I have heard little if any complaint about Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. It’s not perfect, chief to me considering I haven’t seen it being that the amazing art style leads to it looking like a low frame-rate in movement. The process creating the art is rather amazing though. No pun intended. It has however been called the best theatrical Spider-Film by a few critics I’ve seen and while I don’t know if that sentiment has reached the levels of Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm has reached with Bat-Fans who don’t hate animation it does leave an opening we discussed yesterday, the benefits of the animation medium in certain genres.
To expand on that, when you see something in live-action you tend to connect it to the real world. Even with the advancements in special effects it changes your perspective of what is believable and “realistic”, although longtime readers know how I feel about the misuse of that word these days. Animation is so far removed from the real world that you can more easily accept a more fantastic reality, and its attempt to emulate the real world has more potential to fall flat than live-action. It’s not impossible and with computer generated special effects it’s practically an animation/live-action hybrid, at least in a visual sense. Replace Godzilla’s suit actor with a CG model and it’s not that different from the technique in Who Framed Roger Rabbit really. At least Jurassic Park included puppetry and…well, not so much costumes.
There are benefits to going full animation. What held the Spider-Man movies back as early as James Cameron’s intended movie was the effects, and Cameron these days is becoming a CG-SFX addict. Imagine if he or any other director had embraced full-animation however. Some of the best Spidey-moves I saw was from Spider-Man Unlimited, which fully embraced how to make Spider-Man look like a spider man as well as the comic character, with some tweaks. (Peter needs a haircut.) And if Spider-Man, from the years of cartoons and the lone theatrical movie, can show movie goers the advantages of animation, maybe Hollywood should try out a few other ideas. They won’t of course because Hollywood looks down on cartoons, but these ideas might work a lot better with just voice actors and the right animation team.
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Animation Is A Medium, Not A Genre [VIDEO]
The coolest cape in comics…OR cartoons.
The following commentary video from The Mysterious Mr. Enter plays into a discussion topic later this week here at the Spotlight so I thought it would be good to break out now. The treatment of cartoons/animation (depending on how far that broomstick is up your butt) by the Hollywood film machine and the live-action status symbol they’ve help perpetuate is why animation isn’t taken seriously as a medium. Yes, medium, not genre. Puppets are not a genre any more than costumes or make-up. Live-action is not a genre. The term genre is misapplied in other ways as well. Single camera or found footage aren’t genres, they either quality as a medium or a type of artistic filming, not really any different from using black and white whether a pre-color movie or just an homage choice.
I don’t have a problem with animation given its own category personally as sometimes I want to see what animation can do. I even have an “animation spotlight” category here at BW. There is a problem though with how cartoons are treated, which is why “anime” is often treated like a genre when it’s really just cartoons from Japan. It’s just that the Japanese don’t treat animation (which anime is short for…duh) as just kids stories or something to be subversive with, and don’t restrict it to wacky hi-jinks. They take animation as seriously as they do live action, while Hollywood purposefully acts against it getting the same recognition as the “real acting” of live-action. As Enter explains, this is what’s really holding back the animated movie. This came out in December of 2018, so what was recent then isn’t recent now.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on February 27, 2019 in Animation Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged animation, cartoons, commentary.
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