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    You WIll Need To Reset Your Password!!!

    We just moved hosts on this system, and this has caused a few updates. One is the way we encode and store the encoded passwords.

    Your old passwords will NOT work. You will need to reset your password. This is normal. Just click on reset password from the log in screen. Should be smooth as silk to do...

    Sorry for the hassle.

    Dave Koch
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    Are You Just Hanging Out?

    Just lurking? Join the club, we'd love to have you in the Big Cartoon Forum! Sign up is easy- just enter your name and password.... or join using your Facebook account!

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    Dave Koch
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    Other Side Of Maleficent

    I have been looking forward to Maleficent with equal amounts of anticipation and dread. On one hand, she is easily my favorite Disney villain, so cold and so pure, and I want desperately to see more of her and her back-story. On the other hand, she is easily my favorite Disney villain, and I would hate to see her parodied, taken lightly or ultimately destroyed in a film that does not understand this great character. The good news is that this film almost gets it right; but that is also the bad news.

  4. Big Cartoon Forum

    BCDB Hits 150K Entries

    It took a while, but we are finally here! The Big Cartoon DataBase hit the milestone of 150,000 entries earlier today with the addition of the cartoon The Polish Language. This film was added to BCDB on May 9th, 2014 at 4:23 PM.

  5. Big Cartoon Forum

    Warner Brings Back Animated Stone-Age Family

    Funnyman Will Ferrell and partner Adam McKay are working on bringing back everyone’s favorite stone-age family. The duo’s production company Gary Sanchez Productions is in development on a new Flintstones animated feature.

  6. Big Cartoon Forum

    Disney To Feast In France

    The follow up to Disney’s 2013 Academy Award Winning short Paperman has been announced, and it will premiere at France’s Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Titled The Feast, the short looks to be based on the same stylized CG techniques used on last years Paperman, a more natural and hand-drawn look to computer animation.

  7. Big Cartoon Forum

    Renegades of Animation: Pat Sullivan

    Pat Sullivan became famous worldwide for his creation of Felix the Cat. What most animation histories gloss over is Sullivan’s checkered past and longtime standing as a wildcat renegade. He didn’t follow the rules. And he made damn sure to fully protect his intellectual properties.

Putting The 2D Horse Before The 3D Cart

Discussion in 'Cartoon News' started by Dave Koch, Dec 2, 2013.

  1. Dave Koch

    Dave Koch Cartoon Admin

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    getahorse.jpg With all the talk over the weekend about Frozen, many are missing the little gem of a short that precedes the big, cold monster. While Lauren MacMullan’s Get A Horse! first released last June at the Annecy Film Festival in France, it was not until it was paired before Frozen that it many of us got a shot at seeing it, much less even knowing it existed. And a lot of fun it is– but by the end of the feature, many of people may forget about this wonderful little gem that lead off the movie.
    Get A Horse! begins like many of the classic Mickey Mouse black and whites from the thirties with a title card out of registration with the title. The 2D, hand-drawn animation can easily be mistaken for classic animation, though the story has a more modern feel than the earlier films. Minnie calls to Mickey to join her and their friends Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow as they delight in a musical wagon ride.

    The fun really begins when Peg-Leg Pete shows up in his new horseless carriage, and tries to pass the hay wagon. When he can’t pass them, he tries to run them off the road. In the process, Mickey gets thrown from the wagon, and through the screen… and in the process, he breaks through the “fourth wall” and into the theater itself. And whats more, Mickey morphs from the rubber-limbed, hand drawn black and white character into a full-rendered, 3D CGI color creation.

    Mickey must get back to his black and white world to save Minnie, and soon all the characters are jumping back and forth between the two worlds. And this is where it get’s fun, because this is much more than just a comic device– this is a commentary on modern animation. Just as we have a contrast in the hay wagon and the “new” automobile, so do we have a production contrast of two animation styles. We have black & white versus color. We even have the contrast of the original voices– Mickey is voiced by Walt Disney, re-edited– and modern actors doing the classic voices (both Marcellite Garner and Russi Taylor voice Minnie and Peg-Leg Pete is voiced by re-editing Billy Bletcher and modern touches by Will Ryan).

    Get A Horse! was conceived and directed by Lauren MacMullan. With this short, she becomes the first woman to direct a Disney animated film. The hand-drawn animation was supervised by Eric Goldberg with assists from veteran animators Dale Baer and Mark Henn, while the computer animation was supervised by Adam Green.

    So all these comparisons beg the obvious question… which it better– the old, tried and true way, or the new way. In many ways, the new ways are faster and technically better. But no one can deny that the classic methods also have a lot of appeal, even if they are slower or more clumsy.
  2. oneuglybunny

    oneuglybunny Moderator Staff Member Forum Member

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    Pardon my 2¢ worth, but I'm not seeing the divisionist thinking between cel-drawn and rendered cartoon-making. So far, Cal Arts still teaches the classic Winsor McCay method of drawings on paper mounted on Raoul Barré registers and photographed frame by frame alongside the Maya and Blender and CADD models. It ultimately comes down to which method is most comfortable to the director. Most of Disney's animators grew up on the McCay / Bray method, so they made cartoons that way because that's what they knew. Walt Disney's legendary Nine Old Men grew up with this method, and became completely comfortable with it, which shows in their productions. Likewise, John Lasseter grew up with structure models and surface mapping, so applying computer simulated object rendering to cartoon making was a natural for him, as it has been for many artists who grew up with computers.

    As far as I can see, it's not the method that makes or breaks a cartoon; it's the passion and the skill of the creator(s) behind the cartoon. Really, how else can anyone explain the works of Aleksandr Petrov, who makes Academy-Award winning animated short films by fingerpainting images on size A2 sheets of glass, photographing the result, then meticulously adjusting the paints while they're still pliable as his method of animating. Despite other methods, Petrov still uses this obscure method to produce brilliant works.

    If we want better cartoons, then it's not a matter of standardizing the method; instead, it's critical to nurture and cultivate cartoon creators, who take their skill and their enthusiasm into whatever method and whatever media they like. Canada has an excellent program for doing this. As does Germany. And France. And Japan. What was shown in Get A Horse! was animators doing what animators love to do, methodology notwithstanding.
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  3. Dave Koch

    Dave Koch Cartoon Admin

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    I have never thought the method was what mattered; I still don't. The method is a tool.

    What matters- what has ALWAYS mattered- is the story. Period.

    I will watch a stick man animation with a good story over great animation of something boring like paint drying.

    I remember Eisner/Katzenberg getting whomped by DreamWorks with Shrek and EVERYTHING from Pixar. The two began praising 3D animation as the next great thing/the thing that will save Disney, etc. They put it all into Chicken Little. Did 3D CGI make that a great film? No. But the story and the direction sucked big, and THAT is why Disney nearly died when Pixar was on the rise.... NOT because Pixar was CGI.

    Its the story stupid. Lassiter knows that, which is why he wins no matter the medium.
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