Animation

There was a lot of hype around Procreate Dreams when it was announced in the fall. Aaron Blaise did an animated short for the launch, and has been doing some videos since.

https://youtu.be/wnjet_kvkUo?si=e40WXWfoAtXXPQ77

He's also offering a deal on a more formal class through his website. Only $1, so I just purchased it.

https://creatureartteacher.com/product/aaron-blaise-get-started-with-pro...

If you want just the nuts and bolts of how the program works, here's an Envato tutorial I watched last week before using the program for the first time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLRi1nL1aE

Found this on youTube, really interesting for animators and creators!  https://youtu.be/o5aiRrHq5Ao

Christian Bale’s voice resonates with poetic emptiness in Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy in the Heron.

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Bale provides the English language voice for the lead, a twelve-year-old child named Mahito who, at the start of the film, tries to save his mother from a burning hospital after a World War II attack.

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But he fails.

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It's a heavy traumatic moment that launches Mahito into an internal world. And one of the most understated performances of Bale’s career.

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Bale embodies the closed-up emotional state of a heartbroken child, manifested through Miyazaki's stunning first act. Although beautifully crafted, this segment is ultimately devoid of the visuals that Miyazaki is renowned for.

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And that's what makes it so powerful.

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It is a world of little magic, where Mahito is forced to live with his aunt, far away from home, and bullied at a new school.

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Later, the film explodes into a phantasmagorical parallel universe where the living are half-dead, and all sorts of delightful creatures abound. Bale’s character and vocal performance open up, and he is ultimately able to overcome his trauma and embrace connection.

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Bale first encountered Miyazaki's work in Spirited Away (2001). He was so blown away by the movie that he reached out to Miyazaki to say he'd play any role in the director’s new film, Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).

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Miyazaki granted him the lead.

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Although Bale has been absent from cinema since his less well-received The Pale Blue Eye (2022), he constantly manipulates his voice for each role, pitching up for the psychotic Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or down for his “Batman” voice in the trilogy.

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Bale explains finding that voice in Batman Begins (2005):

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“It was the only way I could find how I could get into it, to justify wearing this friggin’ bat suit, walking around like that. Otherwise you’d just go, like, ‘He’s loopy beyond belief.’ I mean, he’s loopy, but he’s loopy with a method to his madness.”

Christian Bale’s embodiment of vocal madness has made him one of the most iconic figures in modern cinema.

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The Boy and the Heron is currently in theatres in the US and UK and features some wonderfully odd voice performances by Dave Bautista, Florence Pugh, and Willem Dafoe.

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(Courtesy of The Industry newsletter)

https://youtu.be/t5khm-VjEu4?si=xrOz7-umtqX27-ZG

I'm writing a screenplay that I think would be great, animated. My question is what is the usual criteria for animation vs live?

A great article detailing the history of this animated gem.

https://open.substack.com/pub/animationobsessive/p/ambition-madness-and-a-christmas?r=4ftu4&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

If you’re not familiar with Richard Williams, he’s best known for the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Back in the 70s, he directed (for producer Chuck Jones) a super detailed, finely crafted 26 minute version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol.

Interesting that the article points out the debate among animators at the time between the trendy abstract modern style and the more traditional, fluid “Disney” style.

This is the full blog that I posted on my website monumentscripts.com. If you like the article, please check out some of my other content.

It pains me to say this. It really does. I have been a Disney fan since I was a kid, and I even worked there for a few years around the turn of the millennium. I raised my daughters watching Disney movies, and there was a time in my life when Disney could do no wrong in my mind. Those days are gone now, and this movie is easily a bottom-5 Disney Animated Feature. I can usually find at least a few redeeming things about almost any Disney film, but this one left me completely flummoxed. The film made no sense from a story perspective, from a character perspective, or even from a design perspective.

Disney is worried about the wrong things.

I worked at Disney during a pretty dark time. The wave that produced blockbusters like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan, and Tarzan had crested. The Florida studio would produce Lilo and Stitch during that period, but the Burbank studio was struggling, and the company went through a very clumsy transition from traditional hand-drawn animation to a CGI pipeline. What was worse, though, was that the studio had lost its way in terms of crafting wonderful stories that were populated by intriguing characters. The studio was trying to make movies that would appeal to everyone rather than just making good movies and letting the rest take care of itself. I fear that Disney is in a similar situation today.

The wave that produced Tangled, Frozen, Moana, and Encanto has crested, and the most recent efforts, Strange World and Wish, are films with stories that are thin and characters we don’t care about. What’s worse is that you could always at least count on Disney films to look good, but the visual styles of these films, and of Wish in particular, felt confused and disorganized.

The structure of the story doesn’t work.

From a storytelling standpoint, but script just didn’t work on any level. First of all, the concept just didn’t make sense, there was never a clear idea of what this story was about. Since there was no clarity in what the story was about, the characters weren’t developed enough to have clear goals. Without those goals, it was impossible for the story to have a tight dramatic structure. That is screenwriting 101, and this movie failed. Screenwriters Jennifer Lee and Allison Moore just did not do enough to build this script from the inside out, and without that foundation, the story fell flat.

The characters had no depth.

Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose), the main character had a relatively ambiguous goal. According to the concept of the story, King Magnifico (Chris Pine) created this utopian society where people could come and live in peace. They would express their wildest wish to him, which he would magically keep, causing them to forget what it was, and once a year, he would grant someone their wish. Asha wanted her grandfather to get his wish since he was going to turn 100, and from there, the story completely fell apart.

But the main issue with Asha is that she has no depth. The best characters always have an inner weakness or flaw that they need to overcome, and Asha doesn’t have anything that I could see no flaw in her personality. She was totally likable and a little quirky, but she didn’t have any character trait that could accurately be described as a flaw. The problem with that is that the transition between Act II and Act III is often a moment when the hero seems to lose everything, often due to the fact that they haven’t overcome that flaw or weakness. It’s usually the most dramatic moment in the script and sets the Hero forward to finally claim the prize in Act III. That moment completely fell flat in Wish because there was no flaw to cause Asha to seem to fail or for her to overcome. That left us with an undramatic story and an anticlimactic finish to the story.

There was also no clear motivation from Magnifico. Why did he want other people’s wishes in the beginning? Why was it important that they forget what the wishes were once they gave them to him? What was he getting out of any of this?

The production design lacked focus.

This might have been the most upsetting thing about Wish. While the movie was beautiful, there was no direction to the production design. The studio seemed to be influenced by previous success from other studios that added unique elements to their looks, like Into the Spiderverse from Sony and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from Paramount, but those studios clearly identified the motivation behind the interesting looks that they had. There was none of that in Wish, and it seemed like they were playing with the different looks in the movie with no real idea as to why.

Overall, this was a pretty lackluster effort from the studio that should be leading the charge in animated features. I will always be a fan of Disney films, and that’s why it’s so disappointing when they come up so short when we all know what they’re capable of at their best. At their best, there is no one better than Disney. Unfortunately, this film is far from their best, and I don’t think Wish could be included in the top-5 animated films released this year.

Do better, Disney.

Funny rumor here, based on the fact that a British clay company was closing down.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/stop-motion/aardman-denies-report-that-it-is-running-out-of-clay-to-make-stop-motion-films-235061.html

The story reminds me of this video from Tested, that covers how Aardman mixes its clay colors.

https://youtu.be/E5t_DXgZmFM?si=AW8WvOW9eQLOc_x2