For the Love of Line
I love lines. And lately, I miss it them on the big screen: I miss the magic of caricatured lines-in-motion.
I admire 3D animation when it’s done well, by Pixar and others. But to me it still lacks something. For a long time I puzzled over this and couldn’t quite explain it to myself. What was the absent element?
Finally, as obvious as it sounds, I realized that they have no lines. It’s not that these films are no longer something vaguely defined as “2-D”; it’s more exactly that they have no outlines.
Lines. Good old outlines. They took them away, and added a whole bunch more lighting and rendering and usually unnecessary camera movement, and called it “3-D animation”.
Yes, in creating this brave new creature, they threw away the lines, locked them in the garage, to cower ignominiously, ignored. They ripped those weak, spindly outlines away from the forms they enclosed; forgot about them. Dropped them.
At least, they dropped them from the final product. But the artists themselves haven’t forgotten them; you look at all the “Art of…” books released in conjunction with 3D films, and you can find endless beautiful outlines. The artists still know the ultimate power of the line: and often, in my opinion, the art in those books is more engaging than the actual films themselves. Personally I often look at a piece of art in one of those books and say to myself, “I wish this was in a picture book, or a comic, or a so-called ‘2-D’ version, drawn just as it is here, in all its graphic simple beauty!”
Lines. I love them. In all their simplistic, no-tech glory, I love them nonetheless.
Outlines: lines around things, enclosing shape and suggesting forms. Stipple lines. Hatching lines. Pattern lines. Pen lines, brush lines, marker lines. All the endless sorts of lines, straight, sinuous, pointed, long short, and broken…
They have a pure distilled-down magic. Suggestive and symbolic, they don’t exist in reality. They promise and prompt and then let the imagination of the viewer fulfill the rest, actively bridging the gap. They engage the mind!
In the hands of many past masters, such as Milt Kahl, Marc Davis, Bill Peet, Ken Anderson, and so so many others, we were treated to the unfettered glories and suggestive powers of the line, whether still or in motion. On the big screen, we tasted the singular delight of caricature-line-in-motion. And the amazing spectacle of the background layouts in 101 Dalmatians, with their raw, naked lines, brazen and unashamed.
It’s a specific flavour, a graphic taste, that can be gotten no other way, and when you know and love that flavour, you have to have more of it. You watch classic films such as The Jungle Book, or for that matter The Iron Giant, for their story and acting and character, of course; but beneath that, you watch and enjoy the beauty of caricature-line-in-motion, for its own sake. It adds enjoyment as a language all on its own.
I have nothing actively against so-called “3D” and films made that way…but I miss them, the good old outlines, and the worlds they conjured...
I admire 3D animation when it’s done well, by Pixar and others. But to me it still lacks something. For a long time I puzzled over this and couldn’t quite explain it to myself. What was the absent element?
Finally, as obvious as it sounds, I realized that they have no lines. It’s not that these films are no longer something vaguely defined as “2-D”; it’s more exactly that they have no outlines.
Lines. Good old outlines. They took them away, and added a whole bunch more lighting and rendering and usually unnecessary camera movement, and called it “3-D animation”.
Yes, in creating this brave new creature, they threw away the lines, locked them in the garage, to cower ignominiously, ignored. They ripped those weak, spindly outlines away from the forms they enclosed; forgot about them. Dropped them.
At least, they dropped them from the final product. But the artists themselves haven’t forgotten them; you look at all the “Art of…” books released in conjunction with 3D films, and you can find endless beautiful outlines. The artists still know the ultimate power of the line: and often, in my opinion, the art in those books is more engaging than the actual films themselves. Personally I often look at a piece of art in one of those books and say to myself, “I wish this was in a picture book, or a comic, or a so-called ‘2-D’ version, drawn just as it is here, in all its graphic simple beauty!”
Lines. I love them. In all their simplistic, no-tech glory, I love them nonetheless.
Outlines: lines around things, enclosing shape and suggesting forms. Stipple lines. Hatching lines. Pattern lines. Pen lines, brush lines, marker lines. All the endless sorts of lines, straight, sinuous, pointed, long short, and broken…
They have a pure distilled-down magic. Suggestive and symbolic, they don’t exist in reality. They promise and prompt and then let the imagination of the viewer fulfill the rest, actively bridging the gap. They engage the mind!
In the hands of many past masters, such as Milt Kahl, Marc Davis, Bill Peet, Ken Anderson, and so so many others, we were treated to the unfettered glories and suggestive powers of the line, whether still or in motion. On the big screen, we tasted the singular delight of caricature-line-in-motion. And the amazing spectacle of the background layouts in 101 Dalmatians, with their raw, naked lines, brazen and unashamed.
It’s a specific flavour, a graphic taste, that can be gotten no other way, and when you know and love that flavour, you have to have more of it. You watch classic films such as The Jungle Book, or for that matter The Iron Giant, for their story and acting and character, of course; but beneath that, you watch and enjoy the beauty of caricature-line-in-motion, for its own sake. It adds enjoyment as a language all on its own.
I have nothing actively against so-called “3D” and films made that way…but I miss them, the good old outlines, and the worlds they conjured...
posted by Paul Rivoche at 1:57 PM
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