Cartoons vs. CGI: A dying art

I remember the day I heard that Disney fired all of their cartoonists and artists, saying that the future of Disney lay in CGI only. My heart utterly broke.

When I was seven, I mailed a few of my drawings to Disney. I received a letter back, which included my original letter with the section highlighted in which I told them my age (apparently they don't receive too many drawings from 7-year-olds). Their response said that they were impressed with my work, and when I was old enough, they wanted me to send in a professional portfolio and I'd have a job waiting for me. Now here I am, 18 years later, and the job I was promised is obsolete.

I've always had a fondness for the incredible clarity of expression capable with art, and in particular, cartoons. In  what takes paragraphs of text to explain, I can sum up in one facial expression of a drawn character. And one several-panel comic speaks volumes. Family and friends are often my inspiration; my dad used to do voices for characters he made up, and every year for Christmas, Father's Day, and his birthday, I would make him a cartoon based on his voices. The dry sarcasm and twisted dark humor made my gifts his favorite every year. And many friends and ex's over the years have been turned into their own characters, complete with their own comic and storyline.

Drawn characters afford a certain level of imagination in their portrayal; exaggerated expressions and movements that defy reality serve to enhance the storytelling and enrich the visual experience. Cartoons are a feast for the senses. Much of the detail in a cartoon is implied, such as a cat's fur being represented by a couple jagged lines on its forehead. Any additional detail is not only needless, but including it becomes a distraction from the far more important representation of the character's colorful personality. The richness of the character lies instead in the attention to other more subtle, but poignant, details: an exaggerated wink, a bounce in a step, a jaunted chin or slinky tail.

CGI, unfortunately, undercuts or completely misses many of the beautiful things about cartoons. When you spend so much time painting every hair, every line of physical detail, instead of a "character," you end up with exactly what you set out to make: an extremely lifelike representation. But the point of animated movies is to express characters and ideas that can't be found in life. Have you noticed how unmemorable characters from Disney movies are these days? They're dull and unexceptional. They're too lifelike. Kids don't care about how well you rendered every hair of fur on a cat, or the time it took to make the reflections in its eyes shine just right; they would rather see its personality sparkle instead. Sorry, CGI artists. You should leave the characters to cartoonists.