The General Benefits of Animation

[Milkymagic]

My Base Questions

1. What do you like about animation that it can do over live-action film? Y'know, what makes anything animated what it is?

2. What benefits would you see in taking a manga or novel and adapting it into animation?

3. (add any other thoughts into this space)

Answer #1
I'd probably say the best feature about anime is how the perspective is not reliant on looking for set locations to film a particular sequence, which means it can be drawn at the correct angle to give off the ideal atmosphere. My favorite examples of this include a sequence in the first Patlabor film in which a chief yells at his subordinate (Ota) and the angle focuses almost concave-like upon his face and then shifts the perspective slightly as the argument becomes heated. Another sequence, ironically Patlabor 2, has a montage of troops surrounding Tokyo with many angles that would be hard to capture in a conventional live-action film such as reflective skyscrapers that capture a chopper riding by for instance.

Another possible benefit, though it can certainly be a double-edged sword, is the violence and destruction that can be depicted. Entire buildings can be destroyed effortlessly, people can practically explode if the artists desired it, and the whole planet could just freaking blow up if it was desired. Of course, once again, violence destruction is good and bad.

Designs such as mechs or fantasy-themed creatures are made with relative ease, without the worry for makeup or special effects (in some cases) to cover the visual look. So this aspect is easier.

Finally, overall content. I'd be totally surprised if most anime could be translated accurately into live-action. Some can, but some can't. Just look at material like Project A-ko or FLCL for instance.

Answer #2
Animation would obviously be easier for a manga, given the visual stylings, but I feel a novel doesn't benefit much more over a live-action film adaptation (being this depends on overall budget). But I feel the greatest benefit in this category would be promotion, as I've discovered great manga through the viewings of the anime that depicted those original stories. Sometimes the best way to create awareness is to go through a television or computer screen and zap some advertising through somebody. But a close second place would be added visual excitement, like maybe a sequence in a comic or novel could be made more exciting through a visual zap of beautiful artistry. A final benefit I could see, though selfish, is a director taking somebody else's work and personalizing it to add more perspective (or merely another angle) such as Oshii's Ghost in the Shell adaptation or Anno with His and Her Circumsances.

Answer#3
There will always be a benefit to every medium that can be seen, but the way the benefits are realized all remain the same to me, as I feel it all comes down to one's own creativity and resources.

[Mana]

Stylization is probably the key element for me. Humans and animals will always look like humans and animals when filmed, but animation gives you so many other options as far as design elemts go. Draw dark and angular for a horror animation, bubbly roundness and bright colours for children, more realistic stylization for animation aimed at an older audience, etc etc. Even live-action has used this now to some extent with the addition of CG graphics in movies.

I suppose that kind of answers both questions >.>;

[kyubichan]

1. Things look better with animation when it comes to elements that don't really appear in real life. Even with advanced CG, scenes appear smoother when the whole sequence is animated rather than live-action+CG.

2. Even with imagination, images are still there, up in our noggins. When animated or adapted to live-action, you can sit back and relax, and watch everything unfold without worrying about losing your place in a book. And ooh, moving pictures ^^

3. No matter how hard you try, you can't make me believe that a real living person can swordfight while standing on tiptoes on treetops.

[Milkymagic]

I suppose that kind of answers both questions >.>;

Wow, it does...but that's what moving pictures can certainly do! It captures the atmosphere on a new level.

1. Things look better with animation when it comes to elements that don't really appear in real life. Even with advanced CG, scenes appear smoother when the whole sequence is animated rather than live-action+CG.

2. Even with imagination, images are still there, up in our noggins. When animated or adapted to live-action, you can sit back and relax, and watch everything unfold without worrying about losing your place in a book. And ooh, moving pictures ^^

3. No matter how hard you try, you can't make me believe that a real living person can swordfight while standing on tiptoes on treetops.

1. Yes, sometimes CG+live-action at its worst makes me throw up, and it makes me want to play a video game instead.
2. Yes, I am not the fastest reader (since I concentrate on paragraphs from time to time), and a movie just pushes me forward and lets me think afterwards.
3. Definitely!

[Roark]

Abstraction, abstraction, abstraction. Animation, follows traditional forms of painting and drawing in that it deals in abstraction. While photorealism does exist, great power comes from depicting only what you want depicted. This means dealing purely in symbols and icons, as the mid-20th century showed us by breaking art down to simple geometric patterns and basic colours.

So, what exactly does that mean? It means wholly inclusive realities. All that's required is internal consistancy. That allows stories, scenarios, and situations impossible in a more realistic medium, like animation. There will always be a wall between viewer and medium, an obvious "someone created and drew this" that doesn't exist in film (see: Blair Witch Project for film example). This means that viewers go into an animated feature knowing they're watching something completely fantastical.

Hence, immediate lowered expectations for realism. This isn't meant as a negative. Rather, this means that absurd or impossible situations slip under the radar easier. A lot more disbelief is suspended. Compare this to film, where great pains must be taken to provide verisimilitude. Ask yourself why most crappy sci-fi and fantasy movies fail to seem engrossing, and you'll see why. This is also why The Princess Bride casts itself in a frame story - it makes the fantasy easier to believe when you know you're seeing a story.

Now, we also talked about icons and above. This is both a strength and disadvantage at once. Icons are great for universals. Look at illustrated warning signs - we all know how to follow an airplane emergency card, even if it's in Swahili. However, the abstraction and iconization creates the layer between viewer and viewed, as noted above. Icons do remove characters a layer or three from reality. Hence, animations' problem with realistic characters. While not impossible, emotion and expression in animation will by natrue be more exagerrated and less realistic than in film. This is just a fact - I don't care how "realistic" or emotional your favorite anime is. Animated characters just don't display the same nuance as a talented actor.

Now, good animators recognize this fact and play off it to great effect. The better emotional treatments in animation delve straight into various root-level emotions: love, pain, fear, joy, happiness, anger, etc. Animation can examine base emotions in ways that other medium cannot, again due to abstracting it. When a character so obviously and perfectly represents a characteristic, you can contrast and compliment said characteristics and emotions directly, to much greater effect.

Abstraction also gives rise to Mana's stylization point. An old film called the Great Race is described as a live-action cartoon for how stylized the characters were, how abstracted they were from real heros and villains. Generally, stylization in live action takes lots of costuming, masks, or exceptional effects (see: Sin City). Abstracting human elements makes stylization that much easier.

So why transfer mediums? Money. Or the desire to apply a new interpretation onto something. Some books really read like screenplays, so they're trying to become movies. Now, why into animation specifically? The level of abstraction required to do a book may be impossible to do with live-action or may look hokey (see: lots of bad wu-xia films). Waking Life did this fairly well - it had to be animated.

Books with lots of human elements, lots of delicate character portraits, those are probably best as live action. Anna Karenina would suck animated - she's just too deep. Disney's Hunchback suffered this fault, because it reduced complex characters too much.

yeah, I take my entertainment seriously.

[soundchazer]

The posibility to put any type of scenario of story in a moving format. While CG and movies can do that, there are several constraints because of the realism that is expected out of them and the overall cost. With animation, you don't have that problem, since as Roark well put it, it is a simplyfied version of "reality" and allows the public to be less tied to the logical element of the mind... or in other words, with lower expectations comes a better chance for acceptance.

[Milkymagic]

Pretty much, it's all about believability, and nothing translates more logically than how we interpret reality within the given medium. Can we imagine what is onscreen being a possibility, even if by fictional means? It's all in the presentation, and the compliment is always the quality of the story that goes along with it, though one should definitely keep in mind the limitations of expression visually and those that come viscerally through a book.

In a way, visuals truly hold more credit in any film when given you're viewing something with the risk of not following what's happening in front of you if there is nothing visually to stimulate the right response, otherwise the story doesn't work. Abstraction is definitely the way to keep a proper interest for the individual in animated form. Because pretty much, reality is just wholly separate from the images that pervade all drawn mediums.

CG isn't much kinder in my opinion.

[Roark]

The quality of the story really doesn't enter into it, but more the elements of the narrative. If the narrative calls for people lobbing giant energy balls at each other, representing it visually becomes a major challenge. It's relatively easy in words, somewhat harder in static images or animation, and worlds harder when you have to apply it to the real world. If the narrative calls for real people in real situations, no matter how extraordinary, you'll get more resonance placing a real person there.

It'd be really tough to do a live action FLCL, as we've noted, because animation lets us accept a weird world of robots from heads. It'd be really tough to do an animated Godfather triology, since a lot of the drama and attachment comes from seeing Marlon Brando and friends in their full human dirtyness.

[Milkymagic]

The quality of the story really doesn't enter into it, but more the elements of the narrative. If the narrative calls for people lobbing giant energy balls at each other, representing it visually becomes a major challenge. It's relatively easy in words, somewhat harder in static images or animation, and worlds harder when you have to apply it to the real world. If the narrative calls for real people in real situations, no matter how extraordinary, you'll get more resonance placing a real person there.

It'd be really tough to do a live action FLCL, as we've noted, because animation lets us accept a weird world of robots from heads. It'd be really tough to do an animated Godfather triology, since a lot of the drama and attachment comes from seeing Marlon Brando and friends in their full human dirtyness.

Irony: I just watched The Godfather yesterday, and I perfectly understand what you just said as a result. Actually, I don't think animation could even capture "Marlon Brando" if it tried. I like the grief he expresses when he realizes how the business changes around him, it certainly felt real, and by the end of the film I wanted to cry for him. Good, bad, he was human. I've always separated a man from his business in such portrayals, even if mafia work was certainly dirty. Actually, I do that in a majority of cases (give or take the people in this world who are genuine 100% *******s), but I don't go overboard with that viewpoint.

So in that regard, I guess it would be infinitely harder to dissect a fictional anime character, because a good amount of the narratives do call for different circumstances, and the more believable narratives hold real people within them (like Shiro from The Wings of Honneamise for example). But in the same regard, some of those narratives are modeled after real people and places, like Grave of the Fireflies, so there is a narrative that remains easy to identify to the public.

Something like FLCL definitely has its own way of working, and maybe even not working on a conventional level of narrative. But as I've just realized, it's all thanks to animation, and not necessarily the need for direct human expression, but once again abstraction.

[Ghostmaster]

Nice animation definately adds to the whole experience, you don't want to watch something that looks like a piece of crap. I do enjoy the CG mixed in with the animation now that a lot of animes use, but I don't like when they overdo it, or all they use is CG or whatever and just rely on the animation.

[laborpilot86]

Animation's flexiablity is it's greatest strength. Part of the effectiveness of Serial Experiments Lain is the flatness of the 'real' world compared to the Wired. Ghost in the Shell just would not work in live-action because the ideas and images are so extreme, it would look ridiculous in anything other animation. The bright colors and differant designs that are so effective in many shoujo anime are all but unusable in live-action. Grave of the Fireflies is the greatest anti-war film ever made (yes, it's better then All Quiet on the Western Front[1930 version] and Jean Renoir's Le Grande Illiusion[1938]), because it is animation. If it wasn't it would just be another semi-exploitive Schlindlers List knockoff. Try doing any mecha story in live action?

[ZZalapski]

Try doing any mecha story in live action?

Does this summer's Transformers movie count?

[Roark]

And what about Power Rangers?

[laborpilot86]

Roark, you just made my point


The thing with the Transformers movie is that it's mostly cg, so it might fall into the same mixed animated/live action category as Cool World and Who Framed Roger Rabbit

[Marth]

1. Animation works far better with fantasy/supernatural imho. A lot of live-action fantasy is incredibly cheesy, except the epic clashes of large armies, such as in LotR.

2. I prefer anime to manga in general, except in the case of romantic comedy and harem stuff. So... everything. Unless it has bad voice acting and terrible music.

[shizukuchan]

Animation appeals more strongly to kids (or maybe to a more childlike or primordial part of the mind), so I have a hard time deciding whether that means a young mind is better with certain kinds of abstract thinking or receptivity to symbols, considering some of Roark's points about abstraction and symbolism. Maybe I have a hard time deciding, because I've been taught that adults are better at understanding abstract symbols; however, understanding is one thing, and receptivity to experience is another.

Anyway, most of us today grow up with cartoons, so I think it's very likely that animated images have strong associations with certain childhood feelings, experiences, and faculties that we may not even have words for as adults. So animation is a kind of abstraction and symbolism, but I think that also makes animation a kind of language. After all, any vehicle of abstract symbolism can be considered a language.

I'm pretty sure that most people's receptivity to cartoon images generally decreases as time goes by. This makes me wonder about the advantages of animation when considered as a language. Language, as a system of abstract symbols, refers to something beyond the symbol. A lot of us have memories of cartoons that made a big impression earlier in life, only to become boring to us later. So exactly what kinds of things does the language of animation refer to? Only to childhood experiences? Or perhaps animation refers to a field which is much more vast: not the experiences of childhood, but the innumerable seeds of experience, many of which don't really have a chance to germinate in the short span of receptive youth.

Maybe that's the main advantage of animation as a language: it refers to some things held or dormant in the mind which verbal language is not able to refer to. That's also a reason why I sometimes disagree with people who think of animation only in terms of aesthetics or entertainment value. The significance of verbal language is more than just a matter of aesthetics and entertainment, so I think cartoons and anime should be considered likewise.

If you think about it, our experience of reality is largely limited by the languages or systems of symbols we rely upon. Otherwise, we aren't really able to "read" the pages of our experience. Experiences depend on activating the seeds of potential in the mind, and those seeds never even see the light of day unless we're able to assign a symbolic code to refer to it and bring it within range of conscious perception. Considering animation as a language, it's easy to feel that each mind holds an entire culture buried like a lost civilization. Verbal language is not equal to it, so, as much as one would want to describe it in words, the necessary symbols and images seem to come with difficulty, like a mind in an infantile state.

[Milkymagic]

I must admit, I made this thread in hopes of truly understanding why exactly I liked animation in the first place.

I always told myself it was because,"Animation could do things live-action couldn't." This remains correct thanks to my grasp on abstraction and narrative (thanks to Roark and SC), and the same way I've interpreted symbols in my life is no different than the interpretation behind watching animated shows. There's something we pick up and understand in the world, then we notice that same symbol abstracted in animation, and it becomes clear. Yet, we are amused because it is so differently depicted. In truth, it's all about how we read everything. And some people like and dislike animation judging by how well they can believe what's being shown in front of them. It is indeed fiction, but as long as we come to understand that animation is all drawn up, our minds do the work of interpreting what is going on within the barriers of the program. But again, this is all a matter of the level the narrative aims for, and the abstractions that keep our believability within that animated film.

There might not be a specific reason for liking a specific art style, other than little details that bring you great amusement in their abstraction, but that is something that might only be understood with a look into Cognitive Science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Science). Maybe it's because I liked how different everything was depicted from reality, and it felt more vast because of its abstractions to real life symbols. I basically understand what animation can do over live-action, but myself and animation is another subject entirely. I know why I like animation now, and maybe I'm just brooding too far for my own good.

Still, your post was interesting, and I'm still thinking how it could've communicated to me before I really began to interpret it differently than I did then. I was amused before, and now I'm trying to be engrossed with great storytelling alongside excellent narrative and artistic merit (yes, abstraction). So perhaps there might've been a connection on the level you speak of, but again, I'm confident it was just me identifying an abstract symbol of what I originally saw in reality. And I became amused by the differences animation held between our reality and in the perception of something that was animated.

It's different than reading a book, but animation can be enjoyed just the same with enough believability put into it, as it thrusts your mind into adventure and takes you away from your reality for a little bit. It's all about identifying what's in front of you.

And if I'm wrong about all this, somebody please slap some sense into me!

[ricomambo]

1. Ooh... there are so many things. Visually, animations brings alot of things that live-action can't. If the animation is fluid, you can bring characters to do amazing movements. Fight scenes that comes into life, fleshing out our wildest imaginations. Landscape art can be so dramatic. And when you look and stare at a stunning background, you get drawn to the character's world. Moments in the story become alive like fireflies witnessing the separation of two lovers. besides it's so much fun watching anime than watching live action.hehe

2. I think it's great to see how manga/anime is translated with real, live people. You get to see and feel it in a different dimension.

3. I'm just relieved that someone posted something more positive than the cartoon vs. anime thing that pissed me off a couple of times now in this forum. there are lot of great things in animation that it makes it worthwhile to watch one.

[Milkymagic]

1. Ooh... there are so many things. Visually, animations brings alot of things that live-action can't. If the animation is fluid, you can bring characters to do amazing movements. Fight scenes that comes into life, fleshing out our wildest imaginations. Landscape art can be so dramatic. And when you look and stare at a stunning background, you get drawn to the character's world. Moments in the story become alive like fireflies witnessing the separation of two lovers. besides it's so much fun watching anime than watching live action.hehe

2. I think it's great to see how manga/anime is translated with real, live people. You get to see and feel it in a different dimension.

3. I'm just relieved that someone posted something more positive than the cartoon vs. anime thing that pissed me off a couple of times now in this forum. there are lot of great things in animation that it makes it worthwhile to watch one.

Yep, animation can do more abstract things than live-action cinema, and that's the most definitive feature in its belt.

I pretty much post threads like these to promote optimism for animation and get people involved in talking about what they love about it so much. My threads on Your Most Appreciated Anime Figures and Characters were aiming for the same thing. Glad to see you enjoyed this thread! :D

But I think literature and graphic novel forms should be appreciated in the same token when I say this, as we all find great stories in every format when they are told just right.