Can You Tell What It Is Yet?

The issue of realism is something that people will always mention when talking about some form of animation - an amateur art/film critic would say that's because it adds to the audience's investment into the piece. But when you look at the most successful animated films in cinema (Toy Story, The Lion King, UP, just to name a few) and you'll see that none of their art styles try to be photorealistic, and yet the vast majority of cinephiles love them. For artists there's this phrase called 'The Uncanny Valley', which is this gap of accuracy when an artist tries to make an image perfectly realistic.

For any budding artist who ponders of entering this metaphorical valley, my warning to you is not to, or you will plummet into the river of failure that awaits at the bottom.

The biggest example of this attempt at realism which resulted in a box office flop was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The artist's that slaved away on modelling the characters were raving about how photorealistic they looked, and how they were, pretty much, closer to live-action actors than any other piece of animation. But if you look at the image below, ask yourself "do real humans really look that perfect?"

The perfectly symmetrical human face is a rookie mistake for artists

So if the realistic approach is a doomed venture for animation artists, what do the masters (that are Disney and Pixar) do to create such immersive art styles? That answer's easy - just distance yourself from The Uncanny Valley and go for a more stylised and illustrative approach.

Take films like Cars or Finding Nemo: the characters in these films aren't trying to look like they're from the real world, but a place where vehicles and fish have large eyes, don't have the usual details that their real-world counterparts do, and can talk to each other. This makes the audience stop comparing them so heavily to how their minds tell them the characters should look like.

Even Disney's semi-animated cult classic Tron doesn't attempt to make the virtual tanks or light cycles look real because they're part of a computer system (as well as any technical limitations the animators had at the time).

In short, the significance of realism in animation is still very important because it can make or break a film. But it seems that the key to a successful art style is to stop trying to make it look realistic and make it more exaggerated.

After all, when you create an animated world you make the rules - rules that the audience have to follow when they watch it...