In japanese anime nowadays there are alot of smart use of CGI to cut down on production cost. However most big CGI animated movies always cost 7-8 times higher than traditional hand drawn animated movies. Weathering with you and your name budget was about 9-11 million, while boss baby, frozen, kungfu panda was upward of 125-150 million.
In: Technology
Shitty CGI slapped together in 2 hours costs less than hand drawn ^^muffled ^^Berserk ^^noises
Top notch photorealistic CGI costs a whole bank’s worth of money, but is above in quality to what is realistic to be done by hand for any budget.
The cost of CG animated series also goes down in the long run depending on how much they can reuse the character and background models as the show goes on
The budget didn’t go exclusively to animation, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the production cost was actually the star voice actors for all the languages it’s shown in. Also advertising is probably a much larger part of the overall budget
You can’t say that CGI costs more or less than hand drawn animation because it doesn’t. CGI has a wider range of potential costs than hand drawn animation, which is why its used in both expensive movies and cheap anime.
With hand drawn animation the cost of fluid animation is mostly determined by how fast you want it done. If you want it done really fast you hire more animators, if you don’t care, you hire less. But its difficult to drop the overall quality of the animation (and therefore, also drop the cost) without producing something that’s jarring to watch. Likewise, its hard to increase the quality because there are practical limits as to how well humans can draw – particularly in a production environment.
With CGI its much easier to alter the quality, and cost, of the CGI. And if you’re looking for cheap CGI – as in the case of anime – the more CGI you order the cheaper it gets. The reason for this is that the main cost involved in cheap CGI is making the digital models, once you have those done its relatively inexpensive to shoot scenes with them.
But CGI doesn’t have to be cheap. If you want to make a CGI model that has a higher definition than the human eye is capable of perceiving, that’s not a problem. All it takes to do that is to throw an obscene amount of money at the project. When you see Disney or Dreamworks movies that use a lot of CGI, chances are they spent more time (and money) developing the main character’s model than most anime spend on an entire season’s worth of CGI.
One answer that I don’t see people mention: cheap TV shows use off-the-shelf software, whatever its limitations. Big CGI animated movies hire big teams of programmers and have them invent new software for each movie, to make new effects possible.
For example, Monsters Inc wanted big furry monsters. There wasn’t existing software to animate a monster with that much fur, so they invented it. Years later that same software trickles down to low-budget CGI TV shows. But low-budget shows never invent new effects, they just use what already exists.
Because they are doing things you could only dream of with hand-drawn animation.
Hand drawing was a big limiting factor in animation. You could spend money and effort to make it a little better, but you always had to resort to tricks to limit the number of moving things on the screen and recycle as much footage as you could. You were always limited to the artist’s imagination when it came to how things moved, how light illuminated a scene and how it was reflected. And if you were putting the final movie together and something didn’t look right, your options to fix it were more limited. These constraints created an upper bound on how good animation could get, spending twice as much money only moved the needle a little.
With CGI, the sky is the limit. You can get hand-drawn animation quality for less, but you can’t spend more money to make something a **lot** better. Not only is there a higher ceiling on quality, CGI is still an evolving technology, you can still find new ways to make it better. In a movie market where a good movie can gross over a billion dollars, spending an extra 10, 20, or even 50 million makes sense if it beats out the competition.
Finally, the financials haven’t changed as much as you might think. In 1989, *The Little Mermaid* cost $40 million to make, about $80 million adjusting for inflation. That’s more than the first *Toy Story*, which came out six years later, and on par with movies like *Ice Age*, *Madagascar*, and *Despicable Me*. One of the last big production hand-drawn features, *The Hunchback of Notre Dame*, cost $100,000,000 to make. The cost of modern CGI animated productions is largely a reflection of studios spending more on movies in general.
A ps2 game costs less than a PS4 game. The CGI of a PS4 game is on a different level to a PS2 game. To make higher quality effects like water, light, fur, hair etc, takes a lot of skill and computing power. The stuff put out by Disney is very high quality.
That is essentially the difference.
Hand drawn stuff has “high” minimum cost because it’s all manual and there’s no way to mass produce, however, that doesn’t mean it can’t be extremely expensive too. What if you decided to animate at 60 frames per second? What if you started to animate every detail like background crowds, the shade and light of every tree? Very expensive.
The real reason to use CGI is the scalability, editablity, reusability of the product as well as the process. E.g. if you create a tree for one movie, you can just put it into another movie. If you develop some cool snow effect tech, you can use it across all your CGI animations.
Latest Answers