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I saw this film at a cinema, but I have to say it’s quite disappointing. It’s an impressive feat, yes, and at many points it looks really beautiful. But there
by iainmerrick 3y ago
I saw this film at a cinema, but I have to say it’s quite disappointing.
It’s an impressive feat, yes, and at many points it looks really beautiful. But there are other points where the oil paintings are (understandably!) rushed, and the story is very thin.
Overall, I was far more impressed by “Across the Spider-Verse”. I’d be amazed if any animator can watch that and not think “Yes!! That’s it! This is the future of my profession!”
- wodenokoto 3y ago> I’d be amazed if any animator can watch that and not think “Yes!! That’s it! This is the future of my profession!” I'm sure that Hayao Miyazaki is utterly unimpressed by across the spider-verse.
- iainmerrick 3y agoProbably not _utterly_ unimpressed... but OK, yes, any animator but one. :)
- froh 3y agowhy do you think so?
- vincvinc 3y agoTo go a little bit further on this argument: I was dissapointed because the whole point of making this film turned out to be for nothing. Instead of animation, it felt to me like just a live action film with a fiter. Sure, the filter in this case took many man-hours to produce, and as stills felt pretty, but there was something vital missing. I found this hard to put into words, but here goes: Actual animation thinks about how to present perspective, movement, character, etc. This film chose to paint over moving pictures, and in that way literally took over all the 'real' visual elements without making any choices in them. Compared to almost any anime, it feels lifeless and an under-use of the medium, IMO.
- iainmerrick 3y agoRight, it's almost entirely rotoscoping. I don't think that makes it intrinsically bad or less worthy -- e.g. "A Scanner Darkly" is rotoscoped and I thought that was terrific. But in this case I totally agree, they didn't add anything beyond the one big gimmick.
- Hoasi 3y agoIt's all about the story. Does the style used serves the story? It would be much simpler to experiment with such a film about Van Gogh today with the help of machine learning. But the story has to live up to the visuals. Art and story must complement each other in a way that makes the style use undeniable, not just a gimmick.
- foobar1962 3y agoI saw it too. I found that the hand painting process resulted in every pixel of frame constantly changing, even otherwise plain backgrounds, which made it exhausting to watch. The frame rate was pretty low too.
- mojuba 3y agoAgreed, was also disappointed. Apart from a poorly constructed shallow story, the black and white parts were quite off-putting. The whole point of this film was playful van Gogh-esque colors and his signature strokes. Whose idea was it to have oil on canvas in black and white, for whatever purpose (flashbacks - whatever)? Incredibly bad idea.
- Hoasi 3y ago> Whose idea was it to have oil on canvas in black and white, for whatever purpose (flashbacks - whatever)? Budget, most likely.
- julienreszka 3y agoI disagree If found it most impressive
- scyzoryk_xyz 3y agoI actually knew some people involved in the animation personally and.. um yeah. It really was a bit rushed and cobbled together from what I understood. The creators and producers didn’t have anything specific to say about Van Gogh nor had any reason to. It was a straightforward gamble that this would sell, and it worked. They rode on low-cost high-skill technical talent to pull it off.
- iainmerrick 3y agoAw man, I’m sorry to hear that. Especially as so much of the artwork really is very good -- it deserves a much better showcase. It’s the artistic equivalent of a really cool tech demo without any useful product behind it.