Relative merits of pencil and pixel

 

I watched a BBC documentary Imagine - from pencils to pixels, where the documentary showed both the history and workings of hand drawn animation and computer animation and how they have changed animation over the years.

 

I found with hand drawn animation it can be combined with real life, Looney Tunes back in action  combined the violence of the cartoon world with real life, where they had the same basic animation and personality for the characters form the cartoon brought into live action, where the cartoon characters mixed with real life actors, which with computer animation it can't be done because with computer animation they tent to try and make their films realistic without using real life props, also with drawn animation you get the power of lines which cannot be seen in computer animation and with hand drawings there easier to do because anyone can pick up a pencil and make a quick cartoon drawing, but with a computer it's a lot more harder to do with the detail involved. I also find hand drawing a lot more creative than computer animated work because hand drawing artists have to think a lot more about what there doing because there is a limit to the amount of mistakes that they can make while with computer animation there mistakes can easily be undone like Photoshop work, also hand 2D animation can be used on a computer like with Looney Tunes back in action and used to projected moving images from different series of hand drawn images.

 

I believe with computer animation the work produced is a lot more realistic than 2D animation, where every last detail is worked on like with finding Nemo the objects moving around in the sea are all work on to the very last detail. With toy story the documentary showed how Pixar when working on the character of woody, where with woody they showed how they made it look like he was thinking just by moving his eyes side to side and how it made the animation look like it was alive in term Pixar had turned computer animation into a Fine art medium. With computer animation you can be more experimental with use of colour where with hand drawn animation you have to choose there and then how you want to colour you drawings, while with computer work like Photoshop you can easily undo colour changes.

Overall when comparing the two mediums I prefer hand drawn animation because as an Illustrator it's fits in better with my way of working, while computer animation is seen more of an Fine art medium, I find 2D animation better than computer animation because with hand drawings they have to worked hard on in order to produce a quality drawing with shape, line, detail and shading, while with a computer you can easily just undo and make changes easily, while with hand draw work you would have to start again, so in term I also find hand drawing animation a hard form of working out of the two because hand drawn artist have to think about every think their are doing with there drawings.