Mitch's Animation Anxiety Attacks

WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS



I'm a little iffy all round about this movie.

The jokes were hilarious granted, but the visual look of the movie conflicted with my expectations of the film. A lot of the rigs looked like stereotyped charicatures of famous people, but unfortunately with them being fictional characters, the joke of the charicature style was lost. I found I was a little creaped out by the extreme amount of detail that had gone into skin textures of the humans, like dreamworks was trying to prove a point to the world.



As far as the characters go, without Bob, Dr. Cockroach Ph D, and the President, the movie would have been made up completely of very boring characters. Ontop of that, apart from Ginormica and The Missing Link, everyone else were complete 2 dimentional characters. Bob was "although hilarious" very stupid throughout the entire film, he was remained the same right till the very end, every other character was the same "unchanging". Link didn't even NEED to be interesting and yet they showed a rather sad and exposed side to his usual macho visage when he realises he's not as tough as he thought he was. Perhaps these character stereotypes are becoming THAT stereotyped that you don't even need to give them depth anymore. I noticed this with the antagonist, Gallaxhar, At the beggining he was evil for no reason and I was thinking "here we go, generic evil character no. 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999" but then dreamworks surprised me with his wonderful and perhas even deliberately vague and constantly interrupted monologue explaining why he was evil to make fun of the stereotype. I think Dreamworks took us for a ride with this movie, threw in a bunch of stereotypes, some big names to make the fans happy, put in some good laughs, AND some cheap ones "close encounters of the 3rd kind parody, merging with a stolen joke from Space Chimps", and make it a 3D experience.

The movie was hilarious, but the story had the emotion and depth of a rich 13 year old emo's song lyrics.


and now I've got that out of my system, I wanna talk about the animation.
Yeah, it was alright, but I don't think they thought about it enough. Susan is supposed to be HUGE. You'd think with your body becoming larger, the earth would seem ultimately smaller, thus giving you the illusion that there is less gravity. A scene with her being chased by a giant robot through the city, you watch her jump from roof top to roof top, and she seems to jump like a normal person. my understanding is that the bigger something is, the slower it "seems" to fall from a distance. Galileo was probably rolling over in his grave when they were animating this scene. The story has close to no depth but they have a perfect opportunity to make up for that with some well thought out animation and they put together what looks like a normal person running through a miniature city "which may have been deliberate but I doubt it".



Something that seems to be a pattern in dreamworks movies, animals and monsters etc always seem to be rigged and animated much more entertainingly that humans. They squash and stretch more, and they move more convincingly. "eg, mega-susan moved like a normal human being and yet Insectosaurus was moving like a snail, despite sharing the same trait of being massive characters"

All in all very hit and miss. BUT being a biased fan of comedy I'll still probably enjoy it over and over again despite its downfalls.

Or have I missed the point somewhere?

Hey all, (and especially Nathan) Just strolling the interbuttz this morning and I came across this little gem.
I'm sure we've all heard of stick fighting. It was either invented by bored kids with a vague understanding of flash with no animation talent. Or just some lazy animators. Either way, This animator seems to have taken out two birds with one stone. A first for professional Stick Fighting animation.

Not only that, but ontop of it all he made this animation very intereactive (in the flash version) allowing his audience to take controll of the side scrolling camera (along with the help of the occasional scripted screen shake and cusion effects written into the camera system, which really brings his audience into the action) Ian keeps talking about how young animation. People are coming up with new ways to make this profession more entertaining for the masses, personally I think (for this genre of animation) this is a step in the right direction

This is the Youtube version for those too lazy to venture over to Newgrounds.



For those interested in seeing what you can do with the camera control, and higher Frame Rate (for those with decent computers) here's the Newgrounds link

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/430990

It's nice to see proper decent animators on newgrounds who give a shit about the profession from time to time.

What do you guys think?

I managed to go see horton hears a who today using my young nephew as an excuse for not looking like such a panzy.

and in the great words of Prince Habibu "It is simply awesome!"

Snappy scenes and a good example of pushing movements to their limits and then beyond. And ontop of it all. If someone could make a joke out of every freaken object in a room, it'd be the guys who made this film. And of course there HAD to be a musical number at the end, which I'm sure the animators would have had a fun time playing around with.

and what kind of movie would it be without a 2 minute sequence of horton and morton paying the crap out of anime through the medium of an enraged ninja elephant and a pikachu-esque lightning mouse.

I highly recommend everyone in my class to check this one out. IMMEDIATLY!