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animation quality vs. writting

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animation quality vs. writting

I want to know what you guys look for in an animated film?

Im all about writtting.I love animation quality and good drawings but they amount to nothing without a good story.Ren and stimpy for example had great animation and drawings but the writting was so bad that i hate the cartoon.Now on the opposite side i like Don Hertzfeldt who has horrable drawings and animation.Hertzfeldt is funny(well some of his stuff is) and john K. was never funny to me.

I dont think good animation means a good cartoon I think good animation adds to the cartoon.Chuck Jones's is my favorite animator for this reason.He was a great animator and could draw well.He was funny and some of his cartoons even went deeper than funny some of them made you feel sympathy for the characters.

Many independent cartoons i see i hate because they dont try to be funny they try to have great animation quality and drawings.I think they should focus more on writting. animation isnt a lightshow its a story.

How do you guys feel?

is it all about animation quality?

is it about writing?

its about an eqaul balance of both.

these days its more like 2% story and 98% animation though hehe.

an animated feature is no good without a good story,unless ofcourse ur five and all u care about are colourful shiny things. :D

It's all about trying to make what you want perfectly.
Animation should fit the writing, but then again writing should fit the animation. Thats what i usually live off but i dont think a brilliant script would need brilliant animation. It should always be what you wanted it to be. If you understand.

...if it looks nice, I'm more likely to want to see it. It's hard to quantify good writing. The better stories keep you going through the slow parts and stay with you after you've seen it.

But the animation I really like is the stuff that has a life of it's own. Regardless of whether they write themselves into a corner, or have some technical problem with the animation, if it has some personality, that may be enough to save it.

Animation is storytelling. The writing NEEDS to be good, the story needs to exist. Animation tells the story of your character. how they move gives the appearance of feelings. They are both important, no doubt.

From what i see on tv and in movies you really can be succesfull with great writing and not great animation. look at south park. South park is not nearly the best animation out there. It is all about the writing really. The animation just makes it more appealing and can increase the level of feeling a great deal.

it is kind of hard to say what is better...animation IS storytelling so the good animation should have good story.

"who wouldn't want to make stuff for me? I'm awesome." -Bloo

As a writer, I must say that it's all about the writing.

Now, put that gun down.

I can't name any beautifully animated but poorly written movies (features, shorts) that I enjoy. I can name some movies with great writing and questionable animation that I enjoy very much.

The first thing that came to mind was the Marc Antony and Pussyfoot cartoon, with Marc Antony crying like a baby. We know Pussyfoot is safe, and so we laugh at Marc's agony, but at the same time, his "performance" is so gut wrenching, we get choked up anyway.

I don't think you can trade one for the other.

this is what my animation teacher drilled into my head, every single day:

"STORYLINE IS EVERYTHING!"

http://ben-reynolds.com
Animation and Design

maybe this is splitting hairs, but I think it's not so much the storyline, as the storytelling. You need to have a good beginning middle and end, but that's not enough in itself. A lot of people talk about the importance of plot and story, and it gets to the point where it all becomes a load of rhetoric.

The story is what gives the actors something to do, other wise you got an exercise is drawing. ( like a walking cycle ). You can have a story without actors but actors without a story is just a person doing nothing.

This all goes back to the threads, which is the best vs worst Disney movie. If Disney puts out an animation musical, I wont go. Take out the music and you got a twentyfour minute television show, usually a bad one.

actually, one of the things I love to see in movies is imrovisation. Sometimes when you just take the actors to a set or a location, they bounce off and interact with their environment and you get some great stuff that a scriptwriter could never have come up with. Unfortunately whenever you get improvisation in animation, it's usually some voice actor rambling on and on.

Of course good improvisation still requires a knowledge of who the character is and what his motivations are.

take a look at the bad animated films thread. the consensus in the end is you cant cover up bad writing with good animation. so i would give writing an edge. the assumption being you shouldnt have crap production values.

This all goes back to the threads, which is the best vs worst Disney movie. If Disney puts out an animation musical, I wont go. Take out the music and you got a twentyfour minute television show, usually a bad one.

well since the best ones use the musical numbers as storytelling devices, you would have less of a movie if you took them out. Personally I never really got most of the big Disney musicals of the nineties. Many of the older disney films used a lot of music, but in my view they used it a lot better and a lot less intrusively. I don't think they were as schmaltzy either.

Story is Everything!!!

Both the writing and the animation must serve the story. If you have bad writing which doesn't portray a clear plot, the audience won't come away with much no matter how good the animation is. Sure, they might ooohh and ahhh in the theater, but once they've left they'll be asking "what was the point?"

It works the other way too. If you've got great writing, but the animation doesn't convey the correct feeling and tone to serve the story, it will leave the audience confused. It's like watching shakespeare with terrible acting. And nobody wants that.
:)