[dagmx]

This is a terribly ill informed take.

Sony Animation ( who you misattributed to marvel) were already pushing animation style heavily. Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

There's also tons of animation variety from outside America. The issue is that in America, a lot of the style was defined by Pixar. Which was probably the biggest experiment of them all.

But even among the major studios, there's a lot of variety in style. Trolls is incredibly stylized and DreamWorks really pushed style far in Kung Fu Panda 2.

Even Pixar are now experimenting more with style with Luca and Turning Red.

This is also only considering feature film work. If you pay attention to shorts, there's a huge variety.

It comes down to Art Direction. Arcane and Spiderverse are expensive and require an insane amount of per shot bespoke work. A lot of people also tend to find hyper stylized content not as compelling. So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.

[dmitriid]

> Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

It's the same plasticky "Pixar style" as any other computer animated movie in the past 30 years. And I'm saying that as someone who enjoys the movie immensely.

> There's also tons of animation variety from outside America.

This is true, and it's my mistake not to mention this.

> So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.

Indeed. And that's why it's surprising to see experimentation to come from these two sources (Sony Animation may have made it, but it was Marvel who agreed to it: they guard their properties like hawks)

[dagmx]

Are you simply talking about the shading style? Because otherwise there's nothing similar in style between Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and any Pixar film of that generation.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was very much pushing animation style dramatically at the time and brought a lot of Fleischer, UPA and Looney Tunes animation into 3D for the first time.

Regarding your point of Marvel agreeing to it: Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man for a lot of domains. That was purely a Sony film with little to no Marvel input. Source: I worked on it.

[kranke155]

I already said this above but

The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie. They also did Cloudy with Meatballs.

They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.

[dagmx]

You're confusing correlation with causality.

Lord and Miller definitely like to push the style of their films, but a lot of the technology used to achieve that style from Sony is from trying to closely adapt the rubber hose animation style of Fleischer cartoons in an attempt for Sony to differentiate themselves as a studio.

They really pushed it in Hotel Transylvania, their next feature film, where they were bringing Genndy Tratakovsky's style to 3D.