CG Movies

Over the past years, CG-based movies have certainly evolved.

Tron was one of earliest. Though many scenes were made with cardboard and not computers, it certain defined the look for CG design and had many cultural icons that still appear today. I recently saw a car commercial that was a reenactment of the lightcycle game.

The Last Starfighter was fun, but lacked realism. The space scenes had all the trademarks of early CG- too clean, too sharp angles, no shadows.

On TV, of course there was Star Trek, which mixed models and CG. An often overlooked series was Space: Above and Beyond. It had what I consider the best, most realistic CG space scenes until Battlestar Galactica came around.

BTW, I'm not talking about the 1970's series-- If you don't know about the new BSG, head over to SciFi.com right now. Better yet, head over to Amazon and get started with the DVDs before Season 4 comes out next year!

Final Fantasy was a really good attempt at realism, but fell short in a few areas. Most notably was lip sync and facial expression. The character ended up seeming like robots instead of people. I think that alone gave the movie a bad perception despite how incredible the rest of the imagery was. I wish they could go back and re-render that one.

I ran across a trailer for one called Dear Anne. But the website is down. Just discovered this one- Now and Nowhere. Not sure what it's about, but it looks cool.

I don't want to count Star Wars, even though the last trilogy was almost completely CG. I think they just tried to hard to be hyper-animation and ended up with the equivalent of someone overdressing in a really bad outfit like some stars do at award ceremonies.

I have yet to see 300, but have high hopes. Sin City and Scanner Darkly were okay, but they were more style than story. Movies like this seem to be getting better. But still way behind the traditional Japanese animated movies like Spirited Away or Ghost in the Shell. In design there's a philosophy that "form follows function"- I think that applies to movies as well.