Pas beaucoup de rapport, mais je colle juste cette très bonne analyse de la présence de 3D dans l’animation. C’est tiré des commentaires de la page de Download, et je conseille ceux qui sont interessés de lire la discussion, ca devient très intéressant (et y a même intervention d’un des créateurs)
Désolé, c’est très long et en anglais, mais je le trouve bien intéressant comme commentaire.
"From : Shawn Fumo
2002-02-28 23:57:00 (CET) (Posted from : —.veritechmedia.com )
I guess I might as well chime in on all of this as well. 
As far as the art style itself, I do like it. I’ve been disappointed by a lot 3D stuff out there because it looked too stiff and didn’t have any style. And some of the stuff like Zoids which have vehicles in a state half-way between regular 3d and toon-shaded IMHO looks worse than either full 2d or shiny 3d. Things like Geneshaft lately have done a much better job at integrated 2d and 3d (at least for ships and such).
But this one seems to really succeed as an entirely 3d, but flatshaded show. Understanding Chaos looked ok in stills, but from what I saw of the trailer, its low budget was very obvious when any motion happened. ShadowSkin looks better though. But the higher budget of Molly is very apparant. As someone else mentioned, it is above the quality of many Japanese TV shows, more like an OVA (even though there has been some quite high-quality tv shows as of late like Arjuna, Geneshaft, Scryed, and Figure 17).
But IMO, everyone seems a bit too obsessed with how much or little like anime it is. It borrows certain conventions from it, but has style of its own. Keep in mind that the reverse happens as well. The baka-hammer stuff in Kodocha (Child’s Toy) and the exagerated violence that happens to Keitaro in Love Hina are all very Loony-Toonish. The style of the default eyes is different from what is usually done in anime.
In the url below, it sounds like they also took inspiration from Mike Mignola, which I can see in some of the designs:
http://www.savtheworld.com/kidscreen.html
However, the ghostly mother figure does definitely looks like one of Leiji Matsumoto’s designs (Captain Harlock, Starblazers, etc.).
What is really going to depend on is how interesting the plot and action is. That crash scene does seem like it was taken from the Star Wars Ep1, but it could also be argued that SW itself took from Wacky Races a bit, which the Molly people also say in that are taking from in the article…
One other interesting thing is that several of the Cartoon Network originals like Dextor’s Laboritory and Powerpuff Girls have both borrowed pretty extensively from some of the stylings used in anime. In general I think it has worked very well, while maintaining their own style. It is also interesting to note that PPG is shown in Japan and is fairly popular.
In fact, several of the characters in Molly reminded me more of the style of Samurai Jack (especially that wizard type guy with the weird hat). Actually, it as if most of the characters are drawn in different styles from each other, which is interesting… Fits a bit with the Wacky Races theme, since all those characters were from different shows.
As far as FLCL goes, I don’t see that much similarities besides the opening title sequence (with the font of the logo), and the fact that they both have a digital look. FLCL has purposely faded colors, the character designs are different (Molly reminds me more of something like Jungle wa itsumo Hale nochi Guu). FLCL only has like two scenes with flatshaded 3d characters that I know of (the bullit-time rotation ones).
And speaking of that, flatshaded 3d for actual characters is still very rare in anime. Generally it is just used for background elements or machines. Ghost in the Shell was actually traditionally painted on cells. Some 3d like the green wireframes and console text was overlayed on top. There were a couple of scenes (like where the two mecha tank things battle each other in the big hall) where more 3d was used, but those were pretty obviously different from the rest of the movie.
I think Blood is a digital movie, but not in the 3d sense. Almost all recently made anime, the last several Disney movies, and probably Iron Giant and most of the newer american cartoon tv series are done digital. This doesn’t mean 3d, though. It just means that they take drawings and scan them in and color them on the computer (or sometimes do it all from scratch on the computer), and is done with computer stylus pens instead of mice. In that way it is not all that different from traditional animation except you have more control over color, panning, special effects, and have wonderous things like Undo. These may or may not look like traditional cell animation depending how how they do it. Shows like Love Hina with its super-bright colors are obviously digital, while some others are less obvious. However, I think Jin-Roh is probably the last completely non-digital anime movie we’ll see for quite a while now (and many make the mistake of thinking it is digital).
As far as originality goes, there is some original anime out there. There is also tons and tons of self-referential stuff. Someone mentioned clones of Evangelion. This is true, but it is also true that Evangelion wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Gundam starting the real popularity of people sitting in cockpits of giant robots. And giant robots themselves were around even before Gundam. Sailor Moon is just another in a long line of Magical Girl series, perhaps combined with the old Sentai fighting shows (footage of which was used for Power Rangers battles).
Miyazaki has always been very critical of the general anime industry, saying it is unoriginal, too violent and sexist, etc. He generally tries to distance his work from most of the others shows in Japan. However, while Miyazaki has a very good style and story-telling (and I love his stuff), in a way a lot of his stuff is similar to itself. On the other hand, some of the really original things coming out of Ghibli like My Neighbors the Yamadas were actually made by Takahata.
I am one that subscribes to the opinion that all « anime » means is animation from Japan. It has no rule with regards to style or plot. A lot of anime have similar themes and styles, but there are some that don’t, and they are as much anime as the others. And western animation may borrow from the east here and there, but it still isn’t « anime » by its very definition. I can appreciate when things are very original (like when Serial Experiments: Lain came out), but I will generally enjoy something if I feel like it is well done, even if it has all been done before (like Love Hina).
By being away from Japan, the fans of anime tend to have a more skewed view of it all being art, while many in Japan have as low a view of it as we do of our own cartoons. Over there you see it all on TV everyday and are saturated with the clones and most people don’t buy the DVDs, while we have to in order to see them. Not to mention all of the merchandising going on, as much as what happens with Disney movies over here, with pads, lunchboxes, toys, plushies, backpacks, books, and all of that. For the most part it is very finacially driven over there, with lots of shows that just milk things. Still, there is a lot of great things, and even the bad stuff tends to have at least some amount depth to it. But we’re only starting to get into more variety of things in the US now. Most sports and girls shows (and things like cooking or gambling oriented stuff) haven’t made it over here yet…
BTW, that x-rated video of Evangelion that is floating around the net is NOT official. It is just something that some fans made themselves. That’s why the quality is so bad on it…
As it stands now, I pretty much like any style of animation as long as it seems to work. Stop-motion puppets (like Rudolph or Nightmare Before Christmas), live puppets (Muppets, Dark Crystal), claymation (Wallace & Grommit), regular 3D (like Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Reboot), photorealistic 3D (Final Fantasy), claymation-ish 3D (50% Gray), flat 3D (Molly), painted cell, or digital cell. They all have certain advantages and disadvantages, but they can all achieve similar things, and can all be done well or horribly.
3D has too often been too stiff or trying to be photorealistic when the next hardware and software update will immediately make it look up to date. Trying to look photorealistic is IMO in one way futile unless it really DOES look photorealistic. Thus it is good to instead try to be stylized (I think that’s why Toy Story still looks ok). Doing 3D to look like 2D can have advantages, but in some cases you may have to put so much work into making it look like 2D that it’d be better to just make it 2D in the first place. Like if you try trying to have a really rough drawn look. But stuff is getting better… The less 3D is viewed as just a gimmick to be thrown in for no reason, the better off we’ll be. Is already starting to happen in some cases.
Molly’s style may not be for everyone, but it does give me hope that if regular 2D does get more and more replaced by 3D, that it can still be nice and stylized as opposed to something that just screams « 3D ». As far as the plot goes, we’ll just have to wait and see. I’ll just judge it based on if it seems fun, not how much or little it is like most anime. And another show of theirs on their site called Thomas & Comp looks very interesting, and has a distinctive style of its own. As far as that running loop at the end, it does stay exactly the same the whole time, but I have seen things done like that during the end songs of various anime shows before. Sometimes for budget, but I’d guess it is also sometimes done for a sense of stability in a music video sort of way. Judging by the time they put into it, I gather they could have modified it if they’d really wanted to.
Lastly, I figure the more that people start borrowing some anime concepts, the more chance there is that either people will view cartoons as capable of having more adult themes, or that anime will have less of a stereotype of only being for adults, or maybe even both. It is actually interesting that France doesn’t have more animation, considering that comic books are fairly popular there, both their own comics, and Japanese manga. If you think there is a lot of anime in Japan, it is nothing compared to the sheer volume of manga. It massively dwarfs even the US comic industry. A lot of bad stories get filtered out in the comic stage, with the most popular becoming cartoons, and the more popular cartoons making it over to us… Of course a lot of the truely original manga isn’t popular enough to actually make it to an animated stage. But that’s another story…
Shawn "
[Edité le 6/1/2003 par Azhag]
(Putain, qui arrivera à nous pondre des OST qui arriveront à la cheville de ceux de Cowboy Bebop ?)
