Every Pixar film tackles a different technical problem.
- "Toy Story" (1995): realistic lighting surfaces like plastic and metal toys
- "Finding Nemo" (2003): underwater scenes
- "The Incredibles" (2004): realistic human characters and fabric simulation.
- "Cars" (2006): large-scale environments.
- "Wall-E" (2008): realistic dust
- "Brave" (2012): hair and fur simulation
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It’s super interesting that for this movie the challenge was to animate the fire characters realistically (as fire) but also recognizable (as characters). Using AI is a very neat approach.
Amazing, beautiful stuff.
Incredibly well illustrated interactive website explaining how the internal combustion engine works.
This movie is a visual treat. This talks about some of the work behind it.
This is a Pixar movie set in Mexico. When Mexico or Latin culture in general gets depicted in Hollywood, it's usually a sad caricature of the real thing. Two recent high-profile shows come to mind:
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Breaking Bad, one of the best TV shows ever, does a terrible job of this. The main bad guy is supposed to be from Chile (???) and his Spanish was beyond terrible. Everything else was about the same.
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Narcos, a TV show filmed in Colombia about a Colombian drug lord, chose a Brazilian to play Pablo Escobar. You can tell he tried, but his Spanish is off in an Uncanny Valley kind of way. There are other questionable casting choices.
In a refreshing contrast, Pixar seems to have done it's homework. The clips look and feel like Mexico. And whenever a character says something in Spanish, it sounds like a native Mexican Spanish speaker. Looks great and at the same time very respectful to the culture. How refreshing!
In addition to being a great movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is an impressive technical achievement. It still looks great. This video goes into the work and attention to detail the director and animators went through.
Should be noted, Robert Zemeckis also directed Back to the Future, one of the most entertaining movies ever made.
Super trippy animation, done the old fashioned hand-drawn 2D way.
Engineer friends: don't follow this link unless you want to spend hours entranced.
This is stupendously well made by someone in his free time. Most impressive.
Popeye in CGI? I suppose why not. It's a tough act to follow, the original cartoons were really well made. Let's see if they end up keeping the theme song in the final movie.
Cool video showing Disney's principles of animation. The 2013 Mickey Mouse cartoons don't follow these well and I think that's what makes them look un-Disney-like to me.
A tyrannosaurus was closer in time to listening to a Miley Cyrus concert than to seeing a live stegosaurus.
Nice animation, rather than an illusion.
Very nice black and white animation and use of typography.
Some of the coolest animated GIFs I've ever seen.
Pretty funny.
Amazing abstract animated film.
Exposition showing what the skeleton of several animated characters would be like. I've seen drawings of this before, but I had never seen them build like this.
Cool animation on USA Today showing how they added to the ISS.