I don’t know about you, but I’m finding the current trend of GCI films to be rather repetitive in style. Take this image:

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/54258

To be perfectly blunt, there is very little separating this image from any of the other CGI films I’ve seen over the last 10 years. I think it’s the character shapes and the skin colouring. They all just look the same.







It‘s almost like someone decided that the best medium to work in is some form of virtual plastic. Clearly no innovation in character design any more.

Isn't this just a product of the artists playing to the strengths of the software?
In much the same way that hand drawn and coloured cell animation led to Disney and Warner Bros. producing similar looking films?

Cell animations look the same, by virtue of the medium, granted. But that does not mean that the styling of the characters were the same. You could spot a house style; lines, colours, shapes used. Even animation timings. Then the incentive was to differentiate as much as possible.

With this CGI stuff, it’s as if there has been a perceived “safe” zone to work in, and that’s it. No discernible “house style” seems to exist. Obviously there are economics at play here far more than there were when Disney and Warners were competing in the world of cel animation. However, when every character in every film has the complexion of a polished egg, you know there is something wrong.

Not really. CGI systems these days can produce pretty much any kind of surface and texture you like, and they can be used for widely varying styles of animation; see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQf1nas8BO4

for example.

It's much more likely that they're making big budget animated movies with a particular look because of a problem very common in Hollywood these days which you've highlighted - lack of imagination, and also lack of courage. The original Pixar movies and Mainframe's TV shows did have that 'plasticy' feel largely because, at that point, they didn't have computing resources (and some of the techniques hadn't been invented yet) to do otherwise. But since then, people have assumed 'that's how CGI animated cartoons look' and they've done them that way even though frankly it's not at all necessary, although it does keep the cost down if you makeyour 3D objects as simplistic as possible.

Lots of CGI movies look like that for the same reason lots of action movies look the same and we have the orange/blue poster thing. People just do what has already been successful because that's the safest option.

It's a good point, but I feel like there is a slight house style - look at the Pixar offerings compared to a Dreamworks movie.
Certainly, compare 1998's 'Antz' with 'A Bug's Life' in the same year. I imagine that as the genre is developing, we're seeing a more generic style.

Perhaps other studios are trying to emulate Pixar's success and assume that it's just a visual style thing and if it looks like a Pixar movie then the public will assume it is of the same quality. The only recent film I've seen that did get it right was Tangled. But Pixar themselves don't get it right every time, though....I thought Ratatouille was quite poor.

But the "house styles" meant that the same "characters" were re-used in many films. Look at Jungle Book and Robin Hood, how many of the characters from the former were just thrown into the latter?

The same for Cinderella, Snow White etc. a lot of the characters were re-used, to save time.

HB, WB and other studios did the same thing, look at Scooby Doo and Speed Buggy! Scooby was changed into a car, but other than that the team was pretty much the same.

I thought I was the only person on the planet who still remembered Speed Buggy.

I think there is a difference between “house style” where I’m meaning how characters etc. visually appear, and what the characters are. The Anthropomorphised animal/inanimate object + bunch of teens is certainly a recurring theme in Hanna Barbera and Ruby Spears productions, but their style is generally down to one man - Iwao Takamoto who was the head character designer. You can tell a HB cartoon because the style permeates throughout the range of programming - from the Yogi Bear shorts to the Flintstones. They have a certain way of drawing, colouring and animating.

Disney do much the same thing. They have what I think of a company of players - which you will inevitably find in their “princess” animations, and they change little from film to film. They also have a house style which seems to have moved closer to anime and Manga of late, but still it harks back to their first full length animation - Snow White. It’s interesting to note that for Hercules, they brought in Gerald Scarfe to trey to break the house style mould they felt they got trapped in. However, rather than adopt Scarfe’s artwork and suggestions, they just bent it to fit with their preconceptions. The result was an odd looking cartoon that was definitely Disney, but with strange unfamiliar shapes and lines. The film didn’t do as well as they hoped, so they reverted to more regular service. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(1997_film)


Speed Buggy turned up in an episode of Johnny Bravo (as well as the Scooby gang pre What’s New Scooby Doo?), and more recently in an episode of Scooby Doo Mystery Inc, along side some of the other WB characters - Captain Caveman, the Funky Phantom and (I think) JabberJaw.

It might just be be a fear of Uncanny Valley.

One of the easiest ways to avoid UV is to use neoteny (juvenilisation). If you look at the pics, you'll see exaggerated head size, flattened faces, overly large eyes, small teeth etc.

The trouble is that, once you neotenise the shape of a humanoid form, applying a very natural-looking skin often only increases the uncanniness.

It's often just easier, quicker and cheaper to avoid the problem all together - which would account for most CGI films looking similarly childish.

I think you are definitely right here. Take a look at Jeff Bridges' CGI face in TRON: Legacy. It looks good, but it's just not quite right, and the colouring is off just enough to make it look really weird in places, in my opinion at least. I'm not sure if you can see it in as much detail on the DVD, but my brother and I watched it on Blu-Ray and it was definitely noticeable. Given that this film was A) Disney and B) targeted at nerds who spot this sort of thing (that includes me ), I'd expect them to be using the best CGI techniques available, but it's still not quite "real" enough to avoid the spooky robot-face feeling.

On the subject, I thought Gollum looked amazing considering he is entirely computer generated, but he isn't a real creature so there's no real life reference point to say what he should look like.

This is probably the reason. I had never thought that neoteny (I had not heard of that term until today) could be a method to escape from the valley. It certainly explains a lot.

I also had to look it up - bonus internets to Rusty for learnin' us a new word!

Also "paedomorphism".

Tip top post.

Bottom of UV= zombie.