Character animation: tradition is no longer the norm

Post, March, 2004 by Ann Fisher

there have been whispers: character animation is being used mostly for the Saturday morning cartoon crowd. Its heyday as an advertising medium for adult products is past. The popular 3D type characters from feature films have not been migrating to commercials as quickly as expected. You'd almost think character animation was past its prime. It is not.

In fact, the animators interviewed for this article see it everywhere, depending on their market niche and their definition of what character animation is.

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"It's becoming more of a tool as more directors see movies like The Lord of the Rings. The ideas are certainly out there. It's every bit an option as any other tool that a director may have. It's absolutely accepted, not only by directors but by agencies," says Eric Barba, visual effects supervisor at Digital Domain (www.d2.com), a Los Angeles-based visual effects studio. He recently worked with director David Fincher on the Nike Gamebreaker spot, a realistic character-laden spot aimed at adults and teens.

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"Character animation is used more than ever, even when you use mocap for animation," says Tim Wallace, CG supervisor at Blur Studio (www.blur.com), a visual effects and animation studio which tends toward more toy commercials and games (they do the WB Kids interstitials--all character animation--between cartoons). "We never use raw mocap. We take the capture and then we have our mocap artists clean up that data. Then we'll reduce that motion capture down to the minimal keys and we'll pass it off to the character animators to refine it." He doesn't think the heyday for adult character animation has passed. "We just submitted an eight-minute short film to the Academy that made it to the short list but didn't get a nomination, and this was targeted toward adults."

However, Jeb Milne, founder and creative director of Wit Animation (www.witanimation.com), which specializes in 3D commercial broadcast animation, says "No, [character animation] comes and goes in waves. Right now is not a peak but it'll come back. What's odd is in the last five to six years we have seen so many incredibly successful 3D animated movies from Toy Story to A Bug's Life to Shrek that everyone's a little surprised that they haven't crept into TV commercials more. It could simply be that ad agencies take a while to catch up."

DEFINING CHARACTER ANIMATION

"When little Chiclets that don't have faces jump out of gum wrappers, that's character animation," says Tony Caio, president/creative director of DMA (www.dma-animation.com), a Manhattan animation studio that works in both 2D and 3D. "I term character animation as anything where you have empathy or you resonate with something that's going on in-screen. Look at [Pixar's] Luxo Jr.--that's character animation. That's a lamp, there's no face, there's no lipsync. I think character animation is alive whether it's something that has two arms and a leg or a beer can.

"I've seen a trend in the business where people are used to seeing Flash animation done on the Web and the character has a very '50s, thick line look. I'm hoping that will go away," adds Caio. "I don't want to be a snob but that's definitely not the best animation. I tend to enjoy stuff that's good character development. If I laugh at it and it's a soda can, it's done right."

"There are all sorts of character animation that some people don't think of as character animation," says Amy Taylor, executive producer at Quiet Man (www.quietman.net), a New York City boutique that specializes in character animation. "We did a thing for Pringles and it was really just an end tag--the Pringles face and we had to animate it--for us that's character animation. It's like 'take this object, it needs to be 3D and you need to make some character.' We do a lot of stuff for Oral B and Gillette where you can't make the razor bend but you need to give it character. That's why a lot of people come here because we can take objects and make them move or dance but still keep it true to what the object is.

"It's got to be a really specific spot to take something that's real and put eyes and stuff on it, for it to work. I think it's still a totally valid way to go but it needs to be a special spot for that to work."

Take a tongue, for instance. Wit Animation used one to promote Skips, a potato chip snack, as the sponsor of the Saturday morning show Stars in Their Eyes for Kids. This tongue character has eyes and arms but no legs. Its creators didn't want it to look like a hot dog. Instead, the pointy tip of the tongue droops over, much like a 1950s rock 'n' roll hairdo. The :15, :10 and five :05s began running on London Weekend Television (LWT) this fall. The client was Publicis, the worldwide ad agency based in London.

"We had to achieve a certain elasticity to have it curling around like a tongue. In terms of design, it was quite a challenge. We had to invent how this tongue was going to act. Originally they wanted him to be a little bit gross and then the client wanted to make him cuter," says Milne.