The Perks of Being a Loser

Avengers cast reads new Thanos children’s book.

BONUS

The hyper realistic style is actually limiting the animators, rather than freeing them. The style makes it much harder to have memorable character designs and good expressions. Real lions don’t need to do things like emote in a way that humans can understand – but characters in a film do. The original movie was more cartoony not due to animation limitations of the time, but because that style genuinely serves the story better.

To show you what I mean, compare these two shots of Simba, from right after Scar says “run away and never return.”

Here is a clear reaction, with a strong beat for us to connect with before the character makes a decision. Even without any dialogue, even without any context, you can understand the emotion there just by the expression and the mannerisms. Is it realistic? No! He’s bright yellow and has eyebrows. But do we empathize with him? Yes!

Meanwhile, here is… a lion. Turning and running. No expression, no beats, no character moments, nothing. He actually can’t express himself because the animators are locked into the realistic style. If they tried to animate a strong expression as warranted for the scene, it would look terrible. Is it realistic? Hell yeah! Look at those textures! Look at that fur! But do we empathize with him? …nah. Not really.

To conclude: when you’re retelling Hamlet with a bunch of animated lions, cartoonish-ness is your friend, not your enemy.

He kept refusing to pay, and brought a friend like a hype man to further insist that I was being a jerk by demanding compensation for my hard work. He had an app on his phone where I was supposed to enter the amount of the commission, so I made the price $30 and added several additional lines to the invoice including a “piece of sh*t” charge, a “I’m never drawing for you again” charge, and a “f*ck you” charge.

He almost payed it without looking, but eventually did and flipped out, calling me a scam artist and saying he was gonna call his mom.

but here’s how they actually looked, and it’s actually pretty badass: