keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Michael Barrier was interviewed in the Huffington Post for an article entitled " Animated Man: Cartoon Expert Michael Barrier Decries Pixar, Computers ." This article already has multiple comments about Barrier's views and the article was linked to on Cartoon Brew , where there are yet more comments. Two quotes caught my eye. "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." I've already attempted to debunk this based on the techniques of both drawn and computer animation. My opinion hasn't changed. It's not the technique, it's how the production is organized. Should a cgi feature want a strong connection between animator and character, there is no technical reason why it couldn't be ...

Cartoon Brew is reporting that today is Michael Barrier 's 70th birthday. I have no idea if this is the case. I would not have guessed that Mike is that old. However, Mike is certainly deserving of Amid's praise and I'd like to add some of my own. I first discovered Funnyworld , the magazine Mike edited devoted to animation and comics, at a Phil Seuling comic convention in New York in the early '70s. I must admit that I bought issue #13 because it printed several model sheets by Chuck Jones. When I got home and read through it, I was flabbergasted. The issue included interviews with Jones and Carl Stalling and a two page article "Chuck Jones: From Night Watchman to Phantom Tollbooth" that was a critical survey of Jones' career that also talked intelligently about what animation directors did and how their styles differed as a result. Funnyworld treated animation with the same seriousness that the film magazines I was beginning to read treated live ...

There's no reason to believe that [computer animated] characters will ever live on the screen as the characters do in the best hand-drawn films; given the way that computer-animated films must be made, the vital connection between artist and character simply can't be strong enough. - Michael Barrier Working off of the above quote, I'd like to talk a little about "the vital connection." Mainly, I want to talk about the technical side of how animators work in various media. There's no question that different forms of animation have different strengths and weaknesses, but, if anything, computer animators have a level of control over characters that easily rivals other forms and in some ways exceeds them. In stop motion, the animator is limited by the puppet itself. If the puppet's movement is physically restricted by its construction, the animator must adapt to that. There are also limita...

While I'm not surprised that Michael Barrier and Michael Sporn found this summer's animated features lacking, I am surprised by some of the comments about computer animation. For instance, Barrier says this : What's clear from WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda , as never before, is that computer animation is a dead end, a form of puppetry even more limited than stop motion. There's no reason to believe that its characters will ever live on the screen as the characters do in the best hand-drawn films; given the way that computer-animated films must be made, the vital connection between artist and character simply can't be strong enough. And Sporn says this : When I first saw Toy Story , I realized that the possibility of computer animation replacing traditional animation might actually exist. Nothing prior to that point led me to think that. What I didn’t expect was that I was watching the high point of the medium. People concentrated on animating grass ( A Bug’s Life ), ...

I'm a little pressed for time over the next few days, but wanted to point out this excellent article in the N.Y. Times about how the two companies are adjusting to each other after Disney's purchase of Pixar. I'm going to come back to various things in this article, tied together with Michael Barrier' s Disney bio, The Animated Man . This quote, in particular, caught my eye. One Pixar insider, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized by the company to speak, joked that scheduling a meeting with Mr. Lasseter has become harder than “lining up a chat with the pope.”