oh my god, i had that toy when i was a kid!' (I was already 17 when it came out, by the way.)
From that moment on, i couldn't wait to see more Pixar films and as other studios began to work with 3D animation, i became a fan of the whole thing. Said that, i believe there are limits to 3D animation. It's impossible, or nearly impossible, to portray people (as in human form) very well. They seem somewhat cold, their eyes have no soul, and maybe because they look so real you expect them to BE real and it's easier to spot anything on 3D human form characters that seems out of place compared to reality. The only 3D film i watched that has strong human expression and yet subtle and believable, is Square Enix's Final Fantasy Advent Children, and even in that film the characters do look a bit Animish. So, in my opinion, 3D works best with animals, creatures, objects or very stylized people, like in Pixar's The Incredibles. But live in everything in life, limitations are not always a bad thing, it gives you (or force you) into creative alternatives.
In recent years, we've seen 2D traditional using computers to add special effects, and sometimes even mixing it with some 3D. Call me traditionalist, but i don't believe that mix for 2D and 3D works well. It's like trying to merge 2 different worlds that deny each other. The Korean film, Sky Blue (or Wonderful Days, depending where you are in the world), is a good example of that clash. They used 3D and other CGI rendering in different parts of the film, mixing it with traditionally drawn characters. Personally, every time a CGI seemed obvious to me, i felt like i was pulled back from the story, realising i was just watching an animation. I was too aware it was all fantasy and couldn't get into the film or characters at all. I read a few reviews on the film once saying the characters were badly developed and THAT was the reason why the viewer wasn't dragged into the story. It might be true, but i'll also stick to how i felt when watching the film. So I can say i'm not very fond of mixing 2D traditional and 3D/CGI too much.
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