Reading about this film has thrilled me beyond description (of course I haven't seen it; I doubt anyone in South Africa has). In my country the animation industry is barely fledgeling. There is immense potential for new forms of animation to emerge from our embattled culture...but I am constantly frustrated by the industry's (such as it is) slavish adherence to "standard" animation forms and trends. Companies as well as the few independent projects constantly cite the need for "international marketing", and then proceed to produce crass imitations of well-established, mostly American work. Waking Life sounds like a project that has broken free of these kind of constrictive "correctness" worries. If it is difficult to classify, it has my fullest admiration. Despite my pessimism about the SA animation industry as it stands, the signs are there that very interesting things are about to emerge from this quarter of the world...it would do prospective animators here a world of good to be exposed to films like Waking Life. What are the chances of a South African release? And is there any way to get hold of the film on tape?

Everything mentioned in the article is true. The Story is King at Pixar. I was the Animator of the Main title sequence for Monsters, Inc. My fist feature film credit! I worked directly with the designer, Geefwee Boedoe. He storyboarded the whole thing, practically to every note of the musical score. He is the most talented artist I ever met! I freelanced for Pixar for about 5 months this year. They brought me in to test the validity of using After Effects to animate the titles. I first had to do a bunch of tests. When Geefwee and Pete saw what could be done, the storyboards were done all over again. It took me about 2 months to do the animation. I animated the entire 90 seconds in Adobe After Effects on a G4 Macintosh. Geefwee would draw the elements with pencil and paper, then after discussing how the elements should move, I would tell him to draw me certain "parts" separately. I then scanned them and put them back together in After Effects. I created some elements inside the program with vectors as well. I colored everything in After Effects too, as every drawing was graphite on white paper. Going to work with so many talented people is awesome. The facilities are incredible. The people are really open. All Ideas are heard. There's even an outdoor swimming pool. Ideas are the most valuable asset at Pixar, nothing gets animated until the idea is completely worked out. It was an incredible learning experience. I know I will take the many lessons I learned at Pixar and use them in the future.

One of the lesser tragedies of September 11 is that it took the murder of six thousand people to get our flightiest and most pointless cultural commentators to try to make sense. Bill Maher of "Politically Incorrect" discovered that he couldn't play the smartass, irreverant jerk - and now he's finding he can't play a serious commentator, either. "Tom Tomorrow," the cartoonist of "This Modern World," who calls everyone an idiot who doesn't follow the Old Socialist Beliefs he hands down from his alabaster throne, was actually at a loss for words in the first time in his useless life. And now, the Animation Pimp writes an article that approaches coherent thought and has a genuine direction. Whether or not you agree with him (and I differ with him in several places) for the first time he is saying something with meaning. Instead of taking this public forum as a place to glorify himself, he recognizes what was once called "journalistic integrity." I'm glad, but I just wish it didn't require the death of thousands of human beings to accomplish.

Well this topic of rotoscoping has not really been brought up in a classroom discussion, just the technique. Therefore the idea of rotoscoping being a cheat of traditional animation techniques seems a little bold to say. I feel that rotoscoping techniques or for us 3D animators, motion capture systems should be considered another form of medium. These methods still need creative ideas and skilled artists to accomplish a sense feeling and realism for the viewer. Besides, animated feature films are not for the critques so to speak, but for the audiences that will be viewing them. These are the people that need the realism and realtionship with the character. If using rotoscoping to give greater sense of this, then so be it. As an animator I feel that creating new methods and making the impossible, possible, keeps us above the rest, as different mediums become more excessible and more user friendly to the outside world. I say go with it!!

Anyone with half a brain should realize there is no 2D versus 3D. Folks have been trying to stir the pot since the mid 80's of the last century. The computer is a tool; plain and simple and in the context of animated films - it's an ARTISTIC TOOL. People can fool themselves all they want. They need 2D to do 3D AND they need to draw and develop - it's what the industry wants. Folks who try to "get over" by depending on their boxes are doomed to reside in them - forever. Thanks.

Soon CG animated features will cost orders of magnitute less than their hand drawn counterparts to make. The main driver in which animated movie will be a winner will always be the quality of the story and characters. That having been said, at the rate hardware and 3D Animation software are improving; soon one or two man/woman teams will be able to make "Toy Story" quality animations using nothing more than a couple of PC's and off the shelf software, which is an investment well under $10,000.00. No need for armies of animators or programmers to write custom code. A common mistake when an entirely new art form is born is to compare it to art forms that it seems to resemble. As the years progress it will be evident that Computer Graphics is an art form that far surpasses what traditional animation, film making, and interactive games have done. It will certainly have elements that can be compared to those fields but it's a much more broader form of expression. The tools of traditional animation or film making have not changed much in the last 100 years when you compare them to the amount of change that's going on in the field of Computer Graphics. We are in the infancy of this art form. It's like in the 70's they would compare computer chips and CPU's to the Abecus and mechanical calculators and debate much like we are doing here whether the computer would eventually replace those calculators. No one could see the impact of the computer in the fields of medicine, automobiles, space travel, the human genome project, SETI, your ATM cards, music, GPS, Cell phones etc. With Computer Graphics we are witnessing the birth of an entirely new art form, it will soon stand on it's own two feet and no longer need to be justified or compared to other forms. These arguments are similar to the ones that were presented when photography was first introduced.

AWN Comments Mr. Goodman does make some very good points, but he leaves out a very critical one: That is that just because American feature animation doesn't die, that doesn't really mean it lives either. American animation has yet to break through and make a truly adult feature that's both a mainstream success and because of that success leads to the production of more films like it. Ralph Bakshi's features came close, but they weren't successes on the scale of, say, the Godfather films, and there really hasn't been much of any influence by them in the two decades since. Prince of Egypt was a more mature version of what Disney's already made, but since then Dreamworks hasn't produced anything like it, and it appears that they don't plan to either. Look at the past two or three top ten lists from major critics. Go ahead and try to name as many animated films of equal quality. I'll make it harder. Don't mention any anime. Restrict yourself to mainstream American films. Don't name any musicals. You can't just blame animation's smaller numbers for the dearth of great feature animation. In several years are we to be grateful that there are still animated feature films if the target audience is six years old? If that's all drawn feature animation gives us, then isn't that a type of "living death", some sort of coma or purgatory? Hollywood has never given animated features outside of Disney and "Disney" much of any chance and given the box office of drawn animation outside of Disney/"Disney" are they suddenly going to? The mouse seems determined to not make anything of a truly adult nature. (despite being perfectly able to through Miramax and Touchstone) If they intended to, wouldn't they be living up to the promise of their Miyazaki deal? Just the past year has shown big hits from CGI films for kids & families (Shrek, Monsters Inc.), failures of drawn animation (Atlantis, Osmosis Jones), and studios have pulled the plug on some promising films (Fox's Fathom will be live-action I'm afraid.) or even closed shop altogether. This downward trend may not be a steady one, but it will continue. It was only a few months ago that I came to a very sobering conclusion, one I'd been avoiding for a few years but finally made myself admit: While drawn theatrical animation won't completely die, it won't ever mature and "break through" as I've been hoping for so long. CGI is too big and can do too much for drawn animation to compete, and it will only get better. Hollywood and mainstream audiences won't show the patience to allow drawn animation to build up to the same level of acceptance and find its audiences. The loss of animation, not of films that failed to be seen, but over the course of decades were simply never made or even thought of is staggering. Call me crazy, but I even quantified it, setting the totality of live action film - as flawed as it may be - as the top of the scale at 100%, I estimate that drawn animation, including anime, has only seen 2 to 10% of it's critical potential realized, and maybe 10 to 25% of it's visual. The loss is as big as if the majority of great live-action films had never been made, but most animation fans pretend everything's been fine over the years and animation's history is something to be proud of. That's not a criticism of what good work has been made, but I bemoan the loss of all that could have been instead. At this point there are a few possible hopes for American theatrical drawn animation: Anime through video and TV may be popular enough to someday produce more than just successes from Pokemon movies. Increasing maturity of anime theatrical releases or a breakthrough hit like a Yoshiaki Kawajiri/Madhouse studio film might be enough of an incentive to warrant production and release of more like them. Possibly a successful animated feature based on a popular comic? Kids films like Powerpuff Girls might push enough in an anti-Disney direction to allow production of animated action adventure films targeting teens, then adults. Comic book films also look attractive here. CGI is only going to grow, and despite naysayers, it will eventually be able to produce a reasonable facsimile of drawn animation. By the time it can do this it's possible that no one would be interested in making the drawn look, but should they be, I'll welcome it. I for one don't care how it's made, just so long as the visuals I want are delivered. Drawn animation will be dead, but if the "replacement" is truly just as good then I won't care. All these scenarios require a precise set of circumstances and a great deal of luck. I'm not going to count on any of it, and I'm reminded of how promising things seemed in the mid 90's. Look at where we are now. I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm being too cynical. But for the time being, I can only see theatrical drawn animation continuing to go nowhere fast for the next several years, then quietly fading away into extinction.

CGI will not kill drawn animation for the simple reason that it is only another style of animation. In the same way plasticine (Chiken Run) Cut-outs (South Park), paint on glass (Old Man and the Sea). It has to do more with the script, guest voices and the quality of the artists who work on the film.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! The contents of your article have been in dire need of public digestion for the past decade. In our society of new trends and movements that must be classified and given a catchy name,each new advance ends up being cast as the mortal enemy of its immediate predecessor. As artists we should acknowledge and respect all of the tools at our disposal, and be aware that they are here for us to be creative with- traditional or digital.....

Very well written article. Logical and reasoned arguments. Nice to see this type of thinking come to the fore.

Another good piece, Dr. I might add that another reason for the success of Shrek, Toy Story, Antz, Monsters Inc, might be in small part because of its vocal actors. How much of Shrek's success was owing the star presense of Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, and Eddie Murphy? The same goes with Toy Story (Tim Allen and Tom Hanks). I don't believe it's a major reason behind their success, but I wonder if Shrek, for example, would have reached the same success with minor voice actors.

Yep...I agree with Melissa. And I know I'll be working with Pixar! C ya guys soon!

I love Mr. Vasquez sooo much! (I thought I was the only person out there who hated Scooby Doo...) I feel good to know that there are other minds churning with the same twisted humor that mine does. =) And he should be not only prez, but conquerer of the known universe! Or is he already? Anywho, great interview. Really. Do it again when the MOVIES come out. =P Vasquez is destined for greatness. Or he's really insane. Or both.

Now that the Butt Ugly Martian show has aired some genuine episodes in the USA, any follow-up comments from the original reviewer Mr. Beck? I am a parent of young children, and I have heard of rave reviews and lots of excitement from their friends and their classmates. Boys 2 Martians??? That is just too funny!!!! (I might have the spelling wrong). As posted here earlier, the kids will be the ultimate reviewers........and their voices are beginning to be heard.

hello, awn i am the student of heart animation academy, and studying basic animation course, we are on the major or the basic animation of first exercise of the rolling ball on the punched paper. it's 2d actually, you can know that, i am keenly and very much interested in 3d animation, i have done 3d studio max, but i left it 2 years back, i want to know more about the maya software, and where is is the training available in india ?? i heard about you in the discovery channel splat program that i never never miss it.

Though I enjoyed Monsters, Inc. I do not think it is as good a movie as Pixar's previous films. I was impressed with the "look" of the film more than I was engaged in the story, where in Toy Story II for example I was totally immersed in that world for 90 minutes.

Jhonen is squishy. He goes *squish squish* when you squeeze him. Heh heh.. squishy Jhonen. -Sara

Is it just my browser, or is this page formatted for Japanese? I get 6 columns of 5 letters per column which makes for a highly unreadable article. Does anyone proof read this site? After perusing the html source code, I would advise removing the br tags after every 5 spaces. btw here is the page link in case you can't find it: http://mag.awn.com/index.php3?ltype=comments&article_no=781

Jhonen Vasquez should run for President. I really think he should. Then the friggin terrorists would be too confused and frightened to screw with the US. JV for Pres. in 2004! Foo! Yay! That's what I think. I leave now. ----Me.

That cartoon has got to be one of my absolute favorites (gotta love GIR! ^-^). I love reading interviews. I laughed my head off at this one. A hearty "HELLO!" to all, and "Lookit' me, Mommy! I'm on the Internet!" Keep up the Nicktoons!