eli5: Why do great animations and cgi need a big budget?
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If you construct a set in real life (for a live action movie), there’s obviously a lot of construction work that needs to be done, but the universe/nature actually takes care of a lot of the work for you.
You don’t have to create your own wood grain: nature does that for you.
You don’t have to add your own imperfections into every pane of glass: nature does that for you.
You don’t have to create your own skin for your actors: nature does that for you.
You don’t have to define what a “smile” looks like on your actors: acting school and just being human will have that covered.
You don’t have to define how the lips move when you say the letter “p”: just being human will allow your actors to figure that out by themselves.
You don’t have to define what “walking” looks like: your actors are human.
You don’t even have to define what a car looks like when it drives: physics has that one covered.
Not so when you’re doing a CG animation.
Every freckle, every eyelash, every uneven floorboard, every droop of a flower petal, has to be created by an artist.
And they *all* have to be there, because if you leave them out, your scene looks too “perfect” and viewers won’t be able to suspend their disbelief, even in a cartoon.
When a character smiles, there are hundreds of muscles and contortions that have to be created by an artist.
It takes a *lot* of artistic manpower to recreate the world from scratch down to the sub-millimetre level.
This is, incidentally, why Disney and other major studios are some of the biggest contributors to graphics, modelling and animation tools that help automate parts of this.
[For example, here’s just one of a myriad of research projects Disney did and presented at SIGGRAPH, the world’s largest computer graphics academic conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0kyDKu8K-k).
That project of simulating snow cost several hundreds of thousand dollars in research to complete.
But it’s worth it, because it will ultimately end up saving them *more* money by not having artists work themselves to death simulating snow for their Frozen series of movies.
Computer simulation and computer aids help a lot, but at the end of the day, there still have to be human artists that take that and keep molding it until it looks like a real world.
It takes a lot of work.
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