A Treatise on CG

Animation has had a long and storied history. This beautiful craft of utilizing tricks of the eye to bring drawings to life, which dates back in its earliest forms back to 1825, still has a magical quality to it, nearly two centuries after they first amused children and party guests. It truly is impossible not to feel a sense of awe when placed before thousands of meticulously drawn, and sometimes painted, images coalescing to tell a fluid narrative of vibrancy and motion. But animation has changed a lot in the past few decades and while change is often a positive, especially in art, the shift in the last three decades of animation has been purely detrimental to this art form.

The change which I’m discussing should be immediately apparent, the shift from traditional, hand-drawn pieces towards a focus on purely computer-generated imagery. This motion away from hand-drawn methods came swiftly and ruinously, animation was set in its journey down a digital path by the late 80s, but no one could have at the time predicted that the hand-drawn element would dissipate altogether, as even the digital films of the era were still done in a classically drawn style. But just three decades later we’re not living in the world of digital but still hand-drawn animation any longer, that was a short-lived experiment, we live in the post-Toy Story post-Home on the Range world, a landscape made entirely of CG animated films plastered on every cinema screen.

This “CG Revolution” as we’ll call it did not begin with destructive intentions it is important to remember, as the people at Pixar are themselves lovers of traditional animation, especially the studio founders. But for all of their good intentions, the result of their lives’ work was clear as early as 1988, the year that a short film animated film by the name of Technological Threat was shown in cinemas. This short presented the inherent conflict between the two mediums before a single CGI feature film had been produced, telling a narrative of hand-drawn anthropomorphic dogs working in an office and slowly being replaced by CG animated robots, who do their job with “more efficiently” before the final dog revolts against the technological menace. Fast forward to the academy awards of that year and its very prediction has already proven with eerie swiftness, as the much less impressive Tin Toy from Pixar wins the Academy Award for Best Animated Short film, beating out fellow nominee Technological Threat. But why is there this dichotomous and conflicting relationship between CGI and traditional animation, and what exactly about the CG Revolution has been so “Disastrous”? Important questions indeed.

I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with computer animation inherently. The issue, that primary conflict, comes into being from the moment in which it is utilized to replace traditional animation, and unfortunately, this is almost within the nature of computer animation. The problem with the widespread usage of computer animation is that it is not recognized as its own medium, and it never will be. As far as anyone can tell, who isn’t explicitly informed, CG animation and traditional animation are both just “cartoons,” as it were (it doesn’t help that this view is promoted by many animators, marketers, and the names of the mediums themselves), simply two different aesthetics which are utilized to deliver the same thing, animated entertainment. Because of this lack of recognition of the true nature of these art forms in the public consciousness, many projects which would function better in 2D (Tangled comes to mind) are instead produced in CG for two reasons: first, because it’s more profitable, and second, because the two are seen as interchangeable, and the artist has no leg to stand on in order to combat this imposition.

Of course, these reasons are in truth one and the same, the fact that it is more profitable comes from the fact that there is enough similarity between CG and 2D animation that they are capable of (and will be no matter what) grouped into the same medium, although there are worlds of difference. When people see 2D animation consistently on television, and high-quality animation at that, as they did in the 90s and early 2000s, it stands to reason that CG, which looks inherently better in the cinema with a larger budget (which is one of the many problems that are unique to CG as an art form, it relies so much on hardware quality and intensive modelling) than it does on a shoestring television budget, that those CG films would become more profitable, because the one you can get on TV, the other you can only get in the cinema. But again, the only reason why there’s this antagonism is because of a misunderstanding of the medium themselves. We don’t see any antagonism between animated film and live-action film because no one thinks that one is a trade-off for the other, that they have to pick between the two, but when it comes to the forms of animation its seen as a choice between two competitors.

Because of this conflict of perception, traditional animation has been shafted from its position as the greatest art form of the silver screen and replaced by a completely different medium. Now that we know why this conflict takes place, what are the consequences? In my view, the rise of the CG animated film has utterly destroyed the last century of development of the animated film. We saw a clear progression in the 20th century, from the Disney masterpieces of the golden age to the multi-layered epics of Don Bluth, from the stylistic Looney Tunes classics to the visually artistic journeys of Richard Williams. These works were made possible because of the passing down of vital knowledge from one generation of animators to the next. The Nine Old Men personally taught Don Bluth, Glen Keane, Richard Williams and many more of the greatest animators alive today. But the chance for these animators to pass down their knowledge has been ripped from them. Don Bluth can now longer attain funding for traditionally animated projects, Glen Keane has begun directing CG films (which are beautiful but not a vehicle from which he can train a new generation of traditional animators), and Richard Williams always worked with small teams and recently passed away.

What vehicle have we left? All that traditional animation has at this point is within the realm of television, whose visual quality has undoubtedly decreased over time, and which was never as good looking as cinema in the first place (yes there are of course still animated feature films produced in 2D today, but many of those are made in flash, which is just as damaging as CG, or simply do not feature the level of animation quality of the films of Walt Disney or Don Bluth). The few times that we do get truly amazing work these days is when masterful Disney animator James Baxter happens to appear in a Cartoon Network show for a few seconds (see the Steven Universe finale) but that’s certainly not enough time, and the animation on those shows is so decentralized commonly, that that’s no substitute for the learning space that is a proper studio working on a feature film. So where does that leave us? In a place where even if at some point traditional animation returns to the film mainstream (in legitimately high quality, on ones etc) there will be years of rediscovering as new artists who never got the chance to work with those masters are forced to teach themselves, effectively stalling the progression of the art form in the 20th century until the new animators catch up.

That’s an effect of the future, a future we might not ever see (although I hope more than anything that we see a reprisal of the traditionally animated high-quality feature film), but the rise of CG also has detrimental effects at the moment, which I touched on briefly early on. At the beginning of this article, I included an image of the new Moomins television series, Moominvalley (2019). This is a very good case study in a phenomenon which I am going to term “Compulsory CG” or “compCG” for short. Moomins is a series whose visual appeal comes from the stylization and charming simplicity of Tove’s drawings. The character designs aren’t amazing from any standard criteria (you can hardly tell the Moomins apart), but there’s something special about them which derives from the certain way that they look using ink on paper, the same sort of charm that a child’s drawings have (although Tove is quite obviously a better artist than a child). But for some reason when it came time to produce a new animated series, it was decided that the best medium for the work was CGI. Why? Who could have possibly looked at the childlike ink of Tove’s wonderful pieces and decided that its best representative in animation would be stiff, lifeless 3D models?

I cannot imagine that this was a decision made for artistic reasons. If it was a singular instance perhaps I could believe that it was, that for some reason the people behind the series legitimately thought it was the better way to go, but it is unfortunately just another depressing part of a much broader trend of compCG. Pictured above is an early piece of rough animation for Tangled, which was originally meant to be a traditionally animated film, but was forced explicitly by the production company, the once-great Walt Disney Animation Studios, to shift towards CG after the underperformance of a single film, which was entirely the fault of the marketers (Princess and the Frog). This is an awful blatant example of anti-artistic sentiment, but unfortunately at this point, it is not so obvious and thus is even more insidious and harder to combat. There is simply no decision, you cannot fight to make a traditionally animated film, all films are green-lit and sent directly to the CG rooms, without a second thought. The in house traditional studios have been shut down and computer animation has been allowed to totally supersede traditional animation without a second thought for what medium would best suit the pieces, and works such as Moominvalley or the recent The Addams Family adaptation suffer greatly for it.

But perhaps even more distressing (however only slightly so) than compCG is CG animation’s assault on the art of traditional animation in Japan. Here, instead of simply superseding, CGI attempts to literally take the form of traditional animation. It takes its place and proceeds to spit on its corpse by mimicking its visual traits (seen above, outlines, flat shading, etc) and failing excruciatingly, as seen in series like Ajin and the recent Berserk adaptation. This makes what I touched on prior, a lack of care for what medium something would work best in, even more obvious. These studios are mimicking the aesthetics of traditional animation, doing things that could be done better in that medium than it can in CG, but doing it worse simply because of the need to produce the series in CG. It is the absolute pinnacle of anti-artistry, it is putting the technology and its usage above the needs of the work of art.

This serves as a rather frightening vision of a possible future. As CG advances, it becomes entirely possible that we will get to a point where 2D aesthetics can be “perfectly” (perfectly for the untrained eye perhaps, but there will always be a difference between the work of a pen and that of the computer) replicated in CG, at which point traditional animation will truly be dead. At such a time there will be no hope of a return in the mainstream, as there would no longer be any incentive for the large studios to reopen their traditional departments if they ever wanted to make another film in that aesthetic, or for any new studios to form, nor for most artists to be traditionally trained at all. Truly, such a sight would be among the saddest.

I hate to say that one artistic medium is fundamentally at odds with another, and I think that CG and traditional animation can function beautifully together, just look at the usage of CG for the Atlantian technology in Disney’s gorgeous and oft-overlooked masterpiece Atlantis (2001) or its usage for the alien tech in Lilo and Stitch. And when they function separately, as they did before Disney shut down their 2D studio, when there are studios devoted to creating high-quality work in each, it can be a peaceful coexistence for a time. But even in times of equilibrium CG presents an endless struggle to the form of traditional animation, because of its connection in the mind of the consumer, the two are set at odds fundamentally, and with the added weight of the possibility of CG approximating traditional animation at some point down the line the damage only grows greater. These are both wonderful mediums which have the possibility for great artistic expressions, but I fear that the mainstream CG Revolution has unleashed a beast of insatiable hunger, which is set on a course of consuming the other forms through “technological advancements”.