Death of 2D: Rush to Judgment

Above the streets, passersby shout, duck and cover as animation desks are heaved out the windows; splintering crashes resound down the streets and alleyways of Hollywood, Burbank and Sherman Oaks. Legions of grim-faced 2D animators (or the dozen or so still employed) snap their pencils in two and forswear ink-and-paint forevermore; forward they rally to the 3D computer stations of the animation nation to begin delving into wireframes and pixels, ever so high on CGI. In the U.S. corporate boardrooms the Harrumphs! are sounded, layoffs are planned and plans are laid out: Thou shalt produce traditional 2D features no more!
Last rites have been given, the body is growing cold and the grave awaits. Minister Nemo presides over the desiccated corpses of Sinbad and Long John Silver. Oh, sepulchral sight! Let such lamentations ring out as only the funereal box office figures can summon 2D is dead, dead at last, they say!
My hyperbolic statements are not very far from the facts. DreamWorks and Disney have pretty much forsworn traditional animation for the foreseeable future. 2D animators are being laid off in bunches and those fearing a future that includes serving French fries are retraining at the speed of LightWave. The biggest question on the collective lips of the trade is not whether 2D animation has a future, but whether it shall survive at all. The question on my lips is Where did that idea come from?
One of the more flammable ideas being tossed on to the pyre of 2D animation is that 2D is somehow in direct, foredoomed competition with 3D, as if the 1930 Chicago Bears were slugging it out with the current version of the St. Louis Rams. One recent example of this is a tabulation published by the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 20. The posting, which compares the biggest box office takes among animated films in the past 10 years, counts traditional animation defeated by a 7-3 margin. The heading reads: Traditional vs. CGI: 10 Years of Animation. My problem is with the use of the combative versus in making this comparison. Although this may seem like a matter of semantics, the message is clear: The two have met on the silverscreens of battle and a clear winner has emerged. Animation Magazine went even further, presenting 2-and-3D characters as opponents in a boxing match. Why must this be so, and if the only arbiter is that of box office take, must 2D animation be doomed?
Another bizarre idea is the notion that 2D animation is a dying branch on the evolutionary tree, an antiquated form of the species relegated to fossil status in the wake of a more highly evolved life form called Computeris Generaticus Imagii. It is easy to subscribe to such a view when one considers that both traditional animation and 3D animation are both children of cinematic technology. It is the nature of one technology to supersede another; no one could viably argue, for example, that the Sopwith Camel is superior to the F-16 as a weapon of aerial combat.
However, animation is more than its science alone it is also an art, and art can exist in a multiplicity of mediums. If the argument is accepted that 2D animation is obsolete, then so is stop-motion animation, clay animation, cutout and collage animation, and every other sort of animation that ever existed. Again, why should this be? Did 2D animation kill clay, stop-motion or plasticine animation? Would anyone care to contend that The Nightmare Before Christmas or Chicken Run were simply big, bloody wastes of time and resources?




















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