As a parent, you end up watching a fair amount of cartoons, and...
François Chollet@fchollet
84 views
Feb 07, 2025
~1 min read
Advertisement
1
As a parent, you end up watching a fair amount of cartoons, and I've found that old-school, hand-drawn animation has soul, while CG animation, no matter how pretty, doesn't.
I think this has to do with the fact that hand-drawn frames directly convey an accumulation of human-made choices. Each choice, from the initial design to the final brushstrokes, leaves an imprint, a trace of the taste and thought process of the people who brought it into being.
With CG, the human-made choices are both fewer (which is evident in the fact that CG is much less labor-intensive to create) and less direct, more mediated. Hence the lack of soul -- you are no longer in the close presence of the creators' minds.
I think this has to do with the fact that hand-drawn frames directly convey an accumulation of human-made choices. Each choice, from the initial design to the final brushstrokes, leaves an imprint, a trace of the taste and thought process of the people who brought it into being.
With CG, the human-made choices are both fewer (which is evident in the fact that CG is much less labor-intensive to create) and less direct, more mediated. Hence the lack of soul -- you are no longer in the close presence of the creators' minds.
2
When I was drawing regularly, I used to be able to read someone's mind in their pencil drawings (not literally their thoughts, but the overall shape of their mind -- their personality). What makes it possible is that each tiny pencil stroke conveys some information about the person who made that stroke. That's what the "soul" of an artwork is -- the presence of its creator's mind
3
Drawings are especially soul-dense in this regard, because when you draw you are making multiple choices per second, and each of them ends up visible on paper. A pencil drawing contains a huge amount of information about the artist -- an accumulation of thousands of tiny purposeful decisions
