"I've Got Street Savoir-Faire"

Just got done watching Disney's Oliver & Company. I always enjoyed that flick--I think it was the fact that they had such a fun cast (Billy Joel, Bette Midler, Cheech Marron, Dom Deluese). But I noticed something else about it tonight--it used some CGI.

That's right, an animated flick back in 1988 used computers to aid in certain bits of animation. It wasn't so blatant that you'd really notice it (such as the big song and dance stuff in Beauty and the Beast or the magic carpet in Aladdin). What really struck me as interesting wasn't so much that they used CGI (which they'd already done two years earlier in 1986's The Great Mouse Detective), but how subtle the use was and for what purposes.

See, unlike the current line of thinking at Disney (which is that traditional hand animation should be left in the past), the animators in 1988 saw computers as a way of aiding their work, not supplanting or replacing it. Computers were a way to allow them to work with angles and geometric designs they couldn't do by hand, or at least couldn't do very easily. And like I said, the use of CGI was subtle--it didn't look completely different from the traditional animation, but rather had an almost seamless integration (there were parts that I was fairly certain were CGI--such as Sykes' car--but other things I was unaware were CGI). The texture and feel of the CGI work fit blended with the rest of the animation very well.

The DVD for Oliver & Company included a quick little "Making of" featurette that briefly discussed the use of CGI in the film. What I found very telling was Roy E. Disney's comment that CGI was in no way going to replace traditional animation at Disney. Now, here we are, 15 or 16 years down the road, and Disney is doing just that--closing its traditional animation studio and going all-CGI. As much as I love Pixar films, we really have Pixar to thank (or blame) for this decision. Michael Eisner saw how successful things like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Monsters, Inc. were, and now all he sees are dollar signs. And with Pixar and Disney's distribution deal ending after the next film or two (I'm pretty certain The Incredibles is the last movie with the contract, and then Pixar is free), Disney is looking for a way to replicate that success.

And really, there is a dearth of traditional animated films out now. The last couple of Disney animated movies were pretty slight affairs, not doing very good box office business. Meanwhile, Pixar scores hit after hit, Dreamworks has met with some decent success with the Shrek flicks, and Ice Age did fairly well, too. Beyond Disney's last couple of efforts, I can't even think of a traditional animated film from America in the recent past. Everyone's jumping on the CGI bandwagon. Which is fine, in a way, because computers do offer a whole new world of possibilities for animators. But part of me likes the way traditional, hand-painted cels look. Part of me doesn't like the stiffness or over-exagerated-yet-still-stiff fluidity most CGI work has. The cartoonist/comic artist in me still loves hand-animation. The Japanese still do a lot of it, but even they've been moving more towards CGI stuff lately (I don't really like a lot of more recent imports from Japan. The animation style is too stiff and unexpressive, too smooth, too obviously CGI).

I dunno. At least Miyazaki still does old-school hand-animation. And he manages to integrate CGI into his work in such a fluid, seamless fashion that I don't mind it. Of course, his understanding of the way people (and damn-near everything else) move is still so breath-taking, he could make a film about people walking around a town, so long as he animated it the way he always does. The man's attention to detail is mind-boggling.

Tangent aside, Oliver & Company is still a fun little flick, and the use of CGI in it was an interesting little tidbit for the geek in me.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Billy Joel, "Why Should I Worry?"