The State of Animation
This blog post is both exciting and a bit scary. It’s important to think about what can be done with animation, and the endless possibilities it provides, but we must also consider the difficulty that animation faces daily.
Animation from Chainsaw Man Season 1 trailer.
Firstly, I love animation because it allows you to do anything you can imagine. Secondly, it encourages an audience to be playful when watching a film, which to me is the purpose of cinema and video entertainment. When an audience starts to play along with a piece of media, that to me is what it’s all about. We all know we’re watching a film when we’re watching a film, animation plays on that and encourages people to let go of reality and embrace the fantastical. Animation’s medium does this at first, then it’s up to the artist to use that to tell stories.
The state of animation from a professional standpoint is a little more difficult. There are many misconceptions and misunderstandings about animation from within and outside of the film industry.
Example of Junji Ito’s horror works.
Public misconceptions include the belief that animation is a ‘genre’ and specifically for children. Most people who watch all kinds of content have become aware that this is not the case, however, there are still many people out there who believe this. It’s important to realise that animation can be used to tell any story and can often be more for adults than any other medium. For example, animation can be used to illustrate horrors that trigger our minds to complete imagery to its worst result, making horror and fearful moments even more impactful and long-lasting than live action. For example, take the illustrated works of Junji Ito. The imagery invokes concepts and imagery that our minds complete with spectacularly horrific results.
From PLAYGROUND Trailer (animated horror)
Professional misconceptions include thoughts like animation requires little skill, animation doesn’t take long and can be left until the last process in a film production, animation is fun for an animator because drawing is fun and therefore, they don’t need to be paid, and animation is a one-step process.
All the above are misconceptions that I and many other animators have come across when working as a professional animator. These misconceptions lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings about what realistic uses of animation might be.
One of the biggest flaws in these misconceptions is the misunderstanding of the time taken to complete an animation. Animation is a multistage process that requires a lot of style and character, background and costume design and development before animation can even begin. This process can take weeks or more if done correctly. Working out how different designs can be animated, whether this is in 2D or 3D, everything should be tested before jumping into the full project to make sure that what is required of the character in the scenes is possible and matches the themes and story of the film.
If you are looking for animation in your film, be sure to reach out to your animator as soon as you can as there are likely a lot more stages and time required than you think to complete.
The overarching results of these misconceptions include:
Less budget is being set aside for animation/animators than what is required to complete the job.
More ‘live-action’ remakes that are a less designed medium
Unfair professional treatment for animators
But all is not doom and gloom! We can educate these misconceptions out of people so that animation in productions can be the best it can be and animators are treated fairly. If you’d like to improve your understanding of the animation process, I’d highly recommend you take a look at my other blog posts on animation on sebcox.com
If you need your own animation, take a look at my ‘Hire Me’ page to see what’s possible.
