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How “Spider-Verse” forced animation to evolve
When you think of CGI animated films, you likely think of Pixar. The studio practically invented the genre with 1995’s Toy Story — the first CGI animated feature film.
After Toy Story, almost all animation studios wanted to follow in Pixar’s successful footsteps, straight down to their style. Many studios sought out “The Pixar Look”: extremely high quality, physically based, and in some cases almost photorealistic.
It’s an appealing approach that remains popular at the box office — but animated movies started looking kind of homogeneous. And while studios and independent artists tested out more stylized approaches in short films, no studio would commit to a feature-length animated movie that looked so different.
That is, until Sony Pictures/Imageworks took on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Instead of chasing the look everyone was after, the team wanted to create something visually new. They did it with “non-photorealistic rendering.”
And since Spider-Verse, non-photorealism has taken off, with almost every studio set to incorporate it in the next five years. Check out our video to learn more about how non-photorealism works.
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How Disney’s Animated Hair Became So Realistic, From ‘Tangled’ To ‘Encanto’ – Insider
We spoke with four members of the “Encanto” team to find out how they did it: Character Look Development Supervisor Michelle Lee Robinson, Consultant for Afro Colombian Representation Edna Liliana Valencia Murillo, Associate Technical Supervisor Nadim Sinno, and Character Look Artist Jose “Weecho” Velasquez.
They help trace the evolution of Disney’s 3D-animated hair over the past ten years, from Rapunzel’s 70-foot long mane in “Tangled” and Elsa and Anna’s braids in “Frozen” to the curly-wavy hair in “Moana” and diversity of textures in “Encanto.”