As I took his notes on board, Jules expounded on his two great gifts to me, as I would unwrap them on ThunderCats. The first was that anything one could imagine – absolutely anything – could be realized in animation. This was, of course, before the sometimes dubious magic of CGI – and even now, and even while CGI costs are dropping dramatically, cell animation can achieve that anything at a relatively low cost. More important to me, real cell animation and its best artists project far more character and personality than digital design, which accounts for the sameness of look of so many shows or movies. God knows what will happen when AI takes over completely. AI or AGI will never produce work of the originality of Nishida, Kubo, Takashi Masunaga or Dennis Woodyard. But, bearing in mind the speed at which we losing our critical and analystical abilities, perhaps it won’t matter. Perhaps it’s all just another branch of evolution.
The second of Jules’ gifts was to point out that whatever I wrote would appear on screen, xx months later, exactly as I had written it. This applies particularly to the Rankin/Bass system. He pointed out that, in live action, the writer’s purest vision is rarely transferred to the screen. I had already had a couple of screenplays, and more than a couple of concepts, butchered by the executives, producers, directors and even actors ‘improving’ the work; the work now depressingly frequently described as ‘product.’
It was an exhilarating prospect to imagine that the ‘movie’ I was writing would appear almost exactly as the movie I had written.
More next week…