Different Animation Styles

 




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 contrast to some of their previous films, which used more round shapes and curvy lines. It's only occurred to me now that this could be because of the crystals that the Atlanteans wear around their necks, which also use sharp and straight edges. But anyways, it was a very stylistic choice on the animator's part. Another word I could use to describe it is "blocky."

I love when animation studios like Disney stylize their movies like this. It adds an extra amount of flair and personality to them, like you're more immersed into the setting and the story. Especially if a movie's setting takes place in a certain time period, the characters and backgrounds resemble the art that was made during that time (and yes, I'm talking about Hercules for this one). It just shows how detail-oriented the people who made these movies were and I appreciate it so much.

Comments

  1. HannahJuly 2, 2021 at 1:15 AM

    Hi Alyssa, the world of animation has so many infinite possibilities! It's great when animated movies have their own unique style that makes them stand out from the rest. Your observations for these little details are things I never noticed before. I can definitely appreciate every animators efforts to bring the setting, story, and character to life when they add simple and well-thought-out details to enhance the movie. Thanks for teaching me something new! I would have never known Lilo & Stitch used painted watercolors for the backgrounds.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stop-Motion Animation

Image
  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
Read more

The Beauty of Hand-Drawn Animation

 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
Read more

Dreamworks, The Croods, and Animation Styles

Image
  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. You
Read more