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Test animation for (possible ) Popeye animated movie

Ar-Pharazon

Ar-Pharazon

Admiral
Admiral
As the animator, Genndy Tartakovsky, emphasizes in the video, it's only "test" footage.

Genndy first started his animation training with a (then) 90 year old Gordon Sheehan, one of the original Fleischer Studios Popeye animators.

It seems like his love for the character really shows in this footage and hopefully will do in a full length movie.

My only concern, as with any old time cartoon remade now, would be the attempt at a storyline.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M1lzJuwJD9k[/yt]
 
Seeing all those hand-drawn and painted 2D storyboards and layout drawings just makes me regret that movie studios today are so unwilling to make 2D animation. The insistence on making everything 3D is so artistically limiting. Tartakovsky's 2D animation is strikingly distinctive and stylistically bold, but his 3D animation just looks like most of the other 3D animation out there. Because part of what defines Tartakovsky's style is the use of hyper-stylized, geometrical character and background designs that simply don't translate to 3-dimensional form.

What I might prefer to see in a Popeye movie would be 2D-animated characters functioning in 3D backgrounds. That would be a modernized homage to the pioneering 3D environments of some of the original Fleischer cartoons, with cel-animated characters on glass in front of turntable models of the scenery that scrolled along behind them.
 
i think the test footage looks fantastic. and it made me laugh a few time. i trust Tartakovsky.
 
Flapjack on Cartoon Network seems closer to that old style of Popeye. This seems rather slick but seems so clean and generic. I'm not really sure Popeye has that evergreen quality to it for modern audiences, it seems to me stuck in its time as say Krazy Kat or some of those other older cartoons we watched in the 70s and 80s. I think a lot of people have nostalgia for it but I'm not sure there hungry for more.
 
Christopher said:
What I might prefer to see in a Popeye movie would be 2D-animated characters functioning in 3D backgrounds. That would be a modernized homage to the pioneering 3D environments of some of the original Fleischer cartoons, with cel-animated characters on glass in front of turntable models of the scenery that scrolled along behind them.
Click to expand...

Exactly. You couldn't beat Fleischer's rotoscope technique for excellence in cartooning. :techman:
 
^That wasn't rotoscope. Fleischer's 3D diorama effect was called "The Stereoptical Process." Rotoscope means tracing live-action film frames to create realistic movement, as Fleischer did in the Superman cartoons and Disney did in Snow White and many later movies. I doubt there was any rotoscoping in Popeye cartoons, since the characters weren't realistic in proportion or movement.
 
Similar scenes from Wizards too if I remember (Nazis instead of Orcs).

I haven't watched either DVD in a very long time.
 
Well, that test footage was... not gonna lie, it was ugggggly. Do not want. I agree that hand-drawn 2D would be better, but "none of the above" is probably the best answer.
 
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