[egypturnash]

In stills it feels like it’s waving towards the UPA style, as filtered through modern tools.

Back in the late 1940s and the 1950s, there was an animation studio called United Productions of America, founded by Disney-trained animators who wanted to rebel against the “illusion of life” so beloved by Walt and experiment with the cool new visual ideas coming from an art movement known as “cubism”, as well as experiment with highly abstracted and stylized forms of movement. Find a copy of Amid Amidi’s book “Cartoon Modern” for a nice survey of this time in animation; look up anything in it that sounds interesting on DailyMotion or Youtube. The sound sync will probably be off by a few frames, which is super noticeable in things this stylized, but you’ll still be able to see how striking this kind of animated cubism can be.

It’s a lot harder to animate than it looks; to really make it work you need to have a firm grasp of animation and 3D movement despite the drawings looking super flat. Over time this look went from super hip and new to the cartoons cranked out for TV by Hanna-Barbera. And design drawings that were inevitably reworked into something less stylized - pick up any Pixar art book and you’ll find a ton of great drawings in this mode.

If you’re willing to split your drawings up into smaller shapes and create more of an illusion of three dimensionality, you can do some gorgeous stuff. But I doubt Gilbert had the budget to do this, given the results in this trailer. Instead we just have cool drawings that are snipped into a few pieces and moved around, which is a thing that hasn’t really been satisfying since Flash made it super easy to do this. And super easy to make animation with no lines.

Two relatively modern examples of this style actually working: Samurai Jack and Psychonauts. One is done by hand, one is trying to adapt these kinds of abstracted shapes into 3D models without super-abstracted rendering.

[kyorochan]

Cartoon Modern was recently made available digitally, for free [1]. Well worth the download.

[1] https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/our-treat-to-you