(Under) The Sea Of Animation

  Once cool thing about animated movies is that sometimes they'll have their own style, in the way they draw the characters, the background, or other aspects of the movie to better fit with the story they're telling. I've seen a few different animation studios do this but I'll focus on Disney for this one. My three main examples are Lilo and Stitch, Hercules, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire .  All three movies were made by the same studio, yet each one looks slightly different. For Lilo and Stitch, they painted the backgrounds with watercolor—something they rarely do— to better fit the aesthetic of Hawai'i. For Hercules, since it takes place in Ancient Greece, everything is stylized to resemble the art and pottery of that time period. Meg's character, for example, was designed to resemble a vase. The silhouettes play a big role in this movie, with every character looking as if they had sprung from a piece of pottery. As for Atlantis, their style is very sharp in...

  Anastasia is a 1997 animated movie directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman with Fox Animation Studios. The movie is loosely based on Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia and the rumors of how she escaped the execution of her family in 1918. Several young woman had even posed as Anastasia and claimed to be her. Sadly, as fantastical and bizarre as the story was, young Anastasia did indeed die alongside her family all those years ago.  Still, the story was popular enough to have an animated movie about it, and behold it came to be! In this adaptation, Anastasia survived the massacre of her family but had lost her memory in the process of escaping and went by the name Anya. Meanwhile her grandmother, the Dowager Empress, resides in Paris with a reward for anyone who can reunite her with her long lost granddaughter. Anya runs into Dimitri and Vladimir (secretly two con men) who convince her that she is the lost princess Anastasia and take her to Paris to her grandmother, though the...

  Since I've been praising animation for all of my past posts, I thought it would be nice to switch it up a little and talk about some ... less amazing things. These are all my personal opinions, so keep that in mind.  Listen, I adored Dreamworks' animation style, specifically with their CG-animated ones. Whether it was Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, or Monsters Vs. Aliens , they all had this more gritty look to it. Not the oversaturated, big-eyed, kiddie vibe you get from other animation studios (not to put any of them down for it, every studio has its own style). I just like that Dreamworks had a more original look to their films. Emphasis on had. My example for this would be The Croods series, although you can definitely see this type of change in the How To Train Your Dragon trilogy and the more recent movies as well.  The first picture is from the first The Croods movie. Now for context, the Croods are a family of cavemen and the aesthetic of the first movie reflects that...

 Dreamworks'  How To Train Your Dragon is and will always be one of the most beloved movies of my childhood (and adulthood, too). It was my favorite movie ever for the longest time and if you've seen this movie, you'll probably understand why.  Hiccup is a young viking who lives in a world where vikings and dragons are constantly fighting and at odds with each other. He wants to join in on the dragon-killing like the rest of his village, but he is not as strong or brawny as the others. What he lacks in muscle though, he surpluses in brains and he catches one of the most deadly dragons, a Night Fury, with a contraption he build. Turns out he doesn't have it in his heart to kill the Night Fury and eventually befriends him, which is very dangerous when you live in an entire town of vikings obsessed with killing dragons.  The animation itself and the story are things I'm sure more than enough people have talked about and I can definitely agree that those are my favorit...

  I know Luca came out just last weekend so this will be a spoiler-free post! What I want to talk about in regards to Pixar's newest animated film (aside from it being one of the cutest and funniest movies they've done!) is how the main characters Luca and Alberto, or just their species in general, transform from sea monsters to humans. There's one scene where we get some really cool shots of Luca slowly transforming. When I first saw it, I thought it was so cool! As the movie went on, I began to wonder how on earth they animated that. I have very basic knowledge on CG computer animation, but it's still so mind-blowing and I could only guess how they were able to do that.  In Luca, the sea monsters all have scales, actual scales that pop out from the model and if you were to run your hand across it, you would feel all the bumps from that texture. Their ears and their "hair", too, are all vastly different materials than their human counterparts. So when Luca t...

  We'll talk about something a little different here and that is stop-motion animation. You thought drawing each frame of animation is hard work? Try moving puppets around mere millimeters and taking a picture of it for each frame. Actually, both styles of animation are very hard work and take an incredible amount of practice and skill. Stop-motion is a lot more expensive though. Essentially that's what stop-motion animation is: taking a picture of something, moving it just a little bit, taking a picture again, and so on. It can get crazy complicated the more polished and detailed you want your animation to be. Some of the more well-known stop-motion animated movies consists of The Nightmare Before Christmas , Coraline , and the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special.  Each type of animation has its own kind of flair and magic to it, and stop-motion is no different. It has an aesthetic so unlike those of the hand-drawn or computer-animated variety. It's a different style...

  Recently I watched Into The Unknown: Making of Frozen II on Disney+. It is a six-episode documentary series showcasing the process it took to make Frozen II. Now, I unironically love Frozen. Of course I had a phase where I found it quite annoying like so many others do, but it's really grown on me in recent years. I listened to Let It Go for the first time in forever (lol) and to my surprise, got really emotional over it. But anyway, the docuseries follows directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck as well as an entire team of very talented people as they race to finish the very high-expected sequel to 2013's Frozen. If it interests you enough to watch through the series, be my guest, but I will sum up what stood out to me the most and what my takeaway was from watching it. When you watch an animated movie like this, or any movie for that matter, the directors, writers, producers, and cast are usually who stand out to you the most. They are the ones who do interviews, promos, and...

  I feel like the first movie I should be talking about specifically had to be Disney's Treasure Planet, which is my absolute favorite animated movie ever. For those who don't know, Treasure Planet is an adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island , now with a science fiction twist. The movie came out in theaters on November 27th, 2002 and as great of a movie it is, it did not earn as much in the box office or gain enough attention as expected. Jim Hawkins is the main protagonist of the story and he goes on a voyage to Treasure Planet in search of said treasure. He encounters pirates, robots, a mutiny, and basically has the adventure of a lifetime the entire time. The film is a beautiful blend of sci-fi and an 18th century style. They sail through space on Spanish galleons, their roofs are metal-plated, and so on. It's just such a beautiful movie. Each character stands out on their own and has their own personalities, quirks, and flaws. The story, while it stra...

 Even though the majority of animation studios have been using computer-generated and 3D to make their movies in recent years, I still love and honestly prefer the look of the traditional 2D hand-drawn animation style. There was something a lot more magical about it and the way an animator could draw a character to life. Computers and 3D models are great, don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't give the same type of feeling that traditional animation does.  For traditional animation, it's the artist drawing everything that gets me. If you've seen a video of a rough animation (no colors, no background, just the pencil sketches), you could see the beauty of it, as if the character is actually moving on a piece of paper. It's also really hard to get something moving naturally as if it were in a three-dimensional space on paper. Good animators have done it though, and they do it really well. The study and do research, and even add their own personal flair that makes wh...