Episode 114 - Cartoons and Animation

Slide whistle falls off of cliffs, and twinkle toes powering Stone Age cars were just a few of the sound effects that made Saturday morning cartoons popular with Blind and Low Vision kids in the days before Audio Description. Today, Christine and JJ aim to fill in some visual gaps by describing the look of classic cartoons, from prehistoric gadget gags in The Flintstones, to cutting edge camera work in Snow White, and the colour palette of The Simpsons. So pour yourself a huge bowl of junky cereal and let's dig in!

Transcript

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JJ Hunt: 0:03

Talk description to me with Christine Malec and JJ Hunt.

Christine Malec: 0:27

Hi, I'm Christine Malec.

JJ Hunt: 0:28

And I'm JJ Hunt. This is talk description to me, where the visuals of current events and the world around us get hashed out in description rich conversations.

Christine Malec: 0:47

JJ and I had a first in our voluminous communications about the podcast in which I had the opportunity to say pretty pleased. And that was in relation to this episode, we had started with the idea to talk about animation and animation styles. And I said, Could we pretty please focus on the Flintstones, and it's just a personal thing for me that I grew up with them. I watched them a lot. They're sort of also had iconic everyone have a drink? And, JJ, you asked a great question, which is Do you think there's more investment in the Flintstones within the blind community? And when I thought about it, I said yes, because it's very dialogue driven. But there's also a really well developed soundscape and so sounds and activities gets sauna fide. And so it's possible to follow what's going on, even if you don't get the details of how things are done. But of course, I know there's a rich layering of eccentricity and you prehistoric cave technology about how things happen. And I really wanted to talk about specifics of things that we would have missed as blind people watching the Flintstones and being entertained but not necessarily getting the, the eccentric visuals of how stuff is done. So we're gonna talk styles, but we're also and we're gonna you know, cover a lot of ground there but we're gonna start with the Flintstones just cuz I said pretty sure. Do you want to start with with style or specific's JJ?

JJ Hunt: 2:21

Let's get the the basic visuals the visual style of the Flintstones down so then we can build out some of the specifics from there, that probably makes some sense. So the Flintstones 1960 to 1966 a relatively short run, but for the original Sims Flintstones. But it was the very first big primetime cartoon I mean, essentially it was a sitcom being presented in as a cartoon which was interesting from a storytelling standpoint, very clear style. So the characters are outlined in black and inked with solid colors. This by the way is repeated this formula is repeated very often in in cartoons because it's having very little detail inside costumes makes it easier to animate. If you have a lot of like Louis hatching or a lot of detail work in the in the faces that makes it much more difficult to replicate over and over and over again or to change and shift so this kind of like you know, black outline with bold colors inside is very replicable. The men in the in the Flintstones in general. The men are very stocky, they have no necks. And there's this really distinctive the smile lines kind of under the cheeks are down around and under what would be a chin if they had chins. They don't their chins just disappear straight into the bodies of their one piece for tunics or whatever. Those are, they have these like these circular areas around their mouths, which are the stubble areas. So those areas are a darker color than the rest of their skin tone. Because men of course they shave and so that's they've got this like five o'clock stubble. It's very distinctive, actually Homer Simpson, they they they kind of borrowed that. From the Flintstones this idea of the stubble area around the mouth really very distinctive. The Flintstones men have very fat noses, thick arms, thick legs, huge feet and great big toes. So the men are basically like fur covered sausages with no shoulders and no necks. They're really stout. And their hair is like a singular piece. So you know it's got its it it's a set hair all the hair in the Flintstones is set. It never moves. There's no like, strand of hair. There's no wiggle of hair. It's just a block of like Lego hair basically The women on the other hand, the women in the Flintstones, are basically corseted. So their torsos are tapered to the waist. And the wastes are almost the size of their necks. So they're really tapered to a very thin waist. And then VAVA voom boom, these big curvy hips. So it's very this very hippie, and then they're wearing miniskirts. So the little firm mini skirt that comes out around the hips, and then out from under there, you've got very shapely legs and dainty feet. And the women have red lips and tiny noses. So the men are these like big characters big sausage, and the women are very dainty and very pretty, right. One of the things that's unusual about the Flintstones is that the eyes aren't uniform. So in The Simpsons, for example, all of the characters have the same style of eyes. South Park very much the same thing mo for the most part, all of the characters have the same kind of eyes. But that's not the case in the Flintstones different characters have their eyes are rendered in different ways. So for red and Betty have roundish eyes that are you know, outlined in black and then there are whites with little black circles for pupils. Very classic. Wilma only has black dots for eyes. That's it just black dots for eyes. And Barney has like has just rings. There's their hollow rings with like flesh tone inside like the color of his skin inside. So they're, they're not even solid black, there's no white in there. Very, very interesting. And I should mention in terms of skin tone, everyone in the Flintstones and I don't think I've ever seen aside from like, you know, the green what's his name kazoo? Aside aside from Green, Kazoo and purple Dino the dinosaur everyone is the Crayola crayon, quote unquote skin color, meaning this slightly pinkish beige color. That's the that's the uniform skin tone in the Flintstones. And it's also interesting to note that for the most part, all of the characters are presented, the default positioning is this three quarter profile, so not directly facing us not facing the side, somewhere in between. And so you can see both eyes at the same time. And the nose is kind of you know, being viewed more or less from the side. But that's the default, you very, very rarely see a Flintstone character looking directly at us. Nor do they do they look straight to the side. That's not how we're used to seeing these characters rendered almost always in the three quarter profile.

Christine Malec: 7:48

I'm going to totally indulge myself here. There's a little part in an episode where Fred has written some love poetry for Wilma. And I'm going to quote it: "Your shell like ears, your dainty hands, your eyes so black like frying pans."

JJ Hunt: 8:07

Ha ha ha! Just off the top of your head?! You've just got that --

Christine Malec: 8:10

I got it. I got it in there. I got it in there. My partner and I quote this love poetry to each other now and then.

JJ Hunt: 8:15

That's so funny. I had some quotes from the from the Flintstones, I had a roommate where we use the there was some little bird character that was like a scrub pad or something like that, that they would use to like wash their car. And the little bird like these little creatures that were used. They they often had like one liners. And this little bird that was being used to like wash the car or something didn't like being washed by Barney would prefer to be washed used by Fred and the board would say the little ones got cold hands. And for some reason my roommate and I would say that constantly. The little ones got cold hands. I don't know why these funny little liners from cartoons.

Christine Malec: 8:55

All these one liners. Can we talk about the household gadgets because this is where like they never describe a lot of them because it's so dialogue heavy and we don't know what they are. But that's where I think as a blind person you miss out on some of that that fun eccentric stuff that's so like, technology, but not

JJ Hunt: 9:12

Yeah, they love those little, you know, hidden things, little side things. So I just did a Google image search for Flintstones gadgets and a whole bunch came up. So there's one that's a can opener. It's a tiny little blue like a purpley blue dinosaur with an overbite. So like buck teeth like a like a rabbits buck teeth, and just tall enough so that it can fit underneath and then you tap the thing on the head and did it choose along the edges of the cans. That's a can opener. Oh, here's a garbage disposal, which is a pig like dinosaur hidden in a crawl space with a with a hole in the floor up above. And so this pig like dinosaur has his mouth wide open. So garbage and like food scraps. app's so classic food scraps like bones that look like femurs with little knobbly bits on the end and and you know, onion dropping into this hogs mouth and it looks like there's another hole behind the hog so you can poke them in the in you can poke him in the backside and that lets him know to open his mouth. The lawn mower that's a classic. So that's like me gonna say like a bird like dinosaur sitting on a platform with wheels it's kind of tied to the platform with his long neck kind of reaching over the edge of the platform and kind of chewing it the chewing it the grass. As you as you push this little platform along along the lawn, oh, here's the automatic dishwasher, which is like a prehistoric squid. Sitting at the sink, washing dishes with all the hands. So the gadgets are almost always animals dinosaurs that are turned into some kind of of course, like right at the very beginning of the show, Fred's like working at the quarry and sitting in a little booth that is strapped on to the back of what looks like a brontosaurus style dinosaur who is picking up a you know a big boulder in his mouth. That's the classic like you know, turn if you can turn a dinosaur into some kind of chomping or, or you know, work creature then that's what you do. That's that's how the Flintstones roll.

Christine Malec: 11:26

In the intro. There's something about ribs and a drive thru. Can you take us through that?

JJ Hunt: 11:31

In the intro, the family pulls up in their car they pull up to a burger joint, a drive in burger joint and a waitress who's basically wearing the same kind of outfit that that I already described very tapered at the waist, the little kind of mini skirt that goes out over the over the curve tips. And she's got a little a jaunty little cap on the side of her head kind of like a like a like a bellhop cap. And she comes out from the restaurant, carrying a massive just what the small tray with an oversized rack of ribs. And so this is a huge sea shaped rack of ribs, it's literally as big as the car, and then sets this tray on the edge of the car. So like you would edit old fashioned that old fashioned like a 1950s driving, you would hook the little tray to the window, door of the car. So it would kind of stick out of the car on the outside. And so she sets this tray on and the car goes by boom, boom and then flips over. Because the ribs I love that you're laughing at this. It's like such is such an old timey gag. But it's it's fun. It's still very fun.

Christine Malec: 12:44

Obviously, animation is something that has evolved over time. And so what were the characters moving? How were their moving styles in in something like the Flintstones.

JJ Hunt: 12:55

So the thing with animation is movement is expensive, right? If it moves, it has to be redrawn. So there are a couple of ways that that a show like The Flintstones, which is on TVs got to be done every single week, not being seen in a movie theater where it might be shown over and over again. But the idea was it was just going to be shown on television. So it's a cheaper medium, you want to get that done as cheaply as possible. So there are a couple of different things you can do for that, one thing you can do is you can paint the background separately from the foreground and characters because the backgrounds are not going to move the foreground and characters are so the backgrounds in the Flintstones are they're softer. They've got this mottled kind of quality. I think they might even be watercolor paintings. They're permanently motionless. They never move. So the ground the walls, the tree lines, buildings, all of those things in the background have this like a literally they they look different they are they look like watercolor paintings, the foregrounds things that did move, they had more. There were solid, solid colors, people, vehicles, animals contraptions, because at some point, those things would be moving, they were drawn separately. But then even within that the movement of a person, you want the least amount of the person moving at any given time, because to have the whole person moving, you have to redraw the whole person. So first of all, one of the ways that the Flintstones made this whole process cheaper was to have the backgrounds repeat. So the fifth, the Flintstones backgrounds are pretty notorious for this. If Fred and Barney say are running away from something or someone they might run past a palm tree and a gray stone building, and then they're going to run past the same palm tree and the same gray stone building I've heard and then the same boundary and over and over and over again. Not only is it recycled, it's recycled immediately, like one right after the other after the other. And then to make it even cheaper. EIPER only the things that are moving or getting redrawn, so when they are running, their bodies might be completely still, but their feet are moving back and forth. They are moving very quickly, but the bodies aren't totally rigid. So for example, if a character raises an arm, only the arm moves, not the torso. So it's one of the reasons that they created the style they did with the shoulders, arms that are just basically stuck onto the sides of the body, there's no rounded shoulder, it's really easy to just have an arm raise up and down. In some, like in the earliest Flintstones cartoons, they actually wouldn't even necessarily get the color match perfect, because that the skin on the face and the legs is painted separately than the skin on the arm, because the arm is what's moving in this shot, not the face and the legs. So the arm that's gonna move in the scene, as this is just a slightly different shade of beige than the other bits of skin. Very awkward. So you could always tell if a character comes on screen, and they've got like one arm a different color, it's like, oh, they're gonna be waving soon, you know. So the movement was interesting. So yeah, and the other thing about the Flintstones movement, when characters or vehicles moved really quickly, there were action lines added. So this comes right from comic books. So if a character is going to run from one place to another, in a comic book, there are these little action lines that go around the, you know, the, the curves of the body, so maybe around the head, or around the feet, these legs, like almost like parentheses, little brackets, to show that that body part is in motion. And then maybe if they're running really fast, they're gonna have these streaks lines coming out from behind them with like a little puff of smoke or something that's a very cart that's like, like a comic book thing that is brought into the Flintstones. So when a car when when they run, zoom, these little tiny clouds at the tail of these action lines would appear and then fade away. And then if there was something really heavy, like if someone dropped a boulder in the Flintstones, the entire image would shake, like, like the whole screen would shake, kind of like we talked about on Star Trek, if the if the ship gets hit with a with a photon torpedo, the whole image shakes, it's very much the same. So that the whole image was shake the soundscape really did a very good job of conveying that those booms would would be in the soundtrack. So if you've heard that, that's those are exactly the moments that were that kind of thing is happening.

Christine Malec: 17:36

And we are going to talk about other cartoons but just in case anyone may not know, whenever they drove off in their car, I'm right here, right the feet would stick out from the bottom and running to get the car going.

JJ Hunt: 17:48

All vehicles are operated either by an animal or by feet. And that's right this so it's the men with the big fat feet. Baba Baba Baba. And then you get the zoom and the zip off like that. Yeah, but it's always the feet moving under the car. That's the big gag.

Christine Malec: 18:02

Classic. So yeah, I could spend you know the whole next half hour talking about the Flintstones but we're not going to do that. Um, Looney Tunes is also a very popular and beloved by many I couldn't get into it because there's not there's a ton of visuals and not a lot of dialogue driven our sauna fIying so what happens to the style and the tropes in there when when with Looney Tunes.

JJ Hunt: 18:25

SO tyhe Looney Tuines is interesting because it's actually quite a bit earlier like the earliest Looney Tunes is 1930s Again, similar blackout lines bold. You know inked colors inside, and there are a lot a lot of details in the clothing and the first so Bugs Bunny, long, thin rabbit in gray with a white belly and kind of you know white around the mouth. Big long oval eyes tall oval eyes and long ears, big feet oversized hands wearing white gloves. Why don't know why the white gloves? Maybe it was because they needed hands on this rabbit but for some reason Bugs Bunny has white gloves. I don't know why. Yeah, it's a bit similar kind of the outline and bold colors. But the originals were created as film shorts, not for TV, so they're actually very high quality. So the backgrounds while painted separately, so it's similar to the Flintstones the backgrounds are painted separately, but the backgrounds in the early Looney Tunes cartoons were fairly lifelike paintings and they had considerable depth. And the character movement was much smoother than the Flintstones even though the Flintstones was quite a bit later. And like like said The Flintstones only an arm or the eyes would move in Looney Tunes, more often the entire body would move. So you could you could do more nuanced gags and more nuanced character reactions. So like a character's shoulders could slowly sag or the entire face would move even if it can't Character wasn't talking, if they wanted a reaction, they might get an expression that would slowly creep onto their face, which is very different than the Flintstones, which would to make sure that you, you know, a character still stayed alive, they would blink. That's it, like so it Fred's having an action moment, and Wilma is across the room, Wilma might blink, so those little black dots blink, but that's it she's otherwise motionless. Later, in the later years, when Looney Tunes moved from film to television, it got they needed to move more quickly, the things got a little cheaper, things were a little bit more rushed. So the backgrounds became quite stylized, there was an era in Looney Tunes, with a backgrounds instead of being paintings, lifelike paintings, they're these very stylized geometric shapes and blacks and neutral colors really stylized. And then they use more of this limited animation style that we've been talking about, with only the moving parts moving and everything else being motionless. But the difference was with the Flintstones, they did that because it was cheap. And it was just part of what it was. With Looney Tunes, they kind of used it for comic effect. So for example, a bad guy might have his hat chopped in half with an axe. So someone takes an axe, you know, whacks a bad guy over the head with it, and then you get a close up of the bad guy. And for the most part, the bad guy is motionless, staring directly at us. But the hat that's on top of his head, slowly splits into and slides down off the sides of his head while he stares at us motionless. So from a production standpoint, that's cheap, because only the hat moves, the rest of the face stays motionless. But it's intentionally rendered the character staring straight at us, it's done for also for comic effect. So it's a slightly different approach to this, you know, to the same kind of production issue. Lots of the streaking action lines, these ones look like they're rendered in crayon, so they're not really solid block lines. They're a little bit more dappled and puffs of smoke cloud trails, all that stuff. And what the you're right, like not as much necessarily in some of them very heavy in dialogue, but in some of the Looney Tunes stuff, not at all. Instead, it was about the orchestral soundtrack. And this orchestral soundtrack could convey an awful lot. But you still, unless you got some bit of story being expressed, it doesn't really work out you still you need something you need, you need something to hang your head on. The orchestral soundtrack isn't quite enough.

Christine Malec: 22:47

Disney is sort of the you know the the mega animating production place. And so what did Disney do with some of some of these techniques.

JJ Hunt: 22:57

So it's interesting, Disney in what is now considered the golden era, Walt Disney really wanted to turn the studio from a place that made cartoons to a place that made art films like actual proper films that just that were animated. So 1937 to 1942 is considered the golden era. That's when Disney Studios put out Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. And these really are the first animated films, they are pieces of cinema, and they're really very cinematic in scope and in presentation. First of all, the animation style is utterly fluid. They filmed scenes using real actors, and then drew them kind of frame by frame so that they so that the movements of the animated characters mimicked exactly the movements of real people. So the movements are a little bit slower than in real life more a little bit more deliberate, but they're incredibly lifelike again 1937 This is very, very early an example of how lifelike this this becomes is when Prince Charming for example, leans down to kiss Snow White as she sleeps, a lock of his hair slips and brushes against her forehead. Now contrast that to the Fred Flintstone bit where he's got that Lego hair. It's just it's it's just a completely different thing right? The backgrounds in the in these golden era Disney Pictures are fully rendered painting so again, Looney Tunes went further than the Flintstones the golden era of Disney, the some of the background paintings or works of art in their own right you can you can buy them online or beautiful paintings. And Disney in this era was also the first to use. I think it's called a multi plane camera. So the idea is the background, the foreground and the character could be completely separate. Edited and filmed at the same time. And what that does is it gives you a fully three dimensional look because you can move the background, you can move the middle ground, you can move the characters in the foreground, and you can zoom in, you can pan across a scene. These are things you could not do in in animation before this time, it just wouldn't work. I mean, it's incredibly cinematic to be able to do this. This is the kind of thing you could only do with a live camera not in drawings, it just hadn't been done before. We could do a whole episode on Fantasia alone. It's this avant garde, you know, animated film, some people love it, some people hate it, but it's undeniably astonishing as a piece of art to be made in I think was like 1939, or something like that. It's just an incredible, incredible work.

Christine Malec: 25:56

Speaking of polarizing, I think it's not an outrage, to categorize the Simpsons on South Park together as possibly having the same fan base, they share a certain sardonic, you know, approach to the world. But I know people who won't watch South Park because of the animation style alone. So can we break that down?

JJ Hunt: 26:16

Yeah, they're very different. So South Park, is really unique. I don't think I've seen anything else that's done quite in the same way. It's South Park in animation is made to look like stop motion animation, with paper cutouts. So it's like, you know, if you took a, you know, sheet, a bristol board or whatever, and you cut out a circle, and then you cut out using a different color, some legs, and then you cut out a different color and put a head on it, you glued it all together, boom, there's your character, extremely simple, lots of simple shapes. Very, very flat. And the characters are primarily presented from one angle, like we talked about that three quarter profile for the for the Flintstones, this is even more rigid, it's almost always face on. So all the characters, even if they're, if they're, like, if they're having a group conversation, they will often just be all standing in a row. Oh, facing us. Yeah, it's very, very, very flat. And the actions are intentionally jerky because they just, it's like these little cutouts that are moving around, so you don't get smooth, fluid motion, you get like that, that, that that that, you know, arms waving up and down. Very, very, very simple animation. And if you know, the folks who are not watching are Canadian, that makes even more sense, because it should be noted that Canadians are rendered even more crudely than the other characters within the show. Yeah, there's constant jokes about Canadians, but there are it's true, it's constant. And so the way the visuals to the way that represent Canadians differently in the visuals, so most of the characters in South Park have simple facial features like white circles with black dots for you know, pupils, that's very classic straight lines for eyebrows and mouths that are animated within the confines of this round heads. So when the character talks, the mouth might move, and the eyebrows will move up and down, depending on the expression, you know, whatever. So it's simple, but they're fully rendered. Canadians. No, no, Canadians don't even get mouths. Our heads are these ovals. And they're split in half. There's a top half and a bottom half. And, and our eyes are just black dots. We're very, very simple creatures, you see.

Christine Malec: 28:35

Ha! We're a simple folk.

JJ Hunt: 28:36

When a Canadian on South Park talks. The top half of the head just bounces and tips back and forth. And that's what makes us talk we are very, very, very simple. Yeah.

Christine Malec: 28:51

Oh my gosh! Ok, that's absolutely new to me. Terrance and Philip, I'll never see them the same again. So what about the Simpsons? What's its style?

JJ Hunt: 29:00

So the Simpsons is interesting. The Simpsons is kind of like, I don't know, I think of it as being one of the most cartoony cartoons out there, because it's pulling on a lot of these references that we've already talked about. So again, a black outlines, and then very bright bold colors inside in fact, like primary colors, so they're like the skin tone. The default skin tone is this yellow color. Bart's shirt and Lisas dress are bright red marches, hair and homers pants are blue, primary colors, very, very bright black outlines. And again this stylized look this very clear look. So big round eyes with black dots for pupils. The noses are these little Nubbins like stubby little fingertips all the noses are like that. The hair is interesting. So the hair in The Simpsons is sometimes an extension of the head. So Lisa's head and baby man I guess head, there are these like their yellow faces and then the tops of their heads are spiked like a kid's drawing of the sun, there's no separate hair on top of their head is their hair. It's very strange. Bart similarly has like a spiky flat top. It doesn't, it's not separate. And that's not the case for all the characters. Some of the characters have hair. Marge, of course, has this tower of blue hair. It's like a big, blue phallic shrubbery that's on top of her head. And Homer has this zigzagging straight line around the sides of his head, and two strands of hair as a comb over on top, very, very simple, very clean, and they all have overbites. That's the that's the classic Simpson face, so strong on the upper lip, and then very weak on the chin area. And then yeah, some of the tropes and techniques that were used in, in the Flintstones get pulled into the Simpsons. So the backgrounds right there, they are rendered separately. The difference here is that the backgrounds in the in the foreground and the characters, they're all rendered with the same color. So they're all bold, they're all clean, the black, outline, bold colors, is, you know, that is throughout visually, so visually, it's seamless. And the backgrounds are repeated, like they have been done in all those previous other shows that we've talked about. But they're not recycled one after the other after the other, they you'll only ever notice a repeating background in The Simpsons, if they want you to notice if they're making a joke about it, then they'll do that intentionally. But otherwise, they don't quite do that. They also do create a depth of field, they use some shadows in The Simpsons, but really, that's that's so the world looks convincing. As a real world. It does have that kind of look to it. But it is still a very cartoony cartoon.

Christine Malec: 32:03

And I wonder about what's going on in animation. Currently, and I'm not following it particularly, but I know for example, there's a Star Trek animated series called lower decks. And so are they following any new approaches to animation styling?

JJ Hunt: 32:19

Lower Decks is an interesting one. So it's, in some ways, it's quite a bit like The Simpsons they do. They do have 3d worlds, right. So they're, you know, you have a foreground, a background and a middle ground and there is a little bit of shading in the characters. Not a ton. Though, it's a little bit closer, the character design is a little bit closer to what I've heard called either like the modern style, or the 2d flat, or 2d flash like style. This is a lot of the stuff that you'll find on the Cartoon Network. Now things like Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Laboratory, Teen Titans Go, it's a little bit younger. It's this very flat graphic style. So in the extreme versions of it, there are no shadows, very heavy black outlines, very bold colors, and a very clean digital look with limited three dimensionality within the characters. So even though the characters are in three dimensional worlds, sometimes the characters themselves look very flat. So something like lower decks has uses elements of this, this flat, very digital rendering, but then something like Powerpuff Girls can be pretty harsh, like it's really extremely flat. Sometimes the backgrounds are nothing but stylized shapes and colors, very thinly rendered sometimes very muted. Sometimes, the movement in these tends to be quite fast, it's abrupt. It's a little bit choppy. And you can hear that in the pacing as well. Like the way the movement goes away characters are zip, zip, zip from here to there. And it's, it looks like Flash animation. It's not flash animation, but it looks like it looks like it's rendered very quickly, very, it's very, very digital. The lines are too clean to be drawn by hand. No one is thinking this is drawn by hand. The corners are too sharp, the curves are too smooth. The Simpsons by now, of course, is digitally rendered as well, but it's evolved from a hand drawn style. So it still retains a little bit of that. But this modern 2d flat, it is entirely digital proud of it. It looks like it was done on a tablet, as opposed to done in a production studio and that's intentional.

Christine Malec: 34:40

I have one opinion question. Don't think too hard if it doesn't come easily, but what's the most realistic animation you've ever seen?

JJ Hunt: 34:49

There have been there are a couple of different ways to create realistic sometimes it's about realistic movement. In the case of realistic movement, the Disney approach where you're actually drawing over filmed footage, the movement looks very, very realistic. Then there's the kind of the computer the CGI realistic. And then you get into the uncanny valley thing where if you get too close to reality, but you can't get it perfect, it looks really bad. So even though it's technically closer to being real, it looks far worse. I think for the most realistic animation, you'd have to go to video games. And there are some incredible animations in that where I have had the experience of watching, you know, seeing a YouTube clip, and it's a big, you know, action sequence or something like that. And I'll be 20 or 30 seconds in before I realized, oh, wait a minute. This is an animated video game. This isn't like a fight scene from a film. Oh, yeah. It's not until you get close up and you get to look at that character's face. Because, yeah, you know, the the expression isn't exactly right. The sweat down the side of the face isn't perfect. But that's kind of that's the CGI kind of side of things. Yeah, it's it. realism and animation. You only want to get so close and then you want to have to kind of dial it back. Otherwise, it looks too creepy.

Christine Malec: 36:25

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