Starting with Pixar's Toy Story in 1995, computer based 3D animation has met with both critical and commercial success. Throughout this essay I aim to consider the use of animation and CGI, in particular, in feature length films and argue whether animation should be the way forward for the film industry. I will also consider the views of some of the major film theorists and relate these views to the world of CGI. Theorists I will examine include Sergei Eisenstein, (formalist theory) Rudolph Arnheim, (anti - realist), Sigfreid Kracauer (Realist) and Andre Bazin (Neo-realist). To decide whether animation and in particular CGI should be the way forward for the film industry I think you have to look briefly at the history of animation and CGI and try to discover trends that may occur and assess whether these trends lead to success or failure.
The animated film is an enormously wide category, traditionally understood as film that is shot frame by frame and by which drawings and objects are given the appearance of moving.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Ming-Na's character was designed to be as realisti...
Animated horse, made by rotoscoping 19th century p...However, it ranges from Hollywood cartoons to abstract modernist animation, from puppet (stop motion) films to types of special effects cinema to computer generated imagery. One thing is clear; animation is older than cinema, and indeed almost as old as photography. Niepce mad the first still photograph in 1826, six years later Plateau invented the Phenakistoscope and the Zoetrope appeared just one year later again. These later two devices were examples of what we would call drawn animation. They consisted of a series of pictures shown to a viewer in one quick momentum to give the illusion of movement.
Before the advent of CGI in the 1980's animation was divided into two categories; drawn animation, which involved photographing a series of two dimensional hand drawn images, and...