
A New Age of Animation - jonbaer
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/05/a-new-age-of-animation/483342/?single_page=true
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Animats
Japan is worried about this. K-Pop is overtaking J-Pop. Korea is subsidizing
Korean entertainment aimed at other Asian nations. This is considered an
aggressive use of "soft power" in Japan. So Japan now has a Cool Japan
Fund.[1] This is a well-funded venture capital operation, funded by the
Government of Japan and some big banks, to export Japan coolness. They've
funded a free anime site (daisuki.net), an anime translation service, and a
Japan channel for other Asian countries. Plus various food-related projects.

They're looking for profitable projects to fund. See their investment
criteria.[2]

[1] [https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/](https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/) [2]
[https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/investment/flow.html](https://www.cj-
fund.co.jp/en/investment/flow.html)

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wodenokoto
I've noticed that many official k-pop videos have English, Japanese and
Chinese subtitles, a clear sign that they are reaching out to fans oversea.

However, most J-pop isn't even available on YouTube.

I'm surprised to hear that daisuki.net is a free site. Have been watching rips
from there.

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knowaveragejoe
> But one company is finally helping Korean studios go fully digital, and the
> impact for animation in the U.S. could be significant.

Does this not smack of a PR piece?

[http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

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TD-Linux
It must have worked even better than expected, because the featured company's
website seems to be down.

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DarkTree
> Korean animators can draw 240 pages for a single 20-second scene, and around
> 7,000 drawings per half-hour episode.

I'm embarrassed to say that I thought animation was somehow more automated
now. I had no clue each micro-movement was still hand-drawn, and that frankly
blows my mind, and gives me even more respect for animators.

~~~
lmm
It depends on the show. You see more and more CG, especially in cheaper shows,
but the AAA shows and movies will still have each frame drawn by a human. And
even with CG you'd likely review each frame to ensure it came out correctly.

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busterarm
Most studios doing 2D television animation in the States are using Flash
(mostly CS2 or CS3 vintage) and it's still slow, tedious work drawing every
frame.

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kiba
American prime-time cartoon seemed overly focused on non-serious work.

Don't get me wrong, I loved _Courage, the Cowardly Dog_ , but there's a reason
why I continue to watch anime.

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fennecfoxen
Most American cartoons like that have very _episodic_ designs. This presumably
is great for business, as you avoid a series of uncomfortable questions about
what happens to your cash cow when your series comes to an end or takes a turn
that people aren't interested in anymore. It also means that new viewers are
missing very little, so you can run a bunch of cartoons and not worry about
getting people hooked up front in Ep 1 and you can experience business
synergies from broadcasting a variety of cartoons and getting people to try
new things (it's very low risk).

With live actors, I guess dealing with your stars is already a series-
longevity issue, so maybe people are more willing to countenance finitude? And
there are different kinds of hype-train available with real actors, and the
audience for live shows has self-segregated.

My dream is that some day someone at Cartoon Network who watched _Puella Magi
Madoka Magica_ will get an experimental budget to launch a dozen episodes of a
real, serious cartoon series with incredibly good writing, and win all the
awards. (Bonus points if they also troll people into thinking it's fluff for
the first two-and-a-half episodes and try to break their minds.) In the
meantime, I guess there's _Steven Universe_? which at least deals with serious
issues a little (still in episodic ways)

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jeffbr13
> Bonus points if they also troll people into thinking it's fluff for the
> first two-and-a-half episodes and try to break their minds.

You might like Space Dandy. Japanese again, but they really play around with
continuity expectations between their episodes. I'm pretty sure most of s1 is
meant to occur simultaneously in parallel realities due to the (lack of)
continuity between episodes and occasional story-ending events. It's never
really explained. And then s2 seems to tie some of the threads back together
into a cohesive story arc over the season. Bonus: it's almost always available
on Netflix, with their recent push for more anime.

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egypturnash
Holy crap, I can't believe so much stuff is still animated on paper. When I
was in the animation industry back around 2000 it was pretty clear that
hunching over a light box was on its way out; I even worked on one project
that was using traditional ink and paint for stylistic reasons (it was trying
to look like an old 1920s cartoon) and the folks overseas thought we were
crazy for doing this.

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amelius
Why do they use Korean animators? I was under the impression that South Korea
was a quite developed country and economically on more or less equal footing
with the US.

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adam-a
South Korean cost of living is about 2/3 of the cost in the USA, so wages are
likely a bit cheaper [0]. I would guess that since, as the article says, the
industry has been centred there for 30 years, at this point they probably
trump the US in expertise and experience.

[0] [http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Cost-of-
livin...](http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Cost-of-
living/Average-monthly-disposable-salary/After-tax)

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Ravikiran
It's interesting to realise how animations are still visualised on paper.

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vonklaus
Given that video games exist, thus it is clearly possible to animate highly
diverse and dynamic scenary and complex interactions, why the hell are people
drawing scenes still? That was never explained well.

~~~
rawTruthHurts
Photography exists and still people insists on painting on canvas. How come?

~~~
vonklaus
Presumably to create art/conepts that don't exist in real life and thus can't
be photographed...

My point is that, you have a fairly known batch of charachters, obviously you
can't (and probably shouldn't) eliminate real artists but it seems like
software would be much better than a warehouse of humans. I gave the example
of video games because they clearly create a game engine and level editor and
thus they re able to internally build maps quickly as well as allow the
charachters to interact with both the environment and otehr characthers.

I know nothing about animation, but I rememeber seeing a demo of adobe after
affects that lets you create and animate a charachter with just photoshop and
your laptop camera. So I don't understand the leverage of having a warehouse
of people draw _by hand_ 20-30 images per 1 second of telelevision. The after
affects came out pretty awesome, so I suppose having more people and better
software would be a huge improvement on what is already pretty awesome.

Maybe that is what they meant by "transition to digital" but they didn't make
it clear how or why computers are emloyed and the processes they cant do.

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egypturnash
The "transition to digital" this article is talking about is to throw out the
old method of drawing animation on a huge pile of paper, and move to drawing
it in a huge sequence of frames in the computer. It would still very much be a
human process; essentially, you use a bunch of well-trained human brains as a
very powerful non-photo-realistic renderer.

I am, frankly, kind of amazed these studios are still doing it on paper. I
learnt to animate on paper and it was a royal pain in the ass. Working
digitally lets you have a very fast feedback loop for developing the motion; I
think the best analogy to use here is probably that of a REPL versus a slow
compiled language, where you can very quickly make a tiny edit, test it, then
make another tiny edit based on how it tests, and another and another.

~~~
vonklaus
yeah. I am getting downvoted, but I am totally with you here. The arguments
above seem nonsensical, e.g. tradition, resistance to change, not having the
resources (except large media companies, i.e. the subject of this discussion
who have the resources), and liking the aesthetic hand drawing produces (which
I suspect could be duplicated in a computer).

> I think the best analogy to use here is probably that of a REPL versus a
> slow compiled language

I agree. Something like this analogy, except after it is "compiled" and after
it would be "rendered by the REPL" it would be a commodity. I mean this in the
sense that, typically working close to the metal allows for amazing
optimizations but in terms of a video/animation you are rendering a static
piece of content. So I agree, you are just spending large amounts of time and
resources for what seems like very little leverage.

I bet that some talented kid at RISD or another artschool who is technical and
artistic could probably do a better job with adobe creative suite, so I don't
understand why an entire industry would do it like this. Also pixar was
started >30 years ago at ths point.

I am not trying to condemn the industry or peoples views here. I am just
trying to understand the impediments to this. It seems to be unpopular, but
also have no logical reason. The only one that seemed reasonable would be
difficulty to produce the aesthetics, which would be especially true for a
legacy show like the simpsons where the charachters strongly predate the new
technology. However, southpars, the simpsons and family guy have noticeably
improved their animation and charachter rendering so I don't see this as fully
valid.

edit: I should say that tehri (in a dead comment) does make a compelling
argument. Reproduced for those who do not have _show dead [x]_ enabled.

> Because it's really, and I mean REALLY hard to teach the computer to create
> stylised illustrations from a 3d scene. Even harder, to actually animate the
> scene geometry in a way that corresponds to what a human animator would
> draw. Think to one of the core principles of animation - squash and stretch.
> Every character is more or less a soft body that deforms in a volume-
> preserving way to add emphasis to movement and intent and that's a really
> important artistic element of animation. For example, just watch an old
> Tom&Jerry short and try to imagine how you'd represent these characters as
> 3d geometry. How would the animator move and deform them? How do you do the
> effect where Tom is hit with a shovel in the face and turns into a table?
> With hand-draw animation (either digital or on paper) you are just drawing
> the final result, but with 3d animation you have to describe the actual
> physical geometry in the scene.

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egypturnash
South Park is actually fully CG. Done in Maya IIRC. The original short it
spawned from was construction paper being moved around on an animation stand,
but now it's completely virtual.

The entire industry does not do it like this. I worked in the industry around
the turn of the century and saw a lot of new shows starting up on full-digital
workflows. I am really surprised that it is taking some overseas shops this
long to switch from roughing the animation on paper to roughing the animation
in the computer.

Building it in 3D and making the computer "draw" it is another thing. I mean,
we still have people doing beautiful stop-motion work because that's what they
like the look of, even though CG movies tend to have a similar look. It's very
much an aesthetic choice. It's art, and sometimes art involves weird choices.

