originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/761741...
There is a funny trend in animation-related terminology to define things by what they aren’t. Animation is any technique for creating film that isn’t live action. Limited animation is any style of 2D animation that doesn’t follow the conventions of Disney’s ‘full animation’ on 1s and 2s - a category that includes a wildly diverse range of approaches and techniques, as this wonderful history by Animation Obsessive describes.
In 3DCG circles, there is a similar term: nonphotorealistic. Which describes, naturally, anything that isn’t trying to look like a photograph of a real scene. There has been a real boom in this of late, and just like the other terms, it really doesn’t narrow it down very much. Other terms like ‘hybrid animation’ add a bit more hints.
Of course, if you’ve been anywhere near animation in the last few years, you’ll probably know another term: ’Spiderverse style’.
There is no denying that Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (2018) by Sony Pictures Animation was an absolute landmark for animation. (I wrote about it way back on AN21, focusing more on the cultural angle.) The ludicrously stylish film pretty much set the direction for animation in the 2020s - making a bunch of money and awards and thus finally throwing open the door to 3DCG animation that doesn’t look like the style set by Pixar/Dreamworks in the 2000s. Its sequel, Across the Spiderverse (2023), was even more ambitious and successful (despite a troubled production involving a lot of needless crunch). We’ll be showing that soon in a Spiderverse double bill so look forward to it!
So perhaps not surprising that when people see the use of graphical styles, 2D elements, limited framerates and the like in 3DCG these days, Spiderverse comes to mind. In its wake have come various films and series that apply these and related techniques: 3DCG animation is more varied than ever, and it’s cool.
It isn’t really a style, tho.
Here I’m indebted to youtuber Camwing who has made a nice video overview breaking down the animation of recent movies in this vaguely defined paradigm. Among them we have The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021, also Sony), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022, Dreamworks), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023, animated at the French/Canadian studio Mikros animation), and of course over on Netflix you got the wildly popular League of Legends spinoff series Arcane (2021, Fortiche Productions), and the romance film Entergalactic (2022, DNEG), tying in with an album of the same name.
None of these films has exactly the same style, but they all pull from a related bag of tricks. The core techniques are animating on reduced framerates for a ‘snappy’, high-clarity feeling, the combination of 2D and 3D elements in some fashion, and taking inspiration from traditional media such as paintings or comic books.
For example, Arcane and Entergalactic both use the trick of 2D backgrounds/projecting paintings onto 3D geometry, inhabited by 3D characters with a stylised shader. Arcane is dripping with 2D visual effects. Puss in Boots drops the framerate during its action scenes - the opposite of the old paradigm of full animation, where fast actions would get more frames. Spiderverse draws 2D expressions onto its 3D models to push them further, and is full of all kinds of colourful stylised rendering - screentone effects, kirby dots, outlines, the works.
It’s tempting to link this to 2D-in-3D animation, and certainly many of these films apply this technique - this is the major niche where Blender has found its way into industry pipelines. But using 2D isn’t mandatory to count here. For example, TMNT Mutant Mayhem has an incredibly striking storybook-painting style, accomplished largely by clever shader work and a strong sense of graphic design. Genndy Tartakovsky’s canned 2014 Popeye project was planning to use a ton of 2D-style posing and squash-and-stretch, accomplished largely with rigged 3D models. There are many paths to take!
And mind you, I haven’t even covered one of the biggest angles here. Search for nonphotorealistic 3DCG on Youtube and what you’ll probably find most is information about cel-shading - aka ‘anime style’. This has also advanced considerably in the last few years, with the techniques pioneered by Arc System Works in Guilty Gear such as editing the normals of characters for more precise control over shading, and minute adjustments to break up the mechanical feeling of 3D, becoming widely copied in both games and films. (And particularly, animated porn.)
Vtubers in particular have really run with this technique, generally speaking using cel-shaded models with edited normals, inverted eyes, etc. etc. to try and get the feeling of an anime character come to life. [You can see a lot of these state of the art techniques if you download Pixiv’s free VRoid Studio software and import the model into Blender using the VRM plugin.]
Naturally this kind of cel-shaded approach has found a particular home in Japan. In anime, the biggest champions of it are certainly Studio Orange, whose hybrid approach involves planning out shots with 2D animation before matching them with the rigs. We’ve covered their adaptation of Houseki no Kuni in great detail on Animation Night 97; their Trigun reboot was perhaps even more popular. But cel-shaded techniques, 3D previs and the like have also made their way into big films like Eva 3.0+1.0 (AN66).
Although this type of rendering aims to recreate the look and feel of 2D animation as much as possible, it always ends up being something new: character models that would be too complex to draw, an ease to 3D movements and camerawork that would be challenging in 2D, and generally a new hybrid style. This is good! 2D animation is already very good at being 2D animation - it’s fascinating to see what 3DCG becomes with that inspiration.
So with that brief overview, where does that take us tonight?
I’m not quite ready to do a Spiderverse double bill tonight, so instead the plan is to check out a couple of recent American franchise films that are taking on the new suite of techniques. I’ve mentioned them up above, but let me introduce them more fully here.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a sequel to a fairly unpopular spinoff about a side character of the Shrek franchise (AN75). Not, on its face, very promising - which is why it is all the more striking that I was told on all sorts of sides that I must watch this movie. I’m finally going to make good on that.
The title character is a kind of feline musketeer type, now facing the end of his swashbuckling career as he’s lost 8 of his 9 lives. Not wanting to hang up his hat, he goes on a quest to restore them. What makes it stand out its the action scenes, which go all in on the anime-influenced, extreme perspective and lighting, limited framerate style that we’re discussing above. Apparently it looks sick as shit.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a fresh reboot of the venerable TMNT franchise, which pretty much describes itself in the title: four turtles (named after Renaissance painters, of course!) live in a sewer as ninjas, led by their aging master who is a rat. Starting as a comic book, it became one of the iconic toyline-driven TV shows of the 80s - but it’s still going! Indeed, Turtles has been on a roll of late (at least going by animator scuttlebutt), with Australian studio Flying Bark Productions turning a lot of heads with their neo-Kanada School style (and for really stretching the definition of ‘storyboard’).
This new film takes a different approach to the bombastic action of Rise. It focuses on a new origin story for the turtles, telling a kind of coming of age story - but what makes it unique is the animation style and cinematography. Cinéma vérité is not a phrase you really expect to be associated with ninja turtles, but the film seems to really go all out in a way you wouldn’t really expect from a franchise movie, shooting the young turtles in a handheld style and focus heavily on character. Marcel Reinhard’s shader work, allowing the animators to isolate lights to specific objects and characters and introducing graphical elements of cross-hatching, stippling, etc. etc. to the lighting, gives it a uniquely painting-like feeling, augmented by a lot of 2D creativity in lighting and effects.
Turtles has never really been my thing, but this film looks unique enough that I really want to see it - and I hear it’s a good film too.
So that’s our bill for tonight! Puss and Turtles. Let’s see what the big studios have been cooking of late…
Animation Night 189 will be starting around 10pm UK time (roughly three hours hence) and carrying on til about 2-3am same! We’ll be on twitch.tv/canmom as usual. Hope to see you there!
those sure were some movies!
i wish american movies’ stories would be half so creative as their animation has become. both movies looked and moved absolutely incredibly… all in service of more paeans to friendship, which is still the only story you’re allowed to tell.
puss in boots is really exactly what everyone says: overwhelmingly stylish, solid emotional arcs, manages to sell a ‘genderflipped version of the MC love interest’ character, all the fairytales-as-heist-movie-characters jokes worked with very sharp comic timing. so it was a delight to watch, full of inventively staged scenes and when the animation pops off it really does pop off - even if it plays it pretty damn safe with the overall plot/emotional arc. something to say about how, even if adoptive families are now part of the circle, the ideal of Family must always be affirmed. but that said, I really liked many of the characterisations: the melodramatic Death wolf is an absolute delight, and the extremely british would-be crime family Goldi and the Three Bears are a lot of fun to watch.
turtles, for its part, very convincingly portrays the turtles as a group of teenagers, and the casting of Ice Cube as the villain Superfly and Jackie Chan as overprotective dad Splinter definitely does a lot for it. (amusing moment where I was like ‘this fight scene’s staging is very jackie chan’ and @bossbutch was all ‘you’ll never guess’). to describe it succinctly - basically TMNT by way of X-Men for zoomers, with a blizzard of cultural allusions appropriate to its time. the words sus and rizz are spoken, though no skibidi. soundtrack is predominately East Coast rap, except for the chase scene set to the He-Man meme song (the cover of What’s Up by Four Non Blondes). it all factors into plot as well: the resolution of the big fight scene at the end involves the turtles hatching a plan based on Attack on Titan (there’s a weeb turtle, you see). and yet, it was a charming movie - the unique visual style doing so much to carry it, and I appreciate the injection of a bit of grunge and ooze into the stylised-CG mix (see: the milking machine bit).
with both, as much as I appreciate the immense level of craft and moment to moment joke writing, I get something of the same feeling I did with Nimona: we’re just gonna make this movie again and again in different styles? could we have like one slightly different animated movie maybe? TV/streaming series seem to permit a little more ambiguity, at least.
so it goes though. still incredibly pretty movies. I’m glad that stylistic creativity has become a terrain for studios to compete on - that finally movies can be colourful and fight scenes read clearly again. very soon we’ll go check out that Spiderverse double bill. as for Arcane, I’d love to screen it, but it’s been a while since I’ve been up to 6 hour+ streams, so we’ll see what we can do!
thanks for tuning in, all who did!
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