Saturday, June 8, 2019

Rotoscoping?

The trades explain a new animated series:

Amazon dropped a teaser trailer today for Undone, an animated series that aims for a mind-bending brand of adult sci-fi that ventures into a trippy head space that evokes the surreal pursuits of Philip K. Dick, Phillip Pullman, Inception, The Matrix, and Pink Floyd.

Undone will premiere later this year on Amazon Prime Video but the first two episodes of the Amazon Original series will get a big-screen audience this Saturday at the ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas. ...

Undone is the first episodic television project to use rotoscoping animation, which has visual rhythms that are far removed from the mainstream CG aesthetic that dominates and largely defines contemporary Hollywood’s approach to animation. The best-know product of the rotoscoping approach to date is A Scanner Darkly ...

"Deadline" likes to reference A Scanner Darkly as a well-known "rotoscope" approach to filmmaking. I'm not disagreeing, but since I'm a geezer, you could also say Undone looks a lot like a Fleischer feature cartoon from 1939. And you wouldn't be wrong. The Fleischers were, after all, rotoscoping specialists going back to their Out of the Inkwell shorts in the 1920s. Rotos were a wee bit different technologically back then, but the underlying principle? Much the same.

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