Increased reliance on CGI

[Blitzkommando]

Remember Star Wars? The first three movies made in the late 1970s and early 1980s? The special effects were amazing partly because of the models used which were so detailed. That and the puppets were the same way, detailed and incredible to see.

Now, remember the animals in I am Legend? Yeah, shitsux.

Tonight I watched The Dark Crystal again. Shit, it wasn't the best movie ever made but it was more than entertaining enough and I could tell the detail they put into literally creating the whole world. That was amazing. And it really saddens me that we will likely never see such a movie ever again simply because of how much easier and cheaper it is to do the same thing with CGI.

Don't get me wrong, Pixar makes awesome movies. But they simply can't replace the genre that was made by Jim Henson and such. Puppets may not be so flashy or grand as a fully digitized battle a la Lord of the Rings, but it's not meant to be. They're an entirely different medium, much like a Monet painting is a different medium to a Michelangelo sculpture. It is an absolute shame to see what was such an amazing art form go the way of the dodo.

Classical cartoons are the same way I suppose. In so many it is blatantly obvious that they have gone from hand drawn, to CGI work. Now, often they can pull it off, but sometimes the two styles contrast rather badly and you end up with what is essentially 3D CGI work meshed with 2D cell paintings that contrast each other to the point where it is distracting from the movie.

Computers are amazing things and can make some truly spectacular special effects and entire movies (much like cartoons). However, if you are a movie maker, please don't forget the 'archaic' art forms of stop animation and especially puppeteering. They can really make for some incredible, and beautiful, movies as well and don't cheapen, when done well.

tl;dr Gumby was awesome, Toy Story was funny, and The Dark Crystal told a great story without the aide of computers, they're all unique and it would be a loss for any of those art forms to be lost to history simply because it's not the 'in thing' anymore.

[ABDUR101]

I entirely agree with you; Jim Henson was a god amongst men with his work. It doesn't matter if the puppetry was meant to scare you, when you saw a puppet moving and interacting right there with the actors; it invoked a feeling of "oh my god...look at that!".

The difference between good CGI and good puppetry, is that we know the puppets exist; they're not some pixels on a computer, and that makes it much more real to the viewer. The gremlins might not really exist, but you knew that somewhere, every one of those puppets was setting somewhere.

CGI has it's place, great things can be done with it, but when it's over-used and blatantly used, it just takes away from any immersion one might feel. There are moments when CGI can make you go "oh wow", and you can be in awe for the first few times; but when you see puppetry done right, you can see the same scene over and over and it can stop your heart each time you see it.

[Sharkyland]

In some areas, CG is ok. I mean I remember when my cousin told me that almost everything in Indiana Jones Legend of the Crystal Skull was all done by CG. I can see it as a 'let's not hurt the actors' type thing, but sometimes you just don't get that 'added' energy sometimes. Sometimes when I see movie makers switching to CG probably because it's cheaper and maybe time effective than the real thing.

But I can see your point. I'm pretty much a traditionalist when it comes to drawing. I am 'still' an avid cel collector, but it's near impossible now-a-days trying to capture cels of my favorite characters from anime/video games. Though with CGI instead of having like 50ppl to do the work for hand-drawn animation, it's more like dwindled down to 15-20.

[Reno]

I much prefer when CGI is used as a means to 'enhance' rather than 'replace' things, and when it's done well it can be very impressive

Let's say there is a car chase and they want to use CGI and camera tricks to make it look like the main actor is driving in place of the stunt driver, that's fine. Indiana Jones 4 on the other hand decides to CGI the whole car chase so they can have the actors sitting in a green screen car the whole time, reacting to the impact movements like they were on the set of Power Rangers, that is not fine. The priorities of that particular scene are now all backwards, the excitement is missing and even the actors have to fake it

Most human actors simply can't react convincingly to something that they can't see or experience, and then the CGI artists have to second guess what the actor was imagining... In the end it becomes so diluted that the finished product has a hollow, inhuman quality to it

As for the Dark Crystal, I'd be interested to see what the ratio of CGI to Puppetry is going to be in this new sequel...