Felix the Cat introduced film structure to cartoons and linked story and jokes to movement. © Felix the Cat Prods.

Read Drive to Realism — Part 1

I remember the moment well: sitting in a small darkened theater about 25 years ago, with a group of fellow NFB animators and some folks from California, all of us staring intently at a monitor on which there appeared an image of an orange. It was a nice looking orange with bright, clear color and a pleasing shape — a good photograph, I thought, of California’s finest. The problem was that the Californians weren’t farmers, they were computer people. And the image we were looking at wasn’t a photograph. And there was, in fact, no orange.

This was my first encounter with CG technology (which had just cracked the code for texture mapping) and as mundane as this presentation sounds today, at the time it was shattering. I can still recall distinctly the sensation of trying to wrap my mind around the fact that no actual orange had participated in the making of this image — that it wasn’t a record of reality but a re-creation.

What was this thing that could produce such a convincing orange imposter? And what did it mean for a realism obsessed field like animation? Only one thing was sure: this was going to change everything. But exactly how, it was too soon to tell. Even today, we don’t really understand the true nature of this beast. And how can we harness what we don’t understand?

So what can we do about this?

First we have to recognize that new technologies are launched on the back of what came before, linked by the characteristics shared between the old and the new.

With one technology layered directly on the other, the early results tend to be pretty awkward: cars which look like horse drawn carriages with a motor where the horse used to be; movies which are aren’t much more than recorded stage plays. Form and function go out of synch as old ways of thinking and new ways of doing collide.

Pioneer John Lasseter helped to define CG’s aesthetic. Courtesy of Disney.

CG, to make things even more complicated, draws from at least three older technologies: 2D animation, model animation and live action. Like model animation and live action, CG can work in the third dimension. And like 2D, CG is flexible and creates worlds instead of recording them. So far so good, but so what?

Well, the key here is not just what a new technology is, but how we think about it.

Wherever the links allow, we tend to carry over models for both what to do and how to do it from the old technology to the new. So live action and model animation, for example, influence lighting and camera and how characters are constructed.

But the most striking thing is what is happening with movement and performance. Here there is one overriding influence and it’s not the obvious one. You’d think that puppet animation would have had the advantage in the shift to CG but in fact, the winner of this showdown is clearly classical animation.

This goes back to the beginnings of CG as an industry. After an early attempt to get CG animation rolling by training computer-literate techies how to animate, classical animators — led by such pioneers as John Lasseter — began to jump in and define CG’s aesthetic, using their own background as a template.

The end result is that current CG character animation looks, more than anything, like 2D animation with an extra dimension. This standard even shows up in the debate about how to educate CG animators, with many people holding that you have to “paper-train” animators in classical techniques before you put them on the computers.