These posts may read like a diary and/or sometimes incoherent train of thought due to my myriad of ideas and the daunting prospect of narrowing down my topic to a strong, presentable, clear thesis. It’s also extremely likely that these posts will be rather long-winded as I pull my buzzing swarm ideas from the area and type them out to pin them down for documentation.
I am not entirely sure the hard and fast specifics of what I want to research, although I do have a good general idea of a subject that both fascinates me and provides ample opportunity for investigation. That being said, I will allow myself to bounce between niche subsets of the theme and play with different areas that I may explore in greater depth.
Below is my original proposal for my thesis, submitted at the end of term 3.
In December of 2020, the worsening COVID-19 variant outbreak meant that my partner and I could not travel home for Christmas to visit our families in Connecticut. If I had, I would’ve been required to quarantine there for two weeks and then quarantine again upon re-entry to the UK, thus complicating and dampening the festivities as well as being somewhat of a waste of money on air travel. After much discussion, me and my partner decided that to instead travel to Plymouth for a Christmas by the frigid black ocean and gorgeous hills of Cornwall.
Our AirBnB was cheap, likely due to its basement position, with only the glimmer of sunlight and shuffling feet on the sidewalk visible through the living room window, but it did have a magnificently large television, an amenity neither of us had in our student accommodation, and we always sat down to watch Netflix on the cold and rainy nights. It was during this time that I started watching Love, Death + Robots.
It’s funny how something as simple as a trendy Netflix program influenced my interests in the field so much. Gripping storylines and Twilight Zone-esque plot twists aside, I was thrilled by the use of artistically experimental animation throughout, variating widely in style in connection with the context of the episode. What caught my eye the most, though, was its use of hyper-realistic 3D animation in certain episodes. This was more than the 3D assets used in live-action movies like Marvel, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc: this was a fully animated piece of media using 3D models for characters and bringing us into an entirely imagined space that was still so very touchably real. I had never seen any piece of media do this, aside from video games.
There are fully 3D-animated children’s shows and movies, and some of those can be described as”for all ages”, but for the most part it feels that 3D animation in film has been reserved for children (Disclaimer: specifically in Western media). I’ve never seen any mention of a fully 3D-animated adult-oriented movie, despite the wealth of incredible artwork and storytelling that could be explored. My question is, why?
I found an old forum post discussing this same topic here, so at least I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.
I did a presentation on animation still being seen as a children’s medium, but I want to focus specifically on 3D animation and its place as a tool in the future for adult viewers. Here’s the feedback that Luke gave me.
He’s right, the topic is broad, and that would make it much harder to start, let alone research. He’s also right that it’s impossible to measure audience perception, as much as a desperately want to understand whether non-artists view animation as being childish and whether it must be hyper-realistic or contain gritty themes to be taken seriously. It would be much easier to study box office success.
The techniques and technology suggestion is daunting to me. I suppose a good jumping off point is to study animation styles and their success among adult viewers, although part of the problem is that the few animated adult movies very often rely on gritty themes or stupid humor to assert their position in the viewerbase. I don’t think that Persepolis and Sausage Party have much in common just because they’re both animated films for adults and I especially don’t think comparing the two box office figures has much to say about the enjoyment of the specific animation style.
That being said, perhaps that directly reflects what Luke was talking about as far as widely disliked media sometimes being the most financially successful.
Well, turns out I was wrong! There are some 3D-animated adult movies out there. This one’s from 2007. It’s based on Beowulf. Guess I’ll be watching that and analyzing opinions on the animation style.
I’ve already gotten a sneak peek of some reactions:
Which should be interesting to dissect.
Also Ronal the Barbarian, which looks bad, but hey, I’ll watch it for the sake of my project. I guess it is interesting to note that they’ve used a style typically associated with children’s animation for what’s clearly an adult-oriented film, even just from this poster.
I also found a handful of 3D animated adult movies based on video games. Which I guess says something about how we perceive the use of 3D animation as a whole. I think watching just one of these will give me an idea of what’s going on with that.
Just based on these, I’d conclude that 3D adult animation is still generally struggling to prove itself as an adult medium by overcompensating with lowbrow humor or extreme blood and gore. And as with Love, Death + Robots, the comedy films always lean towards a more stylistic choice. Most of the films I saw that appeared to be making more of an attempt to tell a story were stop-motion or traditionally animated, but even still, there’s not much for adults there.
I guess what I’ll do for the next couple days is watch some of these movies and read about their financial outcome as well as general reception, and try to draw a comparison between the success of hyper-realistic violent movies vs cartoonish sex comedies. It would be easier to tell whether the earnings are due to the animation style if the styles weren’t so tied to the content of the movie.