Cartoon Expert Michael Barrier Decries Pixar
"Toy Story 3" was the highest rated movie of 2010, bringing moviegoers young and old out to the theaters in massive, excitable numbers. An animated film managed to send them home in a haze of emotion
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Now, "Toy Story 3" is the overwhelming favorite for the Best Animated Picture Oscar on Sunday not to mention being the third animated movie to be nominated for Best Film but not everyone is so sold on its charms. Count animation expert and historian Michael Barrier as a doubter.
"Animation of any kind is inevitably an industrial process in large part, but I've always felt watching computer animated films and comparing them to hand drawn, there's a stronger sense of the industrial process, the constructions process, in the computer animated films vs. the handdrawn film," Barrier said. "What I'd call the direct connection between the animator and the character that you have when the animator is drawing the character with a pencil on a sheet of paper, it simply doesn't have an equivalent as far as I'm aware, or if it has an equivalent, it's much harder to establish
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In other words, the soul of the animation has been lost in translation. That, of course
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That's an aesthetic choice though Barrier may be more qualified than most to make that educated judgment, given his encyclopedic knowledge of the medium but as a historian, it's about more than what we see now. There's a ceiling on computer animation, he says, with a trajectory that is dwarfed by
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"If you look back, we've had computer animated features for 16 years going back to 'Toy Story,' and we've had computer animated characters before that, I have not seen the kind of evolution of those characters anything like the extremely compressed and dramatic evolution of the hand drawn characters in the 30s," Barrier observed. "When you think about how Disney went from 'Steamboat Willie' in 1928 to 'Snow White' less than ten years later, I think that's an extremely compressed [growth] that I dont think computer animation has nearly approached. What you have instead in computer animation is a continuing elaboration on texture and surfaces and three dimensional space without anything comparable for characters.
Indeed
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As animation has become more and more main stream, a regular part of our lives, perhaps we've grown less impressed with it, whether it's hand drawn or computerderived. With that in mind
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"I think they are emotionally manipulative in a fundamentally dishonest way. I dont think the people making the films are necessarily dishonest, but they don't seem attuned to what their stories are saying," the historian alleges. "One example, in the opening montage of 'Up,' you're essentially being strong armed into shedding tears about Carl and Ellie
vanessa bruno pas cher. to me, it was grotesquely sentimental and a lot of people were looking for an excuse to break into tears, and obviously this was for them. And 'Cars' has, there's a sentimentality in most Pixar pictures that are very manipulative and completely unconvincing to me. They are congratulating their audience for feeling these synthetic emotions and
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As for films of yesteryear that are more organic in their storytelling, Barrier cites "Dumbo" and "Snow White" as two examples. He does allow that "The Incredibles," another Pixar film, had a more honest emotional core, though his praise for the company is few and far between.
As Barrier admits, the trajectory of animation points firmly at an era of computercreated films; while hand drawn can still prosper in places, especially TV
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Of course, whether we can look back on the characters created in films today as fondly and universally as we do the Snow Whites and Cinderellas of the world
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