I did not find Flow to be a technically impressive movie. The animation was very imperfect. The rendering (especially shadows and textures) were off. The whole movie looked like a video game cut scene.
But oh boy, what an amazing cutscene to watch. I'm worried that the story the media is putting forward is that this was an innovative and cutting edge movie - based only on a superficial appreciation of the (stunning) art design. But the real story is how the director worked within his limitations to make something equally enjoyable and meaningful as the other guys.
Most importantly, this movie passed the Actual Kid (TM) test. My 7 year old and his friends sat raptured through the entire movie without any slapstick, pop music numbers, or even dialogue! Not once, but 4 times now!
Yep, grew up on cartoons like Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, etc. Looking at them now, they are laughably bad in most respects, but they sparked our imaginations and didn't need to be sophisticated to do it.
But some of the really old (like 1940s) cartoons were very smooth and well-done. I have DVDs of old Tom & Jerry cartoons, and they are excellent.
My experience, is that the ones made in the 1970s and 1980s had crap quality.
I watched this movie, and think it very much deserved the Oscar, but the character rendering was a bit “scruffy.” The environment rendering was great, and it looks like they optimized for movement, in the characters, which was a good choice. Once I spent some time, watching, the rough rendering didn’t matter.
I had a similar experience, watching Avatar. At first, it seemed like a cartoon, but I quickly became immersed, and the fact it was rendered, didn’t matter.
I read, somewhere, that the movie is being re-rendered. I think they may have the money for that, now.
Animation quality has always been a question of budget and motivation: the shortcuts (still or partially still images, reuse of cels and whole sequences, lower frame rate and systematically repeated frames, less effort at designing intermediate poses and timing them well, badly drawn interpolations between key frames...) are always the same and always available, with modest impact from technological advances (e.g. badly drawn interpolation done by a neural network or by an IK simulation instead of an inexpensive, overworked and unskilled artist).
Crap quality is typical of cheap TV productions, e.g. Hanna-Barbera and some anime in the seventies and eighties.
> My experience, is that the ones made in the 1970s and 1980s had crap quality.
Because a lot of it turned into a marketing machine thanks to GI Joe. Cheap cartoons enabled kid oriented commercial slots to sell ad time for junk food and toys. The 80's were notorious for throwing all sorts of action figure selling ideas at the wall. Every 80's kid had some cartoon merchandise toy crap.
If the goal is sparking the imagination, these flaws are often a feature, not a bug. You have to do a little bit of work to complete the picture. That's also why the original book is almost always better than the fully rendered movie inspired by the book. No matter the budget.
You have things like Homestar Runner that were animated in Flash.
Animation tools are just part of the story-telling tools, and just because something is visually beautiful in stills (or even animated) doesn't mean that the story is well told, or the tools well used.
And often 'bad graphics' or whatever you want to call it can actually help with the story, just like low-def TV, because it covers up things that are unimportant without drawing attention to it.
yes, there's a balance to get and visual "perfection" is nothing real, even star wars had blunders and visibly lesser tricks, but the whole created a deep sense of wonder and you got along
The Star Wars trilogy wasn't great cinema, but the amount of time we spent playing with improvised light sabers and trying to move objects with the Force attests to the imaginative possibilities behind it.
it was visually ground breaking though, and there was something strange because if you look at movies of that era, a lot of attempts at space action fantasy existed, but they all looked crudely crafted and not believable. there was an alignment of talent, from VFX to audio, to music that made the whole thing hold
nintendo has distilled their own flavor of "disney magic". their flagship games are polished beyond belief, the art direction is a careful choice. they hit the borderlands bullseye over and over - not particularly cutting edge to a gfx professional but unique, cohesive, and beloved.
A key there (and it sounds like in the OP) is that art direction is an order of magnitude more important than graphics technology, especially these days
A lot of the cartoons I watched as a kid had excellent animation, and a lot was very primitive 3D rendering that looks horrible in comparison. As a kid, I didn't even notice!
I feel like it kind of fits in the same category as Hundreds of Beavers (also a fantastic film), as something using the roughness of low-cost methods as a genuine part of the artistic style.
Recently I reminisced about Blender foundations first(?) effort, Tears of Steel, with the script like "Look, Celia, we have to follow our passions; you have your robotics and I just want to be awesome in space!" - "Why don’t you just admit that you’re freaked out by my robot hand?!"
I don't know what they've been up to after Tears of Steel but the primary mission of the older Blender Foundation movies was to further the tech, e.g. motion tracking.
But oh boy, what an amazing cutscene to watch. I'm worried that the story the media is putting forward is that this was an innovative and cutting edge movie - based only on a superficial appreciation of the (stunning) art design. But the real story is how the director worked within his limitations to make something equally enjoyable and meaningful as the other guys.
Most importantly, this movie passed the Actual Kid (TM) test. My 7 year old and his friends sat raptured through the entire movie without any slapstick, pop music numbers, or even dialogue! Not once, but 4 times now!