You’re hit with the swelling opening credits of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: a steady zoom-in through a lush forest glen, each leaf, tree branch, and rock rendered with such astonishing detail and vibrancy that you can almost see the artist’s brush strokes. You feel like you’ve stumbled right into the page of a storybook. Or a painting that could easily be found hanging in a museum. Even just the first shot, let alone the entire introductory sequence, is invested with all the care, beauty, artistry, and rigorous time investment that is demanded of traditional hand-drawn animation.
Cut to 2023, and you’ll find the animated genre dominated by a much different style. Atmospheric, artistically-rendered shots like those seen in Beauty and the Beast are replaced by hyperrealistic depictions of water, grass, wood, and stone, that are so lifelike they almost appear to be stills from a live-action picture. Meanwhile, 2D animation has assumed status as a second-class medium, relegated to only short-form mediums like cartoons, with mainstream feature-length films becoming few and far between.
While there is no doubt that computer-animated films are impressive feats and visually appetizing in their own rights, it leads one to wonder: if the audience wants to see a photorealistic movie, why don’t they just go see a live-action film instead? The hyperrealism of CGI animation in many ways seems to misunderstand and even undermine what makes animation the medium it is–it strips it of a certain authenticity and artistic license, to the point that one can’t help but feel a sense of loss for the exaggerated proportions of Cinderella’s castle, the artistic experimentation of Sleeping Beauty’s stylized backgrounds and geometric trees, the innovative flat perspective of expositional shots in Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers, the dynamic facials of a Ghibli character, the dazzling colors of The Lion King’s African landscape which defy the laws of reality. Animation is, at its core, a way to bend the real world in an exaggerated and more expressive way. Rather than replicating the concrete world with detailed photorealism, 2D animation provides an avenue for playing with proportion, form, and style and creating a reality that is not so much real but ideal– it is fantastical, an image of what the world could be.
We can see this in ensemble films like Atlantis the Lost Empire, where hand-drawn animation plays an immense role in characterization: every character is distinct and dynamic, with sharp, almost comic-book-like features. The exaggerated contours and emphasized body structures of the characters in Emperor’s New Groove all aid in telling the viewer something about the characters’ personalities, from the rounded design of kind and giving Pacha, to the triangular lines of the sardonic and quick-witted Kuzco.
Swap that dynamism and character originality for digital animation’s notorious issue of “same face syndrome,” where face models are frequently recycled, seen in the similarities between Rapunzel, Anna, and Elsa, and inexplicably, Sisu the dragon. Whereas the animation styles within even a single studio, such as Disney, evolved drastically over the years and from film to film under the 2D style, Tangled, Moana, Frozen, and Encanto have all assumed relatively the same animation style, erasing the experimentation and distinction of style which made 2D animation so lively. Hand-drawn animation lends itself much more to this development of distinct stylistic characteristics of different studies–the soft, simple designs and decorative backgrounds of Cartoon Saloon, the lush atmospheric watercolors of Studio Ghibli, the incorporation of styles that mimic ancient ink handscrolls in Mulan, stained glass art in Beauty and the Beast, or Loving Vincent’s replication of impressionist art so that every shot quite literally is a moving painting,
There is also just such a timeless appeal to hand-drawn animation which CGI simply lacks. In fact, a computer-animated film is by nature destined for obsolescence in a matter of years. Though a visual feat at the time, and of course still a marvel in storytelling, the now video-game-looking animation of the original Toy Story film has aged very poorly when compared with the likes of modern animated films like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish or Encanto. Yet there is a timeless beauty to films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves which, despite being released in 1938, remain just as visually and technically impressive as the day they were released. The relatively fixed nature of painting and drawing as artistic mediums ensures that such films remain consistently of high quality, whereas the ever-evolving nature of CGI and technology means these movies are constantly aging with each new advancement.
Additionally, 2D animation also simply allows for a greater appreciation of artistry. While digital animation still requires an immense amount of technical artistic skill, there is just so much more raw creativity and authenticity to a film where the scenes you admire are fashioned directly by the artist’s hand. There can be a greater appreciation for the sheer dedication of the animators who worked on Sleeping Beauty, who intentionally animated the film so that, if you pause the movie at any time, each frame appears as its own individual painting able to be appreciated on its own, proving that these films were not created just for entertainment, but aesthetic beauty. Plain and simple, hand-drawn feels more like an art form. It requires all the mastery in line, color, and space as any of the works you’d find produced by a master artist, and this clearly shines through in the magnificent, vivacious landscapes and vibrantly animated characters that 3D animation just can’t quite replicate.
To put it plainly, there is an intimacy between viewer and artist that is created in the direct visualization of the artist’s process in the final work, where one can almost visualize and therefore better appreciate the animator’s stroke as he painted the ornamental designs of Anastasia’s Russian palace, so detailed and luminescent they almost look like a Renaissance painting. One feels that honest relationships become disrupted or unauthenticated by the interjection of a computer to generate the artists’ work onto the screen in such a way that it can’t help but feel at least a little bit artificial.
While studios like Pixar have been able to recapture a sense of the expressive, exaggerated character design that is reminiscent of hand-drawn in films like Luca and Turning Red, and while films like Klaus and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse have presented a possible path forward as a hybrid of 2D and 3D and prove innovation is possible in the digital model, these mediums still can’t help but feel like they are trying to replicate but ultimately failing to reach the same level of character dynamism and atmospheric immersion of hand drawn. 2D animation’s classic beauty and virtuosic mastery of artistic elements is something that simply cannot be reiterated in any other medium, and it is a pity that it has become so neglected by modern animation studios. In a world of increasingly identical animated movies, where the focus seems more on photorealism at the expense of creative expression, perhaps the revival of 2D animation is what the genre needs to reinfuse it with that forgotten sense of visual energy and artistic authenticity which is, in effect, what truly animates an animated film.
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