Will cel animation ever come back, or are we doomed to be victims of digital art for the rest of time?
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Will cel animation ever come back, or are we doomed to be victims of digital art for the rest of time?
Oh cool you're an animator?
No.
if you want to have certain art forms come back its up to you to do that
It actually isn't. It is at the behest of a few key entities who have money and choose industry directions for these things.
So why aren't you doing anything?
It actually is.
>It is at the behest of a few key entities who have money and choose industry directions for these things.
This could be (you) but (you) choose to sit on your ass and complain on internet forums instaed.
>Why don't you just take over the world conglomerates?
Literally not what I said.
You made this thread to complain about digital art.
>So why aren't you doing anything?
because i actually don't mind digital art
In real life this person wouldn't be invited to parties, dinners, days out, picnics, shuffleboard tournaments, festivals, etc. Being a constant irritant to the people around you won't win you any friends. It's not that he's wrong, it's that he's insufferable.
Not that he isn't wrong anyway, because his entire argument is "why aren't you the thing you're not, it's you're fault you're not the thing you're not", which isn't that valuable or meaningful in the first place. No one in their right mind would aim to build a million dollar empire just to bring back cel animation.
t. butthurt digital animator
No unless it magically becomes easier and cheaper than digital or someone with an insane amount of money decides to invest into cel animation
Grim.
Yes until it mundanely becomes harder and costlier than digital or someone with a sane amount of money decides to divest from cel animation.
A lot of the elements that people like of Cel Animation can easily be recreated digitally. What most nerds don't get is it's not simply that these methods are abandoned because they're costly or take more effort but because wider audiences genuinely dislike them. Why do you think 2D isn't as popular anymore despite CG costing far more? Normalgays like that digital looks cleaner and has more bullshit and flare.
>Cel Animation can easily be recreated digitally
People always say this, but it almost never looks as good as real cel animation. I think this is just massive copium. "We can do it, we just choose not to because we don't like it, so stop asking."
There is literally no advantage in cel animation over drawing directly other than some vague "it looks better"
This is the same argument people use to shill for vinyl
Yet vinyl is still getting produced to this day
liking to collect old things is fine
as long as you dont pretend there is any discernible difference between vinyl or CD or digital, because there isnt
That has never been the real point. Just cope. People like to touch, hold, view and ultimately experience whatever thing on whatever medium. It feels good.
Post the film cels you've bought and touched, coward.
>as long as you dont pretend there is any discernible difference between vinyl or CD or digital, because there isnt
not true. Audio has to be specially mastered for vinyl meaning the version that gets pressed to records is literally a different file. Whether it’s better or not is a whole other subjective conversation, but it is different.
Regarding CD vs Digital (weird distinction, but I know what you meant), it has a lot to do with distribution methods and compression. CD will be indistinguishable from flac format ripped at 44.1kHz/16bit, but while an mp3 ripped at 320kbps will sound pretty good, there is audible information missing. You can test this by putting an uncompressed version of audio in a DAW, and an mp3 version, and flipping the polarity of one of them. Phase cancellation will make whatever’s the same between the files silent and anything that is left over is what’s missing in the compressed version. It will sound like warbly gobbledyasiatic, but it’s definitely within the range of human perception.
I know this seems pedantic, but there are definite differences and they do have an effect. There’s music that I heard in mp3 that I originally wrote off as trite bullshit but later realized it was elegantly understated when hearing it on commercial CD.
Movies are similar. There’s a difference between movies on film vs Blu-ray vs ripped/compressed formats.
>implying the equivalent of making a VHS is the same is creating a show using more costly animation works
vynil is piss easy to produce and cheap
>There is literally no advantage in cel animation over drawing directly other than some vague "it looks better"
isn't "looking better" the entire point of a visual medium?
choosing different types of media purely for their aesthetic properties is an important part of the artistic process, removing one of those options will just lead to that form of art being less diverse and interesting.
>isn't "looking better" the entire point of a visual medium?
they only ever say this in vague terms
but the exact same image produced in digital form will be sharper and clearer, it is an objectively better image that was not subject to deterioration
digital looks closer to how cels actually look like when viewed in person, if anything
>isn't "looking better" the entire point of a visual medium?
In some cases this is subjective though. Some people like film grain, some people prefer a cleaner look.
There's nothing stopping someone from using digital tools to draw frames in the same manner that cel animation is done.
It's not done because it's slower, and no one actually wants to hand draw 80,000 frames.
Fun fact, up until Tom and Jerry and Willy Wonka, Tom and Jerry direct to video movies were animated in a digital ink technique that was basically digital cel animation.
It was William Hannah's idea to try and replicate the feel of the classics
i don't understand how this is different from normal digital animation
Mostly just weird off model drawings more often as opposed to puppet rigs which by design look more on model more often.
>basically digital cel animation
????
needs a better color palette
Yeah, I don't know why they went so bright immediately after Hannah died.
Maybe he was the only og who had experience with and/or cared how the colors should look if they're trying to emulate the classics.
Isn’t that just frame by frame digitally colored?
Yeah, that's the one. It was what he felt best replicated cel animation since they're both hand drawn frames, just done in different mediums.
At any rate, the studio shut down and all tom and jerry direct to video movies are just animated in the style of the tv shows.
Oh you mean its part keyframes, some handdrawn inbetweens and the rest is tween/Interpolation?
Reminds me to those pokemon commercials when the games were on GB, they looked so uncanny.
>hand drawn frame-by-frame animation, but with shit color palette
>puppet rig tweening animation with a filmgrain filter applied over it
These are your two options. Making something hand animated that also looks nice is impossible because the heads of the industry hate (you).
Still looks like shit. There's too much cleanliness with garbage digital backgrounds and animation that looks too smooth and fake.
that accordion effect is clearly cg
Redrawing characters and moving objects for every frame is objectively more expensive than modeling something once and then puppeting it
Not as cheap as rendering it
So why is the vast majority of indie animation is traditional?
It's not.
There's hardly any CG indie shows.
And everything else is digitally animated.
Frame by frame
But also using tweening and other digital shortcuts.
There's Glitch.
Because indie animation is a niche field addressing the needs of the niche audience that is manchildren that want to watch 2D cartoons made by Americans.
There is no indie animation ‘studio’ that is all American. People send their shots in from all over the place.
Yotta?
They just throw basic library filters, like blurry or VHS over the video and claim that it looks exactly the same as cel animation".
Most of the time it ends up being 16:9, and it was rare for TV shows to be produced under that aspect when cel animation was still around. That specific missed detail always pisses me off.
You see Late Night with The Devil? 95% of that is in 4:3. It was great. Production value was good. I guess they used some AI assets for a few things. I'm on the fence about that.
With AI they could fill in the frames in between now
Get ready for uncanny valley nightmare fuel.
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I have yet to see faux cel animation that looks like actual cels
the closest we got is YingYangGio copycats and they are all hit or miss
https://twitter.com/Mex0n37/status/1784823176847065423
This had me fooled for like 15 seconds
?si=xJTOtHwEdr1kphHj
>Why do you think 2D isn't as popular anymore
*looks at anime*
>Why do you think 2D isn't as popular anymore
/a/
>People always say this, but it almost never looks as good as real cel animation.
I suspect that's just a matter of no one taking the time to truly master the craft. I think if someone cared enough it could be done seamlessly sooner or later. Right now we've just got the equivalent of lazy VHS filters, but we're at least 25% there.
Nobody remembers how to use the equipment
Nobody produces the materials anymore in most places of the world
Nobody has the patience and budget
Nobody knows or figures out the old film techniques of lighting and composition
Nobody likes working with film with care
Nobody in the world is interested
Nobody wants to deal with anti seizure laws and regulations
Nobody remembers how to do good animation that isnt Studio Mir Choppy or tween happy
FORGET IT!
>draw
>snap a picture of drawing
>repeat
>”OMG THIS IS SO HARD AUGHHH”
this generation is unfathomably lazy.
You seem very willing to be an animator, an ink-and-paint artist, and a camera operator at the same time. Go out and animate to the extreme!
>You must be an animator or you can't criticize animation!
Who the hell do you think they're making cartoons for, other animators or Joe on the couch?
Hey, I'm not the one claiming other people are lazy for not doing three seemingly simple jobs at once. You should join him and become his film and sound effects editor, how about that?
Can't they do the megalobox trick
This. It's like how the only reason Laika exists is because it's got a trust fund kid propping it up.
cel animation homosexuals are determined to make me hate them.
Yes anon of course they'll bring it back because some people like the aesthetic or some shit
It's not your fault man.
Just make digital look like cel animation. Problem solved.
unlikely, with 2D cartoons and new cheaper digital tools (and the popularity and ease of 3D)
the industry that made the cells and special animation paper disappeared too
The cells are just sheets of acetate which are still sold. The paper just needs to be punched to fit a peg bar. These are not super specialty items.
>cel animation
shaky piece of shit.
I think fundamentally that while you can replicate cel shading digitally for cheaper and faster than the real thing. It would require someone to come up with a process for it that was just as fast and cheap as plain digital. Since an extra cost is an unnecessary cost to producers.
Producers think the equivalent of this is some generic library VHS filter.
no unless a digital animation tax somehow gets implemented forcing studios to go back to cells to avoid that
It will come back in the future, when humans get replaced by IA from jobs and we have so much free time than you can work on your own animation for the rest of your life
AI will make cell look-alike cartoons too
Probably won't since cel animation's distinction comes from the process. AI as a function is creating a superficial composite. So it won't really be Cel like in any meaningful way likely more similar to digital animation if not exacerbate all criticisms.
I've seen AI make pictures of 80s movies that never existed. It gets the color and lighting of the era even easier than giving people 5 fingers. it WILL be able to replicate the look of cels.
Me too, that's what I'm basing my claim on. They're all very superficial, they get close to the idea but lack all the nuance. All the prompts try to recreate Krull and Excalibur and when you look up close you see how everything looks awkwardly smooth and waxy because it doesn't understand grain and texture, it complies a bunch of images of what it's supposed to be creating then computes the difference and with a difference as variable as grain and tiny imperfections of the old tech it just smooths them out. Very good at tricking a layman at a glance but don't actually recreate the source faithfully. Now you're doing that already failed process and multiplying it a million times to change it ways it literally cannot account for.
Was cel animation cool and soulful? Yes. It was also insanely more expensive. Imagine having to buy the paints and materials, being unable to simply Ctrl+Z your mistakes, wasting time to dry the paint, storing all that stuff, and how all that becomes a non-issue by simply painting digitally.
There is absolutely no way for cel animation to make a comeback. Modern anime's hand-drawn and digitally painted frames are the most optimized style of 2D animation, and even that is too much effort for modern Western animators.
>Was cel animation cool and soulful? Yes
the only difference is that the colors are washed out from the photo transfer process
if we used modern technology to allow cel animation to reach its true potential, like scanning instead of photographing, it would look near-identical to drawing on a tablet
It would?
spongebob season 1 was done on cels and it looks worse than the later digital seasons while still looking pretty much the same art-wise
anything you can do on cels you can do better digitally, unless you are a crackhead who likes grain, fuzz, and faded color
What's wrong with texture?
Braindead moron, S1 DID, NOT, LOOKED, like the rest of the show, specially not when they introduced stiff brick piffy cheek spongebon in S3.
The paintjob on actual animation cels looks really smooth and clean, not unlike a digital fill bucket. If you painted on cels, but used a modern high quality digital scanner, it would have that "digital look" because the "soul" of old animation comes from the film grain when they photographed the frames.
if you actually bought an animation cel like used to be able to, and looked at it it has very bright, solid colors and looks very close to digital art
you would struggle to see the difference between it and digital art after you transfer it into the show
but at least with digital art, you dont accidentally mix up the layers and make bumblebee bigger than optimus because the guy in charge of doing the transfer process was busy snorting crack
As cool as it is, I fear that it will never come back in a mainstream kind of way. Corpos just will not let it.
After the decline of industrial civilization bottoms out, computers, if they're ever invented again, will be too rare and expensive to be wasted on digital animation, and so animation, if it survives the coming dark ages or is reborn afterwards, will by necessity have to be done in cels again. Maybe in some distant future reincarnation you'll get to experience it.
You know as a kid I just assumed they were bad at coloring, now I understand that cels aren’t perfectly transparent so when you animate the different parts of the body on their own cels and layer them together like that one of the cels is going to discolor the other
It's a lot more possible than people would like to think, it's not some forgotten artform, many of the people who worked on these kinds movies are still alive, some are desperate to work on any project they can snatch up. Though honestly we probably don't have the luxury of even thinking about this, considering even digital animation is not in particularly good spot either, let alone the writing for any of these..
>victims
God boomers are such weak ass homosexuals.
You just described cel shading. Anon are you okay?
I think anon means when they do the thing like they do in Rescue Rangers where they insist the cel shaded characters are 2D drawings.
Do indie people use that kinda thing when they're wanted to animated their passion project?
Doesn't Xandrecos use Cel to animate?
Cel animation is hard as hell and requires a bunch of specialist equipment and techniques that have simply been forgotten. I think Studio Ghibli still retains its old hardware, and it's so rare that they actually hire it out to other studios who want to use it for one reason or another.
Why not just have all art go back to being cave paintings?
Cel animation is just obsolete technology, there is no difference between it and digital 2d art except the later is more efficient.
If there's anything in particular that I prefer in cel animation, especially in the 90s, it's how glowing things (buttons, displays, energy attacks, etc.) often seemed genuinely luminous rather than merely a bright colour.
Behold Cinemaphile, the final cel animated movie to be ever screened. Took 15 years to make. They got Roy Naisbitt to do a segment.
Frick, that looks fantastic.
the techique and institutional knowledge on how to do it are probably lost now.
Knowing how everything will only be done as cheaply and fast as possible with no real quality, digital
Eventually they're gonna have to start releasing their timeless treasures from the vaults.
Cel animation supplies are vastly more expensive than digital.
For obvious reasons, no major studio would do something so unnecessarily expensive, and indie studios don't have the capital or prior skills to do it - especially with a dubious return on what is a vastly more expensive investment than a handful of drawing tablets.
The only way I could see it working from a financial standpoint is if you make the fact that you are literally the only studio to use cel animation a key part of the appeal. Maybe have the series be derivative of the 80s and 90s and its animations - either stuff like he-man and warrior cats, or the schlocky sci-fi anime Japan was so fond of - to bait in the nostalgic millenials and zoomies who romanticise that time period. Maybe auction off the cels after the fact, there seems to be a market for them
We are.
We're so back bros
>an actual brand new cel animated thing is posted
>literally nobody notices
pottery
Its all a bunch of nonsense.
I like this
reminds me of old newgrounds animations
I was a celhead for many years, decrying digital as it became mainstream and being stuck in my ways well into the 2010’s. I’ve made peace with the transition at this point, but that’s some context before I get into it.
It’s incredibly unlikely that cel animation will come back. There are a few (very few) tiny indie projects that utilize the process (kind of, the paint doesn’t really exist anymore so it’s all with an asterisk) but I’m not aware of any that do it above the standard of basement quality passion projects.
You will hear people say that digital can replicate cel, I’m not convinced this is the case. On paper it *might* be possible, but I haven’t been presented with sufficient evidence. Digital approximations do exist, the best of which are single images which look really dang close, but faux-cel animations never quite look seamless, even the best I’ve ever seen was only 90% of the way there (and a simple style to target).
Cel animation is expensive. It requires technology that is no longer in use and departments that no longer exist. The only feasible way a new professional-grade cel animated production would arise is if a very wealthy, very passionate person worked very hard to see it happen.
Personally, I think the future for the aesthetic will come with AI. I understand that it’s a controversial technology and I sympathize, but I do think that it’s the best bet we have for the approximations to become indistinguishable and feasible to produce.
Someone painted their own cels and actually animated them.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3PV5e9Ok8_/?igsh=MWNsNHNyZ2J6ZjIyZQ==
https://www.instagram.com/p/CC_kaabJmBG/?igsh=MWFmZXFvY3draHFnOQ==
the hardware to even take photos of animation cels is long gone at this point. You may as well be asking for the printing press to come back, its NEVER going to happen.
Isn't it in effect just a high resolution scanner?
it's an entirely different category of hardware from a scanner because it's shot on film as opposed to being converted to a digital signal.
There's no reason cels must be shot on film, you could just as easily remake that setup with a high resolution digital camera
Cel/Hand Drawn is now regulated to niche/animation enthusiasts. Digital/Flash/CG is the norm for actually wanting money from your movie.
https://twitter.com/gameralphabeta/status/1785320846090768704
Was there ever a perfect cel
yes, and it can be yours for just $1500
>dirty saiyan monkey hogging the frame
we can do better
You know, I thought of something. You know how Disney cut costs in the 60s by photocopying pencil sketches onto animation cels? Has anyone ever printed digital drawings onto animation cels?
>Has anyone ever printed digital drawings onto animation cels
I know digitally colored animated movies were transferred to 35mm film between the middle to early 2000s.
oftentimes those collectors cels they have at disney shops or on cruises are just digital files printed onto celluloid
I've seen some great 2D movies hand-drawn, like Unicorn Wars from Spain and they used Blender not cells and it still looks great.
So I don't mind.
Are all cel art work important as the comics art work?
Because they have some sort similarities to each other.
>headline containing "here's why"
this triggers an irrational anger response in my monkey brain, I need to get off the internet
What is the point here?
it'll likely be the last attempt to bring ratings up before everything becomes cgi only
Its like how we are cycling through old fashion and are now in the 2000s era which is the last true era of everyone dressing a certain way so we cycle back to the 50s
Cel will probably be dead soon after with all the old cartoonists dying and a lot of the new ones using Ai or just refusing to learn cel
Objectively, the only benefit to cel animation is the ability to sell the cels after the show's over.
Just because people get lazy with digital doesn't mean it's not an upgrade.
Physical media in general's just way to frickin' limited and risky:
>risk of physical damage / dirt / grime
>lots of consumable expenses like paint and the pages
>hard to work from home and hard to find a place to outsource to that still does cels
>run the risk of shortages and supply issues
>have to work with big-ass fancy light tables and filming equipment, all very bulky and expensive
>pool of animators and artists that can still do that shit is dwindling fast
>no filters, tools or shortcuts to work with, and no "layer settings" either
>higher-res TVs + streaming + the ability to pause and slow-mo and all that all ensures the art has to be bigger AND have fewer errors
>the internet and social media being a thing puts extra emphasis on any errors you make
>errors you make might literally be impossible to fix, or just be costly / time-consuming
Plus some other shit I'm too tired to type out.
how about, having up to 8K remasters of shows shoot on film?
Companies exist first and foremost to make money, not to make things people want, and they do that by cutting expenses every chance they get. So no, we ain't getting cel animation back, because companies found cheaper alternatives.