Bambi II, no more Mr Nice deer

Ok, so this is going to be a short post.

Essentially, one thing I've noticed about animation, both hand drawn and CG, is that the better the budget and quality, the better the actual animation.  I don't mean special effects, I don't mean story, I don't mean film quality.  I'm talking about the more effort the artists put into the movement of the characters.  If you take a look at a low budget cartoon, such as many of the Saturday morning cartoons on TV (going back as far as I can remember), you will see a series of characters with stiff movements, extremely limited movement, or no movement at all.  To put it simply, if you can't afford the quality, you don't get the quality.  Cutting corners is a very popular and well-practiced skill in animation, often leading to misconceptions that all animations are cartoons and for kids.

Now look at a high quality move, like one that Disney makes, or Dreamworks, or even a Don Bluth film.  These have far more actual movement of the characters, and often more interaction with the environment and other characters.  You can see subtly of movement with the characters, sometimes easy to miss, but drawn out none-the-less.  Often, with CG, studios will use Motion Capture to get around having to animate a character with all these subtle movements.  This is in some cases cheating, since Disney and Pixar have proven you don't need Motion Capture to create exceedingly wonderful moving characters.  In fact, I prefer Motion Capture to be limited to movies that are either using a digital character mixed with live action (such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc.), or realistic CG movies (like Beowulf), and leave it out of traditional animations (such as Tangled, Toy Story, etc.).  You can always use references, Walt Disney has been doing that since Snow White, if not earlier.  It isn't exactly rotoscope, but it is a similar idea.

Why do I bring all this up?  Well, you can often see the quality of an animation just by looking at the way a character moves.  This does not speak at all about the story, the acting, or even the cinematography or any other aspect of the film, but if they have a decent budget, seeing a very well-animated character usually means they put an effort into the movie, and probably also other aspects of it.  Now, granted, the movie could still be bad, it could still be lacking in other areas, but for a visual sense, it has potential.  A specific case in point for me is Bambi II.  I have not seen this movie, and I am not one for sequels for the sake of making a sequel.  However, after looking at a few short clips of Bambi II, my jaw hit the floor.  I was instantly impressed but the subtlety of the movement of the characters.  From the way Thumper's ears flop around to the way the deers slightly bob their heads as they walk, these subtle cues along with an unexpectedly impressive visual appeal (color, lighting, etc) show that Disney put more effort into this sequel than some companies put into their headliners.
Plus it has Patrick freaking Stewart as the Prince of the Forest!

Now since I haven't seen this yet, I cannot give a real review, but I will say this: I am unexpectedly interested in checking out this movie in HD, and seeing for myself just how good the animation quality is, as well as the story and acting.  I hope this is a decent movie, but I will expect it to fall short.  If anyone has any comments or questions, or has seen Bambi II, please leave a message on the board.  Also, if you know if this was actually based on part of the book (which I have never read), could you let me know.  I've been trying to figure out if they made all this stuff up, or if they just filled in where the original movie skipped.

Check out the clips at the link below.  ADIOS!

Bambi II Clips