It’s a Game Called 'Find What’s Wrong With This Shot'

Plus: animation news and Moomin.

Detail of a concept piece for RRR (artist Viswanath Sundaram)

Welcome! The Animation Obsessive newsletter is back with another issue. Here’s the plan today:

• 1 — parsing the crisis in VFX.

• 2 — the animation news of the world.

• 3 — New Moomin in translation.

We publish every Sunday and Thursday. If you haven’t already, it’s free to sign up for our Sunday issues. Get them in your inbox every week:

With that, here we go!

1. The VFX crisis

At this point, it’s getting to be a weekly event. There’s a new exposé on the VFX (visual effects) industry — and we’re all reminded that it’s burning.

Gizmodo published one this week. The week before, Defector delivered a long-form piece called Inside Hollywood’s Visual Effects Crisis. And, the week before that, we heard a tell-all by an anonymous VFX artist in Vulture. These are just three in a long string this year. They’re all worth reading.

Animation is a harsh industry — but not many sectors suffer as much, with as little recourse, as VFX.

While VFX often gets treated as a separate stream, it is part of animation. Its artists work in service of live-action films, most of the time, but that’s nothing new for animators. Think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Today, most blockbusters follow that film’s template: blue screens, live actors navigating made-up worlds, interactions between humans and animated characters. What’s different is the pipeline.

In the behind-the-scenes footage for Roger Rabbit (below), you see incredible planning and an openness to artistry. The filmmakers ensured that the live footage and animation worked together. In the VFX articles from Gizmodo and the rest, we hear of dysfunction, sloppy live shoots and endless nitpicking of the animators’ work in post-production, where almost every part of the film is ultimately made.

This VFX crisis has been growing since at least the 2000s. Artist Phil Tippett, known for Star Wars and Jurassic Park, wrote way back in 2013 that something had changed:

… there’s this weird sort of competition that happens. It’s a game called “Find What’s Wrong With This Shot.” And there’s always going to be something wrong, because everything’s subjective. And you can micromanage it down to a pixel, and that happens all the time. We’re doing it digitally, so there’s no pressure to save on film costs or whatever, so it’s not unusual to go through 500 revisions of the same shot, moving pixels around and scrutinizing this or that. That’s not how you manage artists. You encourage artists, and then you’ll get — you know — art.

Endless micromanagement can lead to VFX in film and TV that makes even the micromanagers unhappy. This is an industry-wide problem, but many cite Marvel specifically for needling its VFX teams with notes, reworking art up to the last minute and burning out its artists. It causes rushed visuals and horrific crunch.

“I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week,” wrote Vulture’s anonymous artist about their time on a Marvel movie.

The problem is so bad partly because, according to workers, Marvel delegates most things to VFX. A few months ago, a behind-the-scenes featurette on Spider-Man: No Way Home showed how even mundane-looking city shots were really the work of the VFX team. “In a sense, it’s easier to create the world rather than shoot it in New York,” said VFX supervisor Kelly Port, looking unconvinced.

“Filmmakers, and maybe executives and producers as well, assume that they can do anything in CGI afterwards in post-production,” writer Kyle Buchanan told Defector, discussing the state of Hollywood. “So they don’t bother to make it look good on set.”

Bizarre choices and apparent mistakes were made during No Way Home’s live shoots, and the VFX team had cleanup duty. A number of “all-CG” shots were created to fill gaps left by principal photography — and Alfred Molina’s body was often remade in CGI, in part so his feet would dangle properly when his arms lifted him. (In Spider-Man 2, he was simply suspended by ropes during the shoot.)

Solving problems on set is surprisingly uncommon in Hollywood blockbusters now. Instead, animators get handed raw material and asked to make a movie. They’re the ones who create most of the excitement you see on screen. Many live-action hits are basically animated films — and, because animation can be tweaked more easily than live footage, it opens the way to micromanagement.

In Marvel’s case, that may be more of a feature than a bug, per Gizmodo:

Many sources stated that Marvel deliberately shoots their films in such a way that they are able to change details, both big and small, up until the very last minute. Very little is shot practically, and even the stuff that is practical goes through touch-ups.

Artists without time or freedom to solve problems. Live actors swimming in animated worlds they can’t see, and therefore can’t really play against. Entire shots made in VFX without input from the director of photography.

It’s risky to use Roger Rabbit-style filmmaking this way. It takes a lot to make actors and animation feel like they’re part of the same reality. When it goes wrong, you can end up with Cool World, one of the most infamous duds in animation — and a case study in making actors look lost and alone as they wander a screen covered in VFX.

To be clear, Hollywood blockbusters are a long way from Cool World. And whatever visual disconnects they do have aren’t on the VFX artists — who receive orders that they know won’t work, but can’t change. It’s more about process and pipeline.

Still, it’s easy to wish for films that got a little closer to the Roger Rabbit standard than not. And that’s one of the things that struck us about RRR, the Indian megahit, when we watched it this month. Everyone loves this film. One reason is that, while it used extensive VFX, it also had impressive live shoots.

When you compare Digital Domain’s VFX work for RRR (above) to its work for Black Widow, the difference is obvious. In RRR, the actors often worked with final-looking sets and tight choreography, which was then laced throughout with VFX. The leopard throw scene by the studio ReDefine (Halo, Obi-Wan Kenobi) is an even better example.

On Black Widow, Digital Domain found itself swapping Scarlett Johansson out with a “digi-double” to correct her “body actions.” At least one shot left us with only her head, with CG hair, attached to a CG body in a CG environment. Every pixel was micromanaged, and a lot of wonky live footage was tossed out. That’s no substitute for the presence and energy of a good shoot that choreographs the actors to fit the VFX.

Even though not all of RRR’s animation is high-fidelity enough to confuse with life, it tends to interact with life in a compelling way. Like in Roger Rabbit, the actors don’t feel lost — they’re connected to the VFX. It’s a long way from what reportedly happened on 300: Rise of an Empire, according to an artist’s account in Defector:

These characters are on a green screen soundstage and they’re all on boats. But the boats don’t move. There’s no ocean motion at all. We’re adding some really fake 2D rocking motion to every single shot, with everyone standing perfectly still on these boats. As if the ocean wasn’t moving. That stuff is a giveaway. You know it was on a soundstage somewhere.

This isn’t to claim that every film can be RRR, or that RRR’s VFX team worked under spectacular conditions. But it does show what happens when a film is less open to nitpicking. There’s more artistic intention behind what you’re seeing. Artists get to make sets and props that don’t get keyed out in the final film. And the animators don’t have to make a whole world, and almost everyone in it, from scratch.

Something needs to change for VFX teams. They all know it. Unionization gets talked about a lot — which is a good sign. But the problems in VFX start with the decisions made in Hollywood. As long as Hollywood continues to treat animators like human duct tape, it’s hard to imagine that even unions will fully end the VFX crisis.

2. Newsbits

• This week was overshadowed by deaths: Raymond Briggs (88), author of The Snowman; Jean-Jacques Sempé (89), illustrator of Little Nicholas; actor Carlo Bonomi (85), the voice of Pingu and The Line; and Kiyoshi Kobayashi (85), the voice of Jigen in Lupin III.

• In America, around 1,500 members of the WGA put their signatures on a pledge to fight “for WGA coverage for all animation projects we create, write or produce moving forward.” The Guild has a lot of power, so this could be big.

• In India, Vaibhav Studios did an animated promo for Eternal Sunshine Productions. We love it.

• Director Anna Samo, based in America, spoke with Zippy Frames about her project Conversations with a Whale. It was one of the best films we saw at Annecy last year — and it recently went live on Vimeo.

• Teikoku Databank issued a pretty dire report on the state of Japan’s anime industry, whose production business shrank year-over-year once again.

• Toldi, the last project by Hungarian master Marcell Jankovics, will be released in theaters this October. Jankovics passed away in May 2021.

• Per the Russian Film Distributor’s Bulletin, the campaign to make it legal to screen gray-market films has been “rejected at the state level.” There’s talk of a state bailout for theaters instead. (Also this week, Putin created an annual “Russian Animation Day,” one more effort to tie animation to national pride.)

• In Japan, the oddly titled One Piece Film: Red is tearing up the box office, taking in roughly $37 million after just eight days. Another example, following Mugen Train and Jujutsu Kaisen 0, of the way franchise anime is dominating theaters.

• Meanwhile, the popular Japanese series Haikyu!! won’t have a final season — it’s getting a pair of feature films instead.

• Lastly, we wrote about the Russian anti-war classic Proving Ground (Polygon). If you’ve ever wondered how its style came to be, we found the answer.

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The rest of today’s issue is for paying subscribers (members). Below, we point you toward an effort to translate and document the anime series Shin Moomin, or New Moomin, in English.

If you’re not a member yet, we’ll see you next time!