RCBH928 wrote:I believed it was the other way around. I don't think I saw too many works done by smaller companies in 3D on par of Toy Story, while hand drawn shows were being pumped world wide in the 70s->late 90s. I also believed that the software and hardware were extremely expensive, not to mention I read there is insane amount of rendering time, something like 80+hrs for a single frame.
note, I am not talking about images drawn using computer software but a full fledged 3D animation.
There are a lot of factors going into the costs of both. Animation is labor-intensive either way, making high quality animated features of either kind relatively expensive movies to make. By contrast, a lot of what you'd find on TV has pushed to find
cost-cutting measures whenever possible, and there are plenty of low-quality CGI productions out there as well.
Generally though, 3D movies have been cheaper to produce.
Toy Story had a $30M budget, compared to the $55M that
Pocahontas cost that same year. Costs for either style spiked up after that. The 1999 comparison would be $90M for
Toy Story 2 and $130M for
Tarzan (or $145M on some sources). Relative to the
many other memorable movies that came out 20 years ago... both were still fairly expensive movies, even compared to big budget action stuff like
The Matrix or
The Phantom Menace.
There were more modestly budgeted animated movies that year too -
The Iron Giant (which lost money on a ~$50M budget) and
Antz...but even then, those were not
cheap movies, still on par or pricier than many live-action ones.
By the time that Disney sort of phased out the theatrical 2D movies, they were pretty steadily $100M+ movies. So while there have been some 3D movies since then that have had significantly larger budgets - several cresting $200M, with
Tangled ($260M) still being one of the most expensive movies of any kind (a bit of R&D and production delays contributing to that AFAIK)... I'd suspect 2D features would have ended up being up there too. More commonly, the modern Disney 3D movies are in the $150-160M range budgets, which isn't that far removed from what some of their pricier 2D films cost decades ago.
I am not too big on the computer drawn animations or cel shading. While technically it is 2D and hand drawn, the end results seems too clean, sharp, and flat. They look something closer to a Flash web animation. I like the richer, I guess, pencil drawn looks like Disney's Robin Hood and An American Tale.I don't see too many of those lately, but based on the art project one or the other could work better.
While I don't necessarily disagree regarding end results,
to be fair, it's also not uncommon for cel shaded CGI to be akin to special effects. Done well, you don't even notice it. Many films have used it for select elements (like for the actual Iron Giant in that movie) without it looking out of place. I think a lot of the problems with it will be fixed over time (if not already). Mostly, I think the issue is that good animation
is stylized well beyond the shader. The more effort put into making it work, the better the tools will get, and the more convincing results we'll see.