Pasithea

Several months ago I started reading The Illusion of Life Frank and Ollie's book about their time at Disney way back when. Due to work and some other stuff, I got waylaid after a few chapters and it'd been sitting on my headboard unfinished.

So this last week I've been reading a chapter a night to work my way through the rest of it and absorb what I can. I'll probably go back and re-read the first few chapters as well as they spawned several ideas for me.

What I'm struck by today is a sense of shame for myself and other animators. Seriously. In making the old films for Disney, there was a HUGE amount of cost. Not so much the raw animation but inking, painting, cells, paint, film, development cost, dailies, adjustments, prints, photography time, sound mixing, static free-scissors, full orchestra, and on and on and on and on and you know what _NONE_ of those costs really apply today.

Ink and paint can be done on a computer.
No film.
Colour is wysiwyg and if the color isn't work in a scene, with approximately 3 mouse-clicks you can change it everywhere.
Sound editing is quick and painless. There's never pops from splices, you can remove hiss and all sorts of other level problems with the click of a mouse.
Disney's most expensive machine was the multiplane camera. $50,000 in the 1930's and it could handle 8 planes.
On my computer I can do hundreds. If one is moving at the wrong rate, I can find the flaw instantly, adjust it and everything else still works.
Shots that took the guys at Disney's a month working round the clock just to PHOTOGRAPH I can do in a few seconds.

For a couple thousand dollars you can have a studio more powerful than anything Walt Disney ever imagined. A studio that would have cost him a half million dollars, and that's just the equipment. Don't forget that the computer also lets you reduce your staff from hundreds of people to less than a dozen.

So _WHY_ are the cartoons made today so bad? Limited animation, often uninspired character designs. Why, when we could be making the most beautiful films ever seen, have we instead returned animation to it's crudest most base form, scarcely more than talking heads and pans over comic books. WHY!?

I'm ashamed, and you should be too. Art is the very essence of culture and what does it say of us that we have let ours become so crude and base?