Ok this is really random but I got hit with inspiration earlier. It’s come to me that there is a very right and very wrong way to adapt 2D characters into CGI, and it’s really easy to tell when a studio cares about what they’re adapting through the visuals. To show my point I’m using 2 examples of it done right and 2 examples of it done wrong. 

Starting with done right, my first example is The Peanuts Movie. This movie’s animation works due to the fact they keep the characters shot at a flat looking perspective. The only times you see it shot in varied angles are the Snoopy scenes with the Red Baron, and even then Snoopy himself is still on model through the whole thing. I own the art book for this movie, and they go in detail about how hard it was for the artists to nail Charles Schulz’s style down exactly and then seamlessly transitioning it into CG, specifically with Snoopy. Stuff like Charlie Brown’s imagine spots, motion lines, Pigpen’s dust cloud, the characters’s eyes and expression lines around the eyes, and visual onomatopoeia (aka showing the word for the sound effect on screen) are all done in 2D animation, and they also have the characters move at a lower frame rate and use squash and stretch in there too. It’s one of the first examples of this and it doesn’t get enough attention or praise to me. My second example is with the Captain Underpants movie. I don’t know too much about this movie’s production like I do with Peanuts but I’ll do my best to describe why it looks so good. This one also somewhat does the flat perspective thing that Peanuts does, but since it’s a much more action focused that means they do gotta shoot it from varying angles. This isn’t an issue to me at all though, they tweaked the character designs just enough so they look natural moving like this and doing these dramatic shots. They also have 2D animated stuff too, like the books George and Harold make in universe and eye expression lines again. This section about C.U. is very short, and I’m sorry cause I love this movie, I just have not as much knowledge of its production as I do with Peanuts, and it’s gonna be the shortest section in this big old essay. But regardless, these two movies look amazing and are some of the best ways of stylizing CG, like less ambitious versions of Spiderverse in my mind. So these two movies look incredible. The next two don’t. 

I feel like the one everyone rags on is the Disney Plus Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies. The thing most people instantly say about them (aside from them being bad movies) is that they look kinda ugly. The issue for me is, again, the fact they don’t have it shot from a 2D perspective like the last two. Instead of the characters looking flat they fully rotate and it leads to characters like Fregley and Manny looking actually hideous. I don’t blame anyone for this, I blame Disney for being cheap and not allowing Bardel Entertainment to refine the style more. Actually wait no, cause the test footage they put out before the movies release looks really good! Good lighting and shot from a flat perspective. Hell why couldn’t they’ve just had Blue Sky animate it, it already looked near identical to Peanuts in that way! Another issue is the lighting, which makes a lot of the colors look washed out and kinda muddy. That issue is a little better in the third one Cabin Fever, but not by much. If that was fixed, and they made the future movies look like the test footage, these movies probably would be more well liked. But hey, at the very least, they didn’t make the characters look like hyper realistic versions of themselves, which is a bad segway into our final film, The live action Smurfs movies! This is the only live action example but dammit I wanted an excuse to bring up this terrible terrible trend that I’m glad is mostly dead. A lot of live action adaptions tend to make the cartoons as realistic as possible. There are exceptions mind you, like the Looney Tunes movies (mostly, the back half of Space Jam 2 exists unfortunately), Rocky and Bullwinkle and the 2021 Tom and Jerry movie for example. But stuff like the Chipmunks movies except the fourth one, the Scooby Doo-ology, Yogi Bear, and our subject for today The Smurfs, all make the characters as detailed and textured for seemingly no reason. The Smurfs though are probably my choice for the worst offender. With the other movies I mentioned, I get it. The chipmunks, Scooby, and Yogi and Boo Boo are real animals in universe, so I somewhat understand why they’re realistic. What helps is that Scooby at least moves like a cartoon to offset it, and the Chipmunks got their designs heavily revamped so they resemble real chipmunks and not weird furry humans like the old cartoons do. But the Smurfs are explicitly magic fantasy creatures, so why on earth would you make them of all characters super detailed? What’s worse is that there are a lot of close ups in these movies that make you focus in on how ugly the characters look. Everything looks way too detailed and it looks really ugly and even kinda gross. I’m glad they learned from this and that The Lost Village was fully animated and looks really really good, but the damage was done unfortunately.

There wasn’t really a point to this, I just wanted to ramble under the Paint Drying film again. I made a tweet with a very very shortened version of the thoughts I showed here a few hours ago and decided I wanted to expand on it. Theres other good examples like Sponge on the Run and Mutant Mayhem, and there’s other bad examples like Space Jam 2. I could’ve copped out and went into Spiderverse but like I felt it was better to focus on books and stuff and also that movie gets a lot of praise already, I wouldn’t have anything new to say. So yeah that’s it, tell me films you think either pulls off or doesn’t pull off adapting 2D to CG! Oh and to anyone curious I am rapidly approaching 600 logs and my 600th log is gonna be Perfect Blue! See ya later