Have we lost something?

Was watching one of those "I made this video" videos on Youtube, taking footage from the movie Mirrormask (if you haven't watched this movie yet, why the heck not?!) and putting it with the Cruxshadows song White Queen (a song written based off the movie).

While watching the video, I began to playback the movie in my head, and then images and scenes of Lawnmower Man popped in, followed by a variety of other movies involving computer graphics... and I began to wonder.

Have we lost something with the advancement of computer graphics?  Everything needs to be photorealistic, everything needs to be three dimensional... what ever happened to the look of the computer animation used in film three decades ago?

I miss that grainy look, shadow-laden, the surreal aspect of the images.  As beautiful as those scenes were, they were also rather freaky in their nature.  It'd be along the same lines as you coming across a person on the street: he looks like a person, dresses like a person, and sounds like a person, but there's just something about him that isn't right... you know, you know he isn't a real person, but your senses tell you he is.

With movies going heavily towards computer animation and graphics, with the advancements that we have seen (and knowing what is to come), have we lost the ability to create scenes and images with something outdated and seemingly unwanted?  Or am I the only one that misses this?  

Mirrormask makes good use of both computer animation and puppets, but what I am talking about are mainly the sphynxes and the two floating people in the library.




Maybe this is the same is some people missing the sound of records, a longing for something old and forgotten.  But then again, I really don't think so... there was something here.  These earlier days of CG was art, it was the bending of a medium to fit the needs of what the creator wanted, it was experimenting and forging and creation.  Today's CG really cannot compare; sure, it looks prettier, but where's the art in that?

And, I should add, that's why I liked the look of the original speeder bikes in Tron over the newer ones... that shaded grainy look is just amazing.

I've been recently enjoying going back through our "archives" of old crap, seeing where we were at at different points in time. Clicking a thread based on it's subject, then chuckling quietly when the subject has nothing to do with the thread. My point here is, I looked at the subject and immediately thought "was Sooth talking about his keys? Or his mind?" Upon clicking...BOO! He was making a philosophical statement. Curses... foiled again.

Nope! Found it!

What was I listening to the other day? *thinks* It had something to do with movies and CGI... oh well, I can't remember it, but I do remember what was said. One of the technicians was talking about how older movies, as an example 2001, were visually better than today's movies because the special effects were simpler.

He wasn't bashing modern graphics, quite the opposite. He had a great appreciation for the level of realism in today's films; it was that level that he finds conflicts with people's suspension of disbelief.

He went on to talk about how an audience can watch an older movie and not comment on the graphics or techniques used. The audience knows that what they are watching is false, but they can accept it. On the flip side, that same audience can watch something realistic and automatically their belief is suspended: they know it is false, but because it was trying to pass itself off as being real, our minds won't accept it.

Further in the discussion he talked about the future of movies and (just remembered what the program was about!) virtual reality, and he felt that in order for future graphics to be accepted, it has to be less than what is being done now, or else people just aren't going to buy into it.

Makes for an interesting examination of the perception of mankind, doesn't it? If confronted with something too real or too perfect, we ignore it, we can't accept it. But give us something a bit worn, broken... our minds are at ease.

...

Does that make us flawed?

That actually does make kind of a twisted sense. Sort of explains why anime can "hit so close to home" when compared to the exact same thing in a live action format.

Or think of dreams! "But it seemed so real!" But it wasn't, and you know it when you wake up... Actually that was a backward example, but really not, cuz we've all had dreams where the visuals were sub par, yet we woke up out of breath and eyes wide anyway...