I don’t see any animation, so much as fancy motion graphics, but as a Bill Hicks fan I’m glad to have attention brought to this anyway.

Oh man here we go again with the animation argument.

Of course it all depends on what your definition of animations is, here are a few I found that I consider pretty accurate.

“the technique of filming a sequence of drawings or positions of models to create an illusion of movement” Oxford dictionary

“The technique of making inanimate objects or drawings appear to move” Wiktionary

“Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement” Wikipedia

“the technique of filming successive drawings or positions of puppets or models to create an illusion of movement when the movie is shown as a sequence” Oxford American Dictionaries.

Personally I consider motion graphics as animation, but I might be biased as that is how I primarily make a living. ‘Animation’ is also what I tell the government and the tax office I do for a living and I’d hate to feel like I was lying to my elected overlords.

Going back to Amid’s post the other day ‘The Disappearing Cartoon’, I think that the ‘what is animation’ argument appears so often on this site simply because the blog is called ‘cartoon brew’ and the word ‘cartoon’ is most associated with hand drawn cel based animation.
While the Cartoon Brew folks publish a heap of content relating to traditional cel based animation, they also post a heap of articles relating to animation art of all shapes,sizes,styles and kinds so I’d hate to limit my personal definition of animation to just the traditional ‘cartoon’ style, as great and as influential it is/was to me.

I imagine that I am like a lot of people here who grew up loving, admiring and being inspired to do what I do today by watching traditional animation. Unfortunately, less and less of the sort of animation we grew up loving is being produced today.
You can choose to sit there in self pity lamenting the loss of an art form and consider everything else as inferior and not worthy or you can choose to celebrate it, learn from it and appreciate that it is an important part of how we got to where we are today. Why not embrace all forms of animation that exist simply to allow you more varied, different and interesting potential ways to tell a story.

I feel like the argument against modern animation tools, styles and the ‘what is animation’ argument is probably very similar to the similar argument that occurred over a century ago in the painting world with the advent of modern art/photography and the traditionalists who opposed it.
In the end modern art didn’t destroy or take anything away from traditional art, it simply opened up a whole new set of possibilities.

Would people consider classic Terry Gilliam animation as ‘motion graphics’ today? After all, they often served as title cards and openers to live action sequences much like modern motion graphics do today. I often think of Terry Gilliam when I am working with tools like After Effects and imagine how envious he’d be of the tools that the new generation have available to them.
I’m still not convinced that Terry wasn’t in fact the secret creator of After Effects or at the very least a Terry Gilliam fan wasn’t behind its creation.

Back to the trailer, unfortunately Bill is dead, there is not a large amount of video available and still photos probably wouldn’t have made a very exciting celebration of him unless you wanted to go the sombre route and take the slow moving Ken Burns approach.
Bill Hicks was a smart guy with a whole lot of foresight whose mind could quickly and cleverly cut through the crap and see the world with a whole lot of honesty, while he’d most likely not like a lot of the new generic animation, I don’t think he’d outright condemn it as not being ‘animation’

I’m delighted to see Bill getting more recognition for his incredible work. The first animation I ever did was set to his “Pussy Whipped Satan” routine. And his casual “I am also available for children’s parties” after a five minute, foaming at the mouth rant still makes me howl.

Animation, motion graphics or anything else, if it’s Hicks-related, I’m interested.

To anyone who thinks this can’t be considered animation, I direct their attention to the previous post featuring the tribute to Joe Ranft. It doesn’t take 24fps to bring life to drawings.

J. Champlain, Just the other day I was pointed by a friend to a site hosting the end title sequence for the Lemony Snicket film. You might say the whole thing was just ‘moving things around on screen’ but it had a whole lot of life and character to me, as does Terry Gilliams ‘moving things around on screen’ technique and a whole heap of other similar animation styles I see everyday.

Certain instances of characters may need 24fps to be bought to ‘life’ but others can be infused with a whole lot of life by something as simple as moving their eyeballs at a certain time, in a certain direction with a subtle camera movement and to the right sound cue.

I always get a big laugh when I see really funny, well timed very simple character animation that hits the mark so well with so little but with such simple brilliance. It is in complete contrast and can work so much better than something like ‘Avatar’ which despite all of its technical and artistic brilliance, subtle nuances, attention to detail and addition of lifelike animation techniques in many situations left me completely cold because of a story which I don’t imagine any amount of tweaking of keyframes or animating by hand could have improved.

Despite any shortcomings Avatar may have had, there was still so much technical, artistic and animation talent to admire that I certainly wouldn’t be so bold as to completely dismiss it or somehow claim it wasn’t worthy of being called animation either.

The dilemma of having so many different tools and styles like motion graphics, visual fx, CGI, stop motion, traditional animations etc etc is that individuals, like with anything in this world, tend to think that one way is the best, or somehow the only worthy definition of a word.

Funny thing is that I have worked now in many of the different animation fields and I find myself using and see others using the exact same skills and thought processes for whatever you want to call the technique.

The people I most often hear telling me what and what isn’t animation almost always have something in common, they don’t actually animate themselves.

The greatest comedian who ever lived messy. There was no one like him.

BTW,the primary music(marimbas,:36 in)is “Breathe Me”,by Sia,and was used in the final moments of HBO’s “Six Feet Under” when the the end of the family’s lives are revealed. Though borderline cliche since the music has already been used in those death scenes,it is still effective.

Recommended starting place for newbies (beware if your ears are easily scalded):

http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Hicks-Live-Satirist-Stand-Up/dp/B0004Z33FK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1268647083&sr=1-1

Go directly to the British TV documentary “It’s Only a Ride.” Not only a fine summary of Hicks’ short career (and, sadly, life), but of his impact on fellow comedians.

Secret goldfish, if you seriously can’t tell the difference between motion graphics, cut-animation, character animation and mocap, then it would be pointless to continue this discussion with you.

J. Champlain don’t be too concerned, I can well and truly ‘tell the difference’ between various animation styles and techniques I’m just not as eager as you to outright dismiss and see individual styles as somehow less worthy of being called ‘animation’, especially when they all share such a common discipline and thought process in order to be created.

We hardly had a conversation though, you only ever seemed to offer two sentence replies aimed at dismissing anything I had said. I still don’t know what you consider as animation apart from giving life to your work which is kinda vague, open to interpretation and can be done with a still image as Brian Kidd already pointed out.

I wrote the original post simply because some of comments I read on the Brew, I find overly dismissive like the teenager I saw walking out of Pixars UP who immediately declared to all his buddies that the film was utter ‘CRAP’. It was actually pretty funny how loudly and proudly he made his announcement but also kinda sad at the same time how dismissive he was.