Batman and Harley Quinn animated movie

I don't think it works that way. Generally key animation poses and in-betweens are both done before the digital ink & paint and compositing stages. Digital animation does allow for clean-up and refinements of a completed shot, but what's in the preview doesn't look very different from the usual animation quality for WB Television Animation these days. All their DVD movies and TV shows look a little stiff and jerky to me.

 

Totally agreed! There is some nice fluid animation in some of the fight sequences in their movies, but overall the animation is pretty jerky and lacks a lot of in-betweens. The stiff looking character designs they use overall doesn't help.

 

There are a couple of terms for the frame rate at which animation is done. I'm not sure how they apply in the age of digital/video animation (which is I assume is at 30 frames per second), but back in the days of film (which ran at 24 fps), there were a couple of different frame rates for animation. Most high-quality cel animation was done "on twos," meaning that each cel was held for two frames, so that the animation progressed at 12 fps. That kind of animation was smooth enough to be convincing, but still had a subtle strobing quality compared to live-action film. But lower-budget animation was done "on threes," with only 8 distinct frames per second -- and that was visibly jerky, because 1/8 of a second is just about the duration of persistence of vision in the human eye, so that's right on the borderline of our ability to perceive animation as motion rather than a succession of still images. I think some really cheap animation had even lower frame rates, like fours. I'm not sure what the frame rate is for these movies, or for the current WB Animation TV shows, but it looks like roughly the equivalent of animation on threes. Though sometimes it looks even jerkier.

By the way, this created a problem for me when they started using computer animation to represent vehicles and such in cel-animated shows. The thing is, computer animation is usually on ones, a full 24 fps, so computer-animated elements added to a cel-animated show moved more smoothly than the other elements around them, and so they seemed incongruous to me. To this day, I'm not crazy about the practice of using 3D-animated CGI vehicles in 2D cartoons, since it still clashes to my eye. But by this point, a whole generation has grown up taking it as normal, and it's probably no more incongruous to them than the difference between ink-outlined cels and painted backgrounds is to me.

 

A lot of the fight scenes in the DC animated movies seem to be done in 2s, but overall their animation looks to be done on 3s and they also use a good amount of limited animation where they only animate certain parts of characters (mouths for talking, for instance). A lot of modern cartoons animate in-betweens using the animation software itself as characters are drawn using vectors, creating the look of being animated in 1s. It's a little artificial looking in my opinion (okay, well it is artificial by definition I guess).

As for those 3D vehicles I couldn't agree more. I often wondered why they don't just render the animation using the framerate of the rest of the show and drop the extra frames, but after seeing a lot of modern 3D anime, it doesn't seem to help. All you get is a 3D model that looks like you have frame-drops. What is jarring is that when 3D models are used in 2D animation, the deformations that occur in 3D are completely different looking from the way 2D deformations are animated, so even unifying the framerate doesn't really help.

Except for Futurama. The 3D Planet Express ship just plain works.

 

Yeah. I can see the logic in using 3D for rigid objects like vehicles and buildings, but it is a fundamentally different-looking style of animation.

I remember that when one of Disney's Roger Rabbit shorts way back when used 3D computer animation to create a roller coaster, what they did was to print out the CGI, have the animators hand-trace it, and animate the resultant cels normally, so that it matched the hand-drawn look of the rest. Which clearly didn't catch on.

My favorite pre-CGI technique for animating 3D objects was the one used in Filmation's Flash Gordon and the Taarna sequence in the movie Heavy Metal -- building physical miniatures painted white with black edges and detail lines, photographing them, printing out the photos on animation cels, and cleaning up the lines by hand.

I was always very impressed by the animation of 3D objects like vehicles and buildings with shifting perspective in Akira, but I'm not sure whether it was done by any means other than just drawing very, very meticulously. It certainly looked hand-drawn, but very accurate, so maybe it was traced from models.

Yeah, that show did a really good job integrating 2D and 3D animation. I think most of the "sets" were 3D environments.

 

I think shows like Futurama benefit from these 3D assets because there is little to no shading of characters and objects. The solid colors of the 2D and 3D objects blend together much better (and in a still shot you can't even tell which are which). Any cell shaded 3D object that fakes shading is easy to spot out because of how dynamically the shading can change in movement when in 2D the shading is more stylized to fit with the shot and not generated by the render to behave "realistically".

 

I think the best job I've seen of a film integrating 3D animation seamlessly with hand-drawn animation was Steamboy, the second feature film by Akira's director Katsuhiro Otomo. There was a ton of computer animation in it, but I didn't even realize that until I watched the special features on the DVD, because it looked hand-drawn/painted. Of course, that was a film with a huge budget and no deadline -- they just kept working on it for as long as they needed until it was perfect, and it took 10 years to finish. So they didn't have to make compromises on the animation quality. And it looks absolutely amazing, with an incredible level of detail. (It's also one of the few anime productions that I prefer to watch with the English dub, since it's set in an alternate-history steampunk Europe with mainly English and American characters, so it makes more sense for them to speak English than Japanese.)

 

Steamboy has been on my list of to-watch movies for a looooong time. Maybe I should finally get to it this weekend. I am a big fan of old school character designs in the modern era. I remember seeing trailers for it and it looked like they used a lot of 3D environments with hand-painted textures. Did they also rely heavily on 3D assets for vehicles as well?

Have you seen the recent series Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress? It is done by Attack on Titan's director and while being a scifi/period zombie action-drama, it has a lot of steampunk motifs in it with both old-school and modern character designs. Visually, it was quite a stunning marry of very different concepts. It actually feels like watching an 80s/90s anime feature film with modern anime animation techniques in a TV series format.

 

I'd say it's a must-see for any fan of animation, Japanese or otherwise.

Oh, yes. There's an action sequence with a train that's just amazing. Lots of other cool vehicles too. It is a steampunk movie, after all.

No, I haven't heard of it. And I'm not a fan of zombie stuff, iZombie being the exception.

 

Well, 'Zombie' in this case is a pretty loose classification. They're semi-giant man eating monsters. Within the story they're more like demons that overrun an alt-feudal steampunk Japan. Has some samurai elements as well.

 

The previous link to the preview no longer works, but this one does.

 

"Batman and Harley Quinn"

They couldn't come up with a better title than that?

 

Is that Swamp Thing? If so, I'm not crazy about that design.

 

I know, right? In the sneak peek we get a look at the script title, and I'm so disappointed that they didn't stick with it. Batman/Harley Quinn: Hits and Giggles.

It's The Floronic Man.

 

I imagine the game has a much higher budget than the DC animated movies but I'd love to see something animated like the cut scenes from Injustice 2. I spent an inordinate amount of time watching these, the plot's weird with an antagonistic Superman and Wonder Woman (it's the setup for a fighting game after all...) but I really like the look.

Until I googled that I wasn't entirely sure if you were pulling my leg or not.

 

The Injustice games take place in an alternate world where Superman went nuts and took over the world. Ok, it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea.

 

We've got another new trailer.
This is probably my favorite trailer yet, it just pushed this a few points up on my anticipation scale.
I have to admit, Rauch's take on Harley is starting to grow on me.

I was just looking through some of the DC Comics' Bombshells stuff the other day, and I'm really starting to wish they would do that as their next animated movie, the designs are cool, and the comic looks like something that could be fun to see brought to the screen. Although given the way some of these movies have apparently handled their female characters, they might want to bring in a different team for it.

 

Not the most impressive thing in the world, and Rauch still sounds bad, but at least the animation looks better then it did in the other footage. I'm still looking forward to it, although if its not great I won't be too shocked.