Keeping Up With Yesterday

Longer version: cg animation is essentially puppet animation. You build a model, paint it and dress it up, and then move it around. That’s why Pixar’s first animated film was about toys, and their second one was about bugs: it’s much harder to make something look convincingly soft and fleshy than it is to work with something that’s supposed to be rigid.

Working inside this paradigm, the progression that makes sense is to work on developing more and more articulated puppets. Figure out how to add fur (Monsters, Inc.), move fish (Finding Nemo), get to the point where you can actually make human puppets who look appealing (The Incredibles.) In 2012 the big animated feature films showed off huge strides in particle physics (The Guardians), and hair (Tangled, Brave). Character effects and lighting were really hitting their stride, and the general movement was towards more detailed models, increased realism, richer and more intricate environments. The models only had so much range before they started to break, so squash & stretch was never going to be as pronounced as something from drawn animation could be. Hotel Transylvania challenged that.

As a show creator and director, Genndy Tartakovsky’s always shown a preference for stylization. He’s also got a reputation for incredible and deliberate timing, spectacular silhouettes, dramatic movement and clear staging, and just overall really good at directing animation. He wanted Tex Avery-type animation in CG and by golly, he did it.

Look at how exaggerated those shapes are, and how snappy, smooth, and fast the transitions between each one: that’s not something that was really being done. The motion-blurring alone was so defining that apparently Sony calls it a “Genndy blur.”

Animation is essentially the art of movement: the better the movement, the better the animation, and the Hotel Transylvania franchise has spectacular movement.

The model is actually being resculpted for maximum exaggeration, and the smears and blurs make the transitions between each pose fast, energetic, and snappy.

Like. Look at that movement. Look at how tightly he’s rooted while the follow through of his clothing sells the hard stop of each hip bump. Look at how sharp and deep his knees are bending, the way his weight shifts onto his heels and that tiny little side step at the very end, where he keeps his weight on his right foot for a split second before popping over to his new position. And he’s dancing the Macarena because he had to find the most brain-dominating, toe-tappingist song in the universe to win a DJ battle where a Kraken was being driven into a murderous rage by a mystical melody and it had to be counteracted by another song.

Yeah.

The Lady of Pain - Forgotten Realms

i originally reblogged this post, but since staff took it down you can't fucking see my reblog anymore. well i liked this comic, i want it on my blog, and it does not include any fucking nudity. especially compared to all the straight up porn staff allows to go free

so here it is

untitled by Pas (paxiti), all pages from May 23, 2018 to June 22, 2023

This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.

i haven't seen anything about this on my dashboard, so i wanted to share. ICE gestapo killed another human being on tuesday. he leaves behind three sons and his wife, who he has spent the last 35 years building a life with

there is a gofundme supported by the league of united latin american citizens set up to help with funeral costs, legal fees, and supporting his family moving forward.