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I truly hope there is a shift back to practical FX and 2d animation. Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much b

I truly hope there is a shift back to practical FX and 2d animation. Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much better to me than the latest blockbuster Marvel movie. There is something about actors acting in the same set you see, with the actual monsters you see, and the fog and lighting and everything else being real. And shooting on film just looks better to me. Hand drawn 2d animation looks so much better too. I much prefer its soft and imperfect look to the HD perfection of modern computerized animation. 3d animation while great in some movies, I feel is an overused default animation style today. I feel like we reached the perfect balance between visual art, technology and original stories back in the 80s, and have been steadily implementing cost/time saving optimizations ever since.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
You have to remember that 2D animation has been around for over a hundred years and a lot of the bad old stuff has been filtered out by history. I think 3D animation is just starting to hit its stride. The Netflix series Arcane is really beautiful, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was incredible, and I was even blown away by Hotel Transylvania 4, which I was ready to write-off as corny kids dreck, but the manic slap-stick stuff they did in it is outrageously good. This isn't even getting into the epic-budget Pixar stuff... Also if Ghibili is your bar I'd say 99% of 2D animation isn't even on par.
- Retric 5y ago
  I stopped watching into the Spiderverse due to the bad CGI. Plenty of people liked it, but I think it’s more people getting used to the style than it actually being good. Most modern animators and many viewers grew up with bad 90’s CGI, worse the old guard of computer animators where making it. Taking with some of these animators they still recognize quality, but it’s like their uncanny valley has moved.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    At this point the animation is so widely lauded that I'd say it's objectively well executed. I can certainly understand not enjoying the style though, I don't like the style of some of the classic Disney animations... but still can appreciate the effort and skill behind them. I don't really buy the idea that animators grew up with bad animation and have somehow lower standards... in the case of the handful of pro animators I know, they're absolutely massive animation nerds and their taste extends far beyond what they grew up with.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Clicking through the reviews on Rotten tomatoes and it got quite a lot of hate though ending up with a high score. It was novel which attracts praise, but again people genuinely seem to like the look of CGI. Anyway as long as we are talking animation. I asked one of the Frozen animators why the faces looked so freaky and they basically said meh, needs to be distinct to sell toys. Serious props to their skills and the massive R&D involved but that right there was the core issue. Moana’s water does a lot of cool animations but looks vastly less “real” than the objectively worse CGI water tentacle in Abyss. Again same deal it’s aiming for a style. Ok fine you say what about CGI in blockbuster movies, except the article again points out how fake they look for various reasons.
- throwaway17_17 5y ago
  I don't know if Arcane should be included in a list supporting the advancements of 3D animation. While the characters are animated, and I do mean that in the technical sense (i.e. actually moving the bodies), in 3D as meshes of polygons, a vast percentage of the effects are 2D vector/bitmap animations and all of the backgrounds are traditional static digital paintings. I am in no way saying Arcane does not 'look good' to me or in any objective way, in fact, I really enjoy the over all look of the show. But I think it is a bit disingenuous to use Arcane to prop up the advancements in 3D animation compared to 2D.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    Is it though? Without advancement in 3D animation Arcane wouldn't have been possible. It's a fairly unique 3D/2D hybrid and that merging of the styles is apparent in how it looks.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
I don't think shooting on film is particularly necessary; it's possible to match that look pretty convincingly. Though attention to why the film look appeals to us is always valuable. Practical effects are probably getting easier, thanks to various 3D printing techniques, the expansion of low-cost microcontrollers, the low costs of servos, and the proliferation of small cameras and lens adaptations for rostrum/running shots. But saving money isn't the main reason we don't have practical effects. Saving time is the main reason we don't have practical effects.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  Apparently Dune was transferred to film and back again to try and get the look. I'm not sure how much it really mattered in the end- I'm sure there are digital methods- but it did work. https://ymcinema.com/2021/12/03/dune-was-shot-on-alexa-lf-transferred-to-35mm-film-then-scanned-back-to-digital/ https://ymcinema.com/2021/12/03/dune-was-shot-on-alexa-lf-tr...
  - drewcoo 5y ago
    Digital -> analog -> digital. Is that what made it so dark? DAD cataracts?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    If your highlights have already been clipped because of digital, you're not going to magically get the benefits of film's rolloff. There's a lot more going on with capture in an analog/physical media like film than just grain that most people associate
    - devindotcom 5y ago
      Modern digital cinema capture has nearly film-like dynamic range. It's gotten pretty good. Film is the gold standard but it's not always worth the trade-off in cost and complexity. And ultimately a lot of it comes down to good grading, not the DR of the original shot.
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
2D animation is alive in Japan.
- highwind 5y ago
  These days lot of 2D animation look is achieved via 3D/CGI tools.
  - snuxoll 5y ago
    There's certainly a lot of use of it, but it's painfully obvious when they do so. I think with some more time and practice many studios could make it harder to tell the difference - but it might negate a lot of the cost savings (making more fluid animations rather than the very stiff ones commonly seen, taking advantage of squash/stretch so the movements don't seem so perfect like they were done using computer animation, etc.). Some shows/movies make it work well enough because there's things other than the animation that keep you watching, some use it for walking/transition scenes where it's easier to "blend" it in since it's background to the dialogue most of the time; but I really wouldn't say the "2d animation look" is even close to being achieved in many cases right now. Again, not because I feel the tooling is incapable of it - but because doing it right would nullify the cost savings and defeating the purpose.
- ginko 5y ago
  Have a look at the remakes of Berserk or Sailor Moon. These are two of the most high-profile anime and manga franchises out there and should have plenty of financial backing, yet they look WAY worse than their cel animated counterparts from the 90s. https://mangathrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/pjimage-2020-12-04T185317.614.jpg https://mangathrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/pjimage-2... https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Untitled-1.jpg https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    That's some heavy cherry picking though. Lots of well drawn anime out today.
tshaddox 5y ago
> Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much better to me than the latest blockbuster Marvel movie. You chose three films that are widely considered to be among the greatest films of all time in their genre.
- ssully 5y ago
  That's what people do. They remember the good and forget the bad. In 10-20 years people will look back and remember the "good" CGI movies from today and forget all the shitty ones that came out along side them. Rinse and repeat.
  - guelo 5y ago
    Nope, none of todays CGI stuff is memorable.
  - lbebber 5y ago
    That's already a thing, people asking why "CGI is getting worse"
- loloquwowndueo 5y ago
  Black panther is the #3 highest-rated superhero movie on rotten tomatoes. Sounds like it’s even higher in its genre than The Thing (#138 in horror) and Alien (#5). Black Panther is not a bad movie in other aspects - but the parts that use (and overuse) CGI look as fake as any other Marvel Production. So how good the movie is isn’t necessarily a free pass for CGI abuse.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    The superhero genre doesn't lend itself to the "don't actually show much to build suspense" style of film-making that horror could lean on back in the day to make up for how corny practical effects would look. It's not really a rousing endorsement that practical's greatest achievements are cases when you have the thematic luxury of not actually showing anything.
roywiggins 5y ago
Well, compare the number of films that Ghibli puts out compared to Marvel. Marvel pumps movies out at a furious pace in comparison; I'm not sure you even could sustain a Marvel-style tempo while remotely keeping up the same quality as Ghibli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Studio_Ghibli_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Studio_Ghibli_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Universe_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Unive...
- antihero 5y ago
  Well there we go, quality over quantity.
- nanobyte 5y ago
  I've never heard of a single movie made by Ghibli. Not that I'm a fan of Marvel, far from it! Apart from a few exceptions, they seem mostly geared towards kids (and adults who still inherit fantasy worlds).
dymk 5y ago
It's because you're very nostalgic for the movies of your childhood. And you listed three classics, when that era produced a lot of trash as well. That's all fine, certainly not a bad thing, but that's where the bias comes from.
- krnlpnc 5y ago
  Nah it's not about them being classics, just widely known examples. I prefer even old grindhouse trash (that I haven't seen until fairly recently) over the nonstop modern day CGI drenched sequels and reboots.
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
I think so much of what made The Thing great is what they couldn't show because of their limitations, not because of their great special effects. It's a thing that the great digital effect artists have realized and integrated into their movies. When you look at movies like The Arrival, which is not considered a great special effects film because they're understated and get out of the way of the story, the effects artists plop a digital ship into the middle of a field and leave it there. Understated digital effects, in conjunction with practical effects, are often the most effective and least appreciated. Villeneuve has a tendency to direct movies that do this well (and I apologize for being a bit of a fan boy), and I hope that more movies take this direction. I enjoyed the Marvel films, but at times they looked a bit like digital vomit on screen and became hard to follow. I couldn't even finish Aquaman, TBH, as it was just over the top with the amount of digital noise. Though, Justice League attempted to do better than this, the Darkside fight was a bit nauseating =( Again, though, I think the Villeneuve films will stand the test of time, where as the blockbuster comic films will go the way of films like Predator. I enjoyed it at the time, but it doesn't really hold up.
- DerekL 5y ago
  I think you mean “Arrival”. “The Arrival” is a 1996 film starring Charlie Sheen, which is also about aliens coming to earth.
  - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    Whoops =)
corysama 5y ago
Phil Tippett just finished a full-length, 100% stop-motion movie https://www.madgodmovie.com/ https://www.madgodmovie.com/
dylan604 5y ago
Fury Road gave a glimmer of hope of limiting the use of CGI. It gave me happy feet to watch it.
- atarian 5y ago
  That'll do dylan604. That'll do.
- adorton 5y ago
  Fury Road makes pretty extensive use of CGI and digital compositing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB3tdMDRQBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB3tdMDRQBc But it looks great so you don't really notice it.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Fury Road also makes extensive use of insane level practical stunts that other features would have gone 100% GGI. There's a difference in enhancing with CGI vs entirely in CGI. The stunt peeps on the motorcyles, the insane pendulum thingymabobbers, the cars themselves, etc are all real and very noticeably better looking than CGI
- greedo 5y ago
  Fury Road used a ton of CGI. So much that without it, the movie wouldn't have been very good.
Apocryphon 5y ago
It feels like Hollywood has had a practical effects craze for a while in the past fifteen years thanks to The Dark Knight. Or maybe it's just been Christopher Nolan (and some Villeneuve) keeping that flame alive. There certainly has been no shortage of public gushing over Nolan's use of practical effects, even if some of his films didn't really live up to the hype.
madrox 5y ago
I wouldn't expect this to happen. It's like hoping software will shift back to writing C++. Everyone moved on for a reason, and the people that make up the industry as a whole simply don't have the skillset (or willingness) for that kind of work. You'll see the occassional autur/indie production, but at blockbuster scale? Never again.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
> I truly hope there is a shift back to practical FX and 2d animation. Most 2D animation these days is just CGI dressed up to look like 2D hand drawn animation. Actually, the reduced production costs is why we are seeing so many magna/light novel being translated into anime series, even if the underlying content isn't that great.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I consider this to be the greatest scene of modern superhero movies (Amazing Spiderman 2 - Electro first fight). The movie itself had a lot of problems and Sony is entirely to blame, but I digress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWNbliU6-LQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWNbliU6-LQ This scene does pretty much everything marvel movies are criticized for. Lots of CGI. Lots of explosions. Banter in dangerous moments. But I think it works extremely well. The use of bright color contrasts between red and blue; then later darkness is really sharp. The sound design of the moment highlights the villain's confusion and spidey comes off as really distraught that this guy is in this situation. You don't really have reason to think that Spidey will die here, but it does set up a level of belief that some civilians could get hurt here, and it does come off as pretty exciting to see him need to immediately pull off a difficult, slo mo maneuver to save them. The fighting is incredibly quick, with both players only doing heavy fight-ending moves. It's stylistic as fuck. tl;dr the biggest problem with superhero movies is the awkward uncanny valley of trying to be both realistic and absurd with CGI. Go big and stylistic.
- js2 5y ago
  I recently re-watched Spider-Man (2002), not having seen it in over a decade. I watched it in 4K on a 100" screen from my JVC DLA-RS400 projector. I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was as good as I remembered, and that the special effects held up remarkably well. I enjoyed its first major fight scene than the one you linked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiaTyUcu5VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiaTyUcu5VM The frozen people effect in Amazing Spiderman 2 reminded me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OANHfaJW3IM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OANHfaJW3IM
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    This scene does the same thing well in that the danger and excitement is not about spiderman being harmed, it's the civilians. I don't know that the special effects here held up especially well though. The machine gun and rocket are dorky. There's some irrelevant punching as well, but not too much. It could be argued just enough to establish GG as physically strong. The fight conclusion feels a bit weak though. I'd say it's a pretty solid scene despite this stuff.
greedo 5y ago
I guarantee you that you couldn't tell the difference between a movie shot on film and one shot digitally but with film-like effects applied to it.
lilthrow 5y ago
I think the point about balance is valuable. In the 1980's the digital transition had just started and mostly contributed to cleaner control of analog processes like computer-controlled tracking shots over models(all the "swooping spaceship shots" were done this way). But most of the things one could do to add visual interest to a shot, regardless of the particular tech, were fundamentally pre-production, not post: Storyboarding, staging, lighting, prop and costume work; well-rehearsed and directed performances. The parts that were meant to be special effects were still often obviously abstract in nature, outside of the biggest productions: e.g. a character walking away from a burning airplane wreck might just be composited on top of a fireball in a very basic way, if the production couldn't afford to destroy an actual airplane. Even just doing any compositing was not an easy task and involved a few specialty roles to create mattes etc. So there were some natural constraints that pushed everything towards building up the parts of the scene that were actually "live-action". Once CGI rolled in - and really, this was true of all graphics when you look at things like 90's magazines overusing Photoshop filters - we got a taste for adding multiple layers of production on top of everything, which made the final image less "tied together" and more of a chimera. I do think animation has gotten better overall, even 2D, because animation has always embraced being chimerical and covering that up by finding a consistent approach to the final image. All that's changed is that there's a lower reliance on large numbers of drawings. In the 80's, very few animation productions could really achieve their full vision - with few corrective tools available, you had to have some excellent draftsmanship just to get a product out the door. While there were opportunities to use that to expressive effect, most of TV animation stuck to simple shots and reused as much as they could get away with. This also really pushed the default look of animation towards whatever was easy to draw, which dampened the tone of works trying to feel serious. Now we have digital puppets that still are fundamentally 2D but allow the animator to spend more time on creating a performance that reuses snippets of pre-drawn material, which is overall a good thing. If they want to push a scene further and add additional camera angles or poses, they have the option to do so and can apply CGI to create the necessary references too - you aren't bottlenecked so much by drawing, but neither are you stuck trying to composite in a CG image, because you can paint over it and get whatever look you want, as long as that look isn't live action.
Zababa 5y ago
> My Neighbor Totoro In anime at least, CGI cuts costs a lot, especially for 3D scenes. On the other hand, people are getting better and better at doing CGI these days. In general I feel like current animation has more movement overall, but it's not budgeted well. For example, in the introduction of Patlabor 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydCLeclaKik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydCLeclaKik, there are lots of still shots, but some movements are impressive, and the backgrounds are gorgeous. It is one of the best anime movie ever made though, so it's not like everything at that time looked like that.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

You have to remember that 2D animation has been around for over a hundred years and a lot of the bad old stuff has been filtered out by history. I think 3D animation is just starting to hit its stride. The Netflix series Arcane is really beautiful, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was incredible, and I was even blown away by Hotel Transylvania 4, which I was ready to write-off as corny kids dreck, but the manic slap-stick stuff they did in it is outrageously good. This isn't even getting into the epic-budget Pixar stuff... Also if Ghibili is your bar I'd say 99% of 2D animation isn't even on par.

Retric 5y ago
I stopped watching into the Spiderverse due to the bad CGI. Plenty of people liked it, but I think it’s more people getting used to the style than it actually being good. Most modern animators and many viewers grew up with bad 90’s CGI, worse the old guard of computer animators where making it. Taking with some of these animators they still recognize quality, but it’s like their uncanny valley has moved.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  At this point the animation is so widely lauded that I'd say it's objectively well executed. I can certainly understand not enjoying the style though, I don't like the style of some of the classic Disney animations... but still can appreciate the effort and skill behind them. I don't really buy the idea that animators grew up with bad animation and have somehow lower standards... in the case of the handful of pro animators I know, they're absolutely massive animation nerds and their taste extends far beyond what they grew up with.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Clicking through the reviews on Rotten tomatoes and it got quite a lot of hate though ending up with a high score. It was novel which attracts praise, but again people genuinely seem to like the look of CGI. Anyway as long as we are talking animation. I asked one of the Frozen animators why the faces looked so freaky and they basically said meh, needs to be distinct to sell toys. Serious props to their skills and the massive R&D involved but that right there was the core issue. Moana’s water does a lot of cool animations but looks vastly less “real” than the objectively worse CGI water tentacle in Abyss. Again same deal it’s aiming for a style. Ok fine you say what about CGI in blockbuster movies, except the article again points out how fake they look for various reasons.
throwaway17_17 5y ago
I don't know if Arcane should be included in a list supporting the advancements of 3D animation. While the characters are animated, and I do mean that in the technical sense (i.e. actually moving the bodies), in 3D as meshes of polygons, a vast percentage of the effects are 2D vector/bitmap animations and all of the backgrounds are traditional static digital paintings. I am in no way saying Arcane does not 'look good' to me or in any objective way, in fact, I really enjoy the over all look of the show. But I think it is a bit disingenuous to use Arcane to prop up the advancements in 3D animation compared to 2D.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Is it though? Without advancement in 3D animation Arcane wouldn't have been possible. It's a fairly unique 3D/2D hybrid and that merging of the styles is apparent in how it looks.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

I don't think shooting on film is particularly necessary; it's possible to match that look pretty convincingly. Though attention to why the film look appeals to us is always valuable. Practical effects are probably getting easier, thanks to various 3D printing techniques, the expansion of low-cost microcontrollers, the low costs of servos, and the proliferation of small cameras and lens adaptations for rostrum/running shots. But saving money isn't the main reason we don't have practical effects. Saving time is the main reason we don't have practical effects.

roywiggins 5y ago
Apparently Dune was transferred to film and back again to try and get the look. I'm not sure how much it really mattered in the end- I'm sure there are digital methods- but it did work. https://ymcinema.com/2021/12/03/dune-was-shot-on-alexa-lf-transferred-to-35mm-film-then-scanned-back-to-digital/ https://ymcinema.com/2021/12/03/dune-was-shot-on-alexa-lf-tr...
- drewcoo 5y ago
  Digital -> analog -> digital. Is that what made it so dark? DAD cataracts?
- dylan604 5y ago
  If your highlights have already been clipped because of digital, you're not going to magically get the benefits of film's rolloff. There's a lot more going on with capture in an analog/physical media like film than just grain that most people associate
  - devindotcom 5y ago
    Modern digital cinema capture has nearly film-like dynamic range. It's gotten pretty good. Film is the gold standard but it's not always worth the trade-off in cost and complexity. And ultimately a lot of it comes down to good grading, not the DR of the original shot.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago

2D animation is alive in Japan.

highwind 5y ago
These days lot of 2D animation look is achieved via 3D/CGI tools.
- snuxoll 5y ago
  There's certainly a lot of use of it, but it's painfully obvious when they do so. I think with some more time and practice many studios could make it harder to tell the difference - but it might negate a lot of the cost savings (making more fluid animations rather than the very stiff ones commonly seen, taking advantage of squash/stretch so the movements don't seem so perfect like they were done using computer animation, etc.). Some shows/movies make it work well enough because there's things other than the animation that keep you watching, some use it for walking/transition scenes where it's easier to "blend" it in since it's background to the dialogue most of the time; but I really wouldn't say the "2d animation look" is even close to being achieved in many cases right now. Again, not because I feel the tooling is incapable of it - but because doing it right would nullify the cost savings and defeating the purpose.
ginko 5y ago
Have a look at the remakes of Berserk or Sailor Moon. These are two of the most high-profile anime and manga franchises out there and should have plenty of financial backing, yet they look WAY worse than their cel animated counterparts from the 90s. https://mangathrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/pjimage-2020-12-04T185317.614.jpg https://mangathrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/pjimage-2... https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Untitled-1.jpg https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  That's some heavy cherry picking though. Lots of well drawn anime out today.

tshaddox 5y ago

> Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much better to me than the latest blockbuster Marvel movie. You chose three films that are widely considered to be among the greatest films of all time in their genre.

ssully 5y ago
That's what people do. They remember the good and forget the bad. In 10-20 years people will look back and remember the "good" CGI movies from today and forget all the shitty ones that came out along side them. Rinse and repeat.
- guelo 5y ago
  Nope, none of todays CGI stuff is memorable.
- lbebber 5y ago
  That's already a thing, people asking why "CGI is getting worse"
loloquwowndueo 5y ago
Black panther is the #3 highest-rated superhero movie on rotten tomatoes. Sounds like it’s even higher in its genre than The Thing (#138 in horror) and Alien (#5). Black Panther is not a bad movie in other aspects - but the parts that use (and overuse) CGI look as fake as any other Marvel Production. So how good the movie is isn’t necessarily a free pass for CGI abuse.
- monocasa 5y ago
  The superhero genre doesn't lend itself to the "don't actually show much to build suspense" style of film-making that horror could lean on back in the day to make up for how corny practical effects would look. It's not really a rousing endorsement that practical's greatest achievements are cases when you have the thematic luxury of not actually showing anything.

roywiggins 5y ago

Well, compare the number of films that Ghibli puts out compared to Marvel. Marvel pumps movies out at a furious pace in comparison; I'm not sure you even could sustain a Marvel-style tempo while remotely keeping up the same quality as Ghibli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Studio_Ghibli_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Studio_Ghibli_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Universe_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Unive...

antihero 5y ago
Well there we go, quality over quantity.
nanobyte 5y ago
I've never heard of a single movie made by Ghibli. Not that I'm a fan of Marvel, far from it! Apart from a few exceptions, they seem mostly geared towards kids (and adults who still inherit fantasy worlds).

dymk 5y ago

It's because you're very nostalgic for the movies of your childhood. And you listed three classics, when that era produced a lot of trash as well. That's all fine, certainly not a bad thing, but that's where the bias comes from.

krnlpnc 5y ago
Nah it's not about them being classics, just widely known examples. I prefer even old grindhouse trash (that I haven't seen until fairly recently) over the nonstop modern day CGI drenched sequels and reboots.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

I think so much of what made The Thing great is what they couldn't show because of their limitations, not because of their great special effects. It's a thing that the great digital effect artists have realized and integrated into their movies. When you look at movies like The Arrival, which is not considered a great special effects film because they're understated and get out of the way of the story, the effects artists plop a digital ship into the middle of a field and leave it there. Understated digital effects, in conjunction with practical effects, are often the most effective and least appreciated. Villeneuve has a tendency to direct movies that do this well (and I apologize for being a bit of a fan boy), and I hope that more movies take this direction. I enjoyed the Marvel films, but at times they looked a bit like digital vomit on screen and became hard to follow. I couldn't even finish Aquaman, TBH, as it was just over the top with the amount of digital noise. Though, Justice League attempted to do better than this, the Darkside fight was a bit nauseating =( Again, though, I think the Villeneuve films will stand the test of time, where as the blockbuster comic films will go the way of films like Predator. I enjoyed it at the time, but it doesn't really hold up.

DerekL 5y ago
I think you mean “Arrival”. “The Arrival” is a 1996 film starring Charlie Sheen, which is also about aliens coming to earth.
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  Whoops =)

corysama 5y ago

Phil Tippett just finished a full-length, 100% stop-motion movie https://www.madgodmovie.com/ https://www.madgodmovie.com/

dylan604 5y ago

Fury Road gave a glimmer of hope of limiting the use of CGI. It gave me happy feet to watch it.

atarian 5y ago
That'll do dylan604. That'll do.
adorton 5y ago
Fury Road makes pretty extensive use of CGI and digital compositing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB3tdMDRQBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB3tdMDRQBc But it looks great so you don't really notice it.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Fury Road also makes extensive use of insane level practical stunts that other features would have gone 100% GGI. There's a difference in enhancing with CGI vs entirely in CGI. The stunt peeps on the motorcyles, the insane pendulum thingymabobbers, the cars themselves, etc are all real and very noticeably better looking than CGI
greedo 5y ago
Fury Road used a ton of CGI. So much that without it, the movie wouldn't have been very good.

Apocryphon 5y ago

It feels like Hollywood has had a practical effects craze for a while in the past fifteen years thanks to The Dark Knight. Or maybe it's just been Christopher Nolan (and some Villeneuve) keeping that flame alive. There certainly has been no shortage of public gushing over Nolan's use of practical effects, even if some of his films didn't really live up to the hype.

madrox 5y ago

I wouldn't expect this to happen. It's like hoping software will shift back to writing C++. Everyone moved on for a reason, and the people that make up the industry as a whole simply don't have the skillset (or willingness) for that kind of work. You'll see the occassional autur/indie production, but at blockbuster scale? Never again.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

> I truly hope there is a shift back to practical FX and 2d animation. Most 2D animation these days is just CGI dressed up to look like 2D hand drawn animation. Actually, the reduced production costs is why we are seeing so many magna/light novel being translated into anime series, even if the underlying content isn't that great.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I consider this to be the greatest scene of modern superhero movies (Amazing Spiderman 2 - Electro first fight). The movie itself had a lot of problems and Sony is entirely to blame, but I digress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWNbliU6-LQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWNbliU6-LQ This scene does pretty much everything marvel movies are criticized for. Lots of CGI. Lots of explosions. Banter in dangerous moments. But I think it works extremely well. The use of bright color contrasts between red and blue; then later darkness is really sharp. The sound design of the moment highlights the villain's confusion and spidey comes off as really distraught that this guy is in this situation. You don't really have reason to think that Spidey will die here, but it does set up a level of belief that some civilians could get hurt here, and it does come off as pretty exciting to see him need to immediately pull off a difficult, slo mo maneuver to save them. The fighting is incredibly quick, with both players only doing heavy fight-ending moves. It's stylistic as fuck. tl;dr the biggest problem with superhero movies is the awkward uncanny valley of trying to be both realistic and absurd with CGI. Go big and stylistic.

js2 5y ago
I recently re-watched Spider-Man (2002), not having seen it in over a decade. I watched it in 4K on a 100" screen from my JVC DLA-RS400 projector. I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was as good as I remembered, and that the special effects held up remarkably well. I enjoyed its first major fight scene than the one you linked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiaTyUcu5VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiaTyUcu5VM The frozen people effect in Amazing Spiderman 2 reminded me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OANHfaJW3IM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OANHfaJW3IM
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  This scene does the same thing well in that the danger and excitement is not about spiderman being harmed, it's the civilians. I don't know that the special effects here held up especially well though. The machine gun and rocket are dorky. There's some irrelevant punching as well, but not too much. It could be argued just enough to establish GG as physically strong. The fight conclusion feels a bit weak though. I'd say it's a pretty solid scene despite this stuff.

greedo 5y ago

I guarantee you that you couldn't tell the difference between a movie shot on film and one shot digitally but with film-like effects applied to it.

lilthrow 5y ago

I think the point about balance is valuable. In the 1980's the digital transition had just started and mostly contributed to cleaner control of analog processes like computer-controlled tracking shots over models(all the "swooping spaceship shots" were done this way). But most of the things one could do to add visual interest to a shot, regardless of the particular tech, were fundamentally pre-production, not post: Storyboarding, staging, lighting, prop and costume work; well-rehearsed and directed performances. The parts that were meant to be special effects were still often obviously abstract in nature, outside of the biggest productions: e.g. a character walking away from a burning airplane wreck might just be composited on top of a fireball in a very basic way, if the production couldn't afford to destroy an actual airplane. Even just doing any compositing was not an easy task and involved a few specialty roles to create mattes etc. So there were some natural constraints that pushed everything towards building up the parts of the scene that were actually "live-action". Once CGI rolled in - and really, this was true of all graphics when you look at things like 90's magazines overusing Photoshop filters - we got a taste for adding multiple layers of production on top of everything, which made the final image less "tied together" and more of a chimera. I do think animation has gotten better overall, even 2D, because animation has always embraced being chimerical and covering that up by finding a consistent approach to the final image. All that's changed is that there's a lower reliance on large numbers of drawings. In the 80's, very few animation productions could really achieve their full vision - with few corrective tools available, you had to have some excellent draftsmanship just to get a product out the door. While there were opportunities to use that to expressive effect, most of TV animation stuck to simple shots and reused as much as they could get away with. This also really pushed the default look of animation towards whatever was easy to draw, which dampened the tone of works trying to feel serious. Now we have digital puppets that still are fundamentally 2D but allow the animator to spend more time on creating a performance that reuses snippets of pre-drawn material, which is overall a good thing. If they want to push a scene further and add additional camera angles or poses, they have the option to do so and can apply CGI to create the necessary references too - you aren't bottlenecked so much by drawing, but neither are you stuck trying to composite in a CG image, because you can paint over it and get whatever look you want, as long as that look isn't live action.

Zababa 5y ago

> My Neighbor Totoro In anime at least, CGI cuts costs a lot, especially for 3D scenes. On the other hand, people are getting better and better at doing CGI these days. In general I feel like current animation has more movement overall, but it's not budgeted well. For example, in the introduction of Patlabor 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydCLeclaKik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydCLeclaKik, there are lots of still shots, but some movements are impressive, and the backgrounds are gorgeous. It is one of the best anime movie ever made though, so it's not like everything at that time looked like that.