August 24, 2005

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  The Following is an Essay written in 2002 for the Cartoons Section of The Cultural Blender Website. I originally planned three essays, and the outline for them is on the main page to the Cartoons Section. The first and second, dealing with the history of the cartooning medium and the fact that cartooning is not an artform originally designed for children only, were never finished, and I began looking at finally finishing those essays last night while looking over the section. The third essay, which I present here, is called "Computers and Animation" and details the "future" of cartooning as an artform.

  
  

  
  

  Computers and Animation

  
  

  Sat. March 30, 2002
  7:00 p.m. pst

  
  

  Finally, I will talk about the future of the filmed medium, where animation, as practiced in the computer, will morph with conventional photography, so that anything in the imagination will be able to be experienced. Couple the advances in CGI (computer generated imagery) with an immersive experience, and you have "virtual reality." The future of the medium is very exciting.

  
  

  
  Computers and Animation

  
  

  
  As the last of the great "animators" pass out of this existence, the skill that it once took to create conventional, hand drawn "cartoons" will pass away as well, because as computer graphics advance to the state where they can precisely replicate life and the world around us, they will be able to replicate anything we can dream up as well. The range of the computer graphics palette will start at photorealistic and change from there to any type of graphic ability imaginable. Computer animation will at some point in the recent future morph (and that's as fine a word as any) into a new kind of artform. Instead of "computer animation" (i.e. "Toy Story", or "Monsters Inc." and "CGI" (computer generated imaging, like T-2 in "Terminator 2" or the flyover shot of "Titanic") occupying two separate realms, there will be a "cultural blending" together, where audiences will not know or care where one stops and the other begins. This new artform will render the ideas of filmed reality and cartoons moot.
  The early stirrings of this new artform which could eventually take the place of both animated and conventionally "lensed" motion pictures can be seen in the recent "live=action/computer animated" "cartoon character" movies. Films like "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and "Scooby Doo" incorporate "realistic" looking cartoon characters along with live action actors.
  This was started back in the early nineties with the release of Disney's "Roger Rabbit". Already, though it failed miserably because of lack of plot, "Final Fantasy" imagined a world with CGI "humans" who looked almost like real people. The range of computer graphics in this type of endeavor is already impressive, and the strides to yet be taken are wonderful to imagine.

  
  

  I predict that computer imagery,and it's near perfect "cloning" capabilities, will change animation in look and form, but not in substance and theme. For as long as man has been able to project images which move, he has been "drawing" on animation to supply the images which are only in his imagination.

  
  

  When I "create" my little composites for these websites, I see images in a different light. I see an infinite capablity, utilizing the various tools available, and others which haven't yet been dreamed up, to render anything imaginable, in whatever way in which we imagine it. I see dreams and nightmares, ecstasy and pain, knowledge and epiphany. All because of the computer graphics program's abilities to take copy/paste to the next level.

  
  

  Perhaps within five to ten years, before I turn 60, the forever shrinking memory chip will allow complex animation paths and behaviors to become available to the novice, and complex animated features will show up on the websites of 12 year olds. The elements, which have been in place for at least two decades, will perhaps not "create" artists. but artistic types who haven't been able to give illustration to their ideas will now have that power.

  
  

  In the early days of computing (circa 1985-88) although programming looked difficult, and results seemed ultimately anticlimactic rather than mystifying and awe inspiring, I searced the local audio superstores for a Commodore Amiga because I had read in Video Review Magazine that you could digitally edit videotape, and add special effects, titles and transitions very easily within the computer. As I write this, albeit on my (now rapidly aging) Compaq 7940 from 1999, there is the possibility that I can not only edit video and add special effects, but create animation and put my creations on DVD's which I could conceiveably sell on my website.

  
  

  The possibilities exist for a mass globalization of a digital imaging art form.

  
  

  Already, by scouring photo databases like Webshots and Exite or Google, I can find illuminating and artistic examples of composites and animations which will, with time, get easier for thier creators to conjure up.

  
  

  As the tools become easier to use, the amount and variation of artists creating in the medium will multiply, then rise exponentially. Perhaps because of digital imaging programs, mental health shall become a stable factor in society, as imagination becomes "virtual reality".

  
  

  The term "virtual reality", which seems to have been with us for a couple of decades now, used to allude to a world, as portrayed in movies like "The Lawnmower Man", where the user would strap on his virtual reality helmet, mount a gurney or gyroscope, and take a trip inside the computer. The early CGI movie "Tron" released by Disney in 1982, and the first to use exclusive use of computer graphics, imagines a physical world inside the computer. William Gibson, writing in 1984, coined the term "cyberspace" to imagine a digital realm inhabitable by humans with electrodes and computers inserted inside them.

  
  

  The heretofore only imagined world of "virtual reality" and the already existing techology which is responsible for photorealistic computer generated images of places and worlds only residing currently within the realm of human imagination will very soon merge together, and we will view, and in fact "experience" these worlds in ways that "virtual reality" never even imagined.

  
  

  Already, through the programs already available, some very interesting effects can be achieved. In my feeble way, I'm attempting to get a handle on this wonderful technology by designing the composites on websites such as the Cultural Blender. The idea of copy/paste, when taken into the infinite realms the mind inhabits, allows me to begin to realize that anything I can imagine, I can therefore find, cut, paste, and affix to my own vision.

  
  

  With time, these visions will move, not only in space, but in with time and emotion in check. Art exists when mankind uses the elements around him to comment on and enhance his life experience.

  
  

  Soon the websites of the departed shall become their legacies, inhabited with the creatures of their dreams come visually out of their imagination and into cyberrealistic sense and nonsense.

  
  

  We can be entertained, nee, enlightended by the possibilities soon to be bestowed upon us.
  With Disney, it started with a mouse. With Max and Dave Fleischer, it was a clown. In 1968, I drew my first "Arnold" cartoon. I haven't flowered along with conventional animation, but I feel a flowering of the digital type to spring forth very soon.

  
  

  I see a wonderful new world on the horizon, where film, animation, imagination, and art mix and blend together in a copy/paste hurricane of cultural and social implications.

  
  

  Everyone is equal in cyberspace. I've mentioned this before. The ways in which our images inform and excite us in new and exciting ways, now and a few digital moments from now, will announce a new world of tolerance and understanding.

  
  

  A picture is worth a thousand words. With access to the right pictures, and the ability to speak volumes with the images selected, we are about to experience an avalanche of communication at exactly the moment in history in which this communication needs to happen.
  And we can look back at, and thank the cartoon film for starting this revolution.

  
  

  
  Michael F. Nyiri  3/30/2002

  
  

  
  

  • 8:27 am
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