One of the first commenters addressed this [1] with a pretty fair point of view:
> "There's an apples-to-oranges comparison going on because while the majority of hand-drawn/made/oldschool animation and effects which were very ordinary and uncreative have slipped from memory (and are unavailable to view) and we only see the cream/best of a hundred years of those artforms, CG is unfairly and naively compared to it."
That is, most old effects before CGI were crap. We remember fondly those that stood the test of time (like Max Headroom or Blade Runner) precisely because they were good. We forget about the majority that weren't very good.
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[1] 11 year ago! Wow that article is old, especially given how rapidly tech progresses
I find it interesting that cheap animation went from cell-based hand-drawn animation to CGI over the last 20ish years. It used to be that if you saw something that was computer-animated, it was expensive and care was spent on the whole production. Now, you can assume that if you see traditional 2D cell-based animation that it’s more likely to be a prestige project.
> "There's an apples-to-oranges comparison going on because while the majority of hand-drawn/made/oldschool animation and effects which were very ordinary and uncreative have slipped from memory (and are unavailable to view) and we only see the cream/best of a hundred years of those artforms, CG is unfairly and naively compared to it."
That is, most old effects before CGI were crap. We remember fondly those that stood the test of time (like Max Headroom or Blade Runner) precisely because they were good. We forget about the majority that weren't very good.
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[1] 11 year ago! Wow that article is old, especially given how rapidly tech progresses