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PaperclipPerfector
1yr ago
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The example du jour of technically masterful, visually beautiful 3D animation right now (well-deserved, IMO) is probably Fortiche Production's 2021 Netflix series Arcane, surprised nobody's brought it up yet. I wouldn't hesitate to put its visual design, character animation and acting, and general execution up on par with a Prince of Egypt or a Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind or Akira or whatever your high-water mark for excellence in 2D animation might be.
My impression is that even people who didn't connect with the story or characters still generally praise the visual style and animation as noteworthy. It's a pretty striking departure from what people have come to expect from big-budget 3D animation - with heavy use of a non-photorealistic rendering style, hand-painted model textures, key effects like fire and smoke actually animated traditionally in 2D and composited in, and other creative ways of sort of "bridging the gap" between 3D and 2D animation, with a result that ends up taking on a distinct character of its own. One of the most common things people say about it (which I agree with) is something like "every frame looks like a piece of traditionally painted concept art", and I think it achieves things that would be technically very difficult or prohibitively labor-intensive if it had been a fully 2D-animated production, particularly in character acting and environment, that strengthen the emotional beats and storytelling.
Is it funny to me that my personal high-water mark for 3D animation is a TV series set in the universe of the video game League of Legends? Yes, a little.
The "kids/family-friendly animation" equivalent to that approach would probably be something like TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (2023), which is also trying for that kind of 'Expressive 2D/3D Hybrid Painting' look. Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022) also did this to an extent. The initial positive reaction to Enter the Spiderverse (2018) might've actually kicked off the trend (on groundwork laid by things like Disney's 2012 "Paperman" short film). I can't really speak to the overall quality of any of those movies as stories, but they all strike me as visually interesting and inspired compared to the larger catalogue of 3D animated family movies of the last two decades. If everyone starts leaning into this kind of look and milking it on a superficial level without any of the creative vision that's supposed to come with it, it might start getting tired fast, but as it stands, these kinds of heavy stylistic experiments are pointing in a good direction to me. It's expressive in the way that stylized 2D animation can be expressive. High Photorealism, now that we can do it well reliably, is ... kind of boring to look at, it turns out.
All that being said, yeah, I can point to a couple examples of studios experimenting with the medium in interesting ways, but broadly, neither the high end (incredibly expensive photorealistic CGI lions that communicate 1/10th the emotion that a cel of expressive lineart overlaid onto a cel of color communicated in 1995) or the low end (Walmart clearance DVD rack or straight-to-youtube Disney Tinkerbell series #48) are particularly pushing the envelope of what's possible in the medium. Nothing Pixar has put out in a long time has really blown me away in a visual sense that I can think of offhand, and a lot of popular 3D-animated children's TV or web programming is just depressingly sparse, sterile, and unemotive.
(late edit: on the Pixar point - After thinking about it more I've remembered Wall-E, which I think actually does really owe a lot of its charm and emotional depth to the realism of the hard, mechanical robots and the contrast between a photorealistic dirty, dusty earth and clean, ultra-curated colony ship. I don't know if the stark divide between the two story settings could've been achieved as well in traditional animation, and I think the machine characters really do benefit from the fact that they're models and not drawings.)
I do think you're right that cost is a driving factor once you get below the production budgets of major studios. Honestly, in terms of bang for your buck, a lot of modern economical 2D animation techniques produce an arguably lower quality product than the equivalent cost 3D animation. Low-cost 2D animation doesn't look like The Magic School Bus (1994) anymore, it looks like The Magic School Bus Rides Again (2017). Or Star Trek: Lower Decks, which appears more polished and is 'for adults' but to me just looks fundamentally offputting. No amount of fancy lens flare and bloom in post can save that. That's not to say there's not also some great, traditionally-principled, technically-masterful 2D animation happening out there right now, but to my eye there's just as much slop and creative poverty in 2D productions as there is in 3D right now.
Pinocchio
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I found I liked Arcane's art style in small doses, but to me it was too visually noisy. Watching it I felt like I had to work to pick out the important figures in each scene.
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