Animated cinema leads us into a tourbillontourbillon of emotions anduniverseuniverse breathtaking. We are more and more fond of it, as evidenced by the top 5 films of 2017, in which two animated films appear: Despicable Me 3 et Coco. The popularity of these films has prompted Futura to investigate what happens behind the screen. What techniques and technologies have led animation cinema to become the success machine it is today?
In more than a century of existence, animation cinema has offered us great classics such as Disney films, humor with The Simpsons (2007), poetry with Spirited away (2002)… It has met with growing success: in recent years, films like zootopia (2016), Snow Queen (2013), Minions (2015), Finding Dory (2016) or even The Incredibles 2 (2018) exceeded $1 billion in revenue. All these films present an animation which is specific to them, which suits the story told, the feelings procured, the desired aesthetic result.
Because it fits into all genres and uses techniques that are each more original than the next, animated cinema is difficult to define. He strives to create the illusion of movementmovement from what is frozen, deceiving theeyeeye and the brainbrain rapidly scrolling through successive images. He gives life to what is inanimate and thus opposes cinema in real shots, which takes actors in the flesh. The word “animation” comes from the Latin animawhich means “soul, vital breath”.
The diversity of animation techniques
Both artistic and technical, animated cinema is synonymous with diversity and creativity. Since its beginnings at the turn of the XXe century, it has often reinvented itself, taking advantage of new technologies, without forgetting its origins. This gives him today a thousand faces:
- L’animation plane or in 2D. She uses drawing, painting on glass, sablesable or even cut-out paper, the whole being photographed or filmed by a camera.
- L’stop motion or 3D real. She uses puppets, toys, and other inanimate objects as actors, such as Chicken Run (2000) — we then speak of stop-motion. It can also depict animals or humans – in this case we speak of pixilation. Again, everything is recorded by a camera or a camera.
- L’computer animation. It includes the2D digital animationas in The princess and the Frog (2010), et la 3Das in zootopia (2016). We speak commonly, in the case of 3D, ofsynthesized imagesi.e. entirely carried out by computercomputer. They are completely independent of the camera and constitute a special case of special effects, which are found in abundance in the cinema, in films such as Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avatar (2009), Ready Player One (2018), etc.
The film Spider-Man: New Generation (late 2018) won acclaim for the stunning quality of its animation. © Sony Pictures UK, YouTube
Making an animated film requires several years of work and hundreds of animators, who very often work behind the scenes: there were, for example, 800 on The Lion King (1994) and 400 on Toy Story (1996). This file therefore proposes to place, for once, behind the scenes in the spotlight of spotlightsspotlights and to retrace the fascinating adventure of animated cinema through the various techniques and technologies, artisanal then digitaldigital, which marked its history. Discover animation before the cinema, the techniques used during the golden age of cartoons, the underside of computer-generated images, the race for photorealism or even the promises and fears generated by the progress of the computer in the ‘animation.
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With the participation of Gilles Penso, director and journalist for L’Écran Fantastique, Julien Duval, director of photographyphotography and teacher at Esma, and Thierry Brionnet, pedagogical director Cinema 3D-FX and Music & Sound Design Isart Digital.
NB: all the release dates of the films mentioned in this file correspond to the dates of the French releases, except when the film was not released in France.