The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/cgi/)
It’s been a long year for animation. While we’ve had a couple good hits here and there, there’s been a lack of quality in many titles. So I really needed Coco. The film opened in Mexico last month, unusual since American studios tend to release their films domestically first. Coco ended up becoming the highest grossing movie of all time in Mexico, and rave reviews heralded an upcoming splendor.
After I reviewed My Little Pony: The Movie a couple weeks ago, I did two things. First of all, I went to see the next available screening of It to set myself at balance. Second, I started to look around and see what other online critics had to say about the movie, a favorite pastime of mine. To my surprise, I found a number of comments saying things like, “Go see the movie! It’s the last chance to tell Hollywood that we want traditional, hand-drawn animation back!”
First order of business: if you haven’t checked out Ajin yet (airing this season), then go watch the first episode to see what you think, especially if you
were a fan of Tokyo Ghoul or Parasyte (seriously, this main character is Kaneki and Shinichi all over again). At the very least, check out some GIFs, because my topic for this week is Ajin’s animation style. I was recently talking about Ajin with friends, who told me that they liked the story but dropped the show because they found the entirely computer-generated animation unbearable. So, I thought I’d take some time to discuss the role of CGI in anime.
After all, Ajin isn’t the first out of recently released animes to rely almost entirely on computer generated graphics.