LogFAQs > #986035703

adjl posted...

CG isn't necessarily cheaper (if you look at the budgets for Disney animated films, the 3D stuff generally has higher budgets than contemporary 2D stuff), but it is more consistent and the skills are easier to learn/train. Hand-drawn animation is hard, and there simply aren't that many people out there capable of doing it. That limits what can be made and can make things less predictable, which isn't desirable. With 3D, they can run more projects simultaneously and reliably find people capable of animating the directors' visions.

Remember that the biggest concern with corporate art production is often not quality so much as it is consistency/predictability. Executives don't want to gamble on producing something that might be amazing but also might not, they want to produce something that will almost certainly be decent and yield a predictable return on shareholders' investments.

The primary benefit of 3D animation is that it is a lot easier to reuse assets and edit.

If a scene comes out a certain way but test screenings didn't like it, it's a lot easier to go reanimate a scene than to redraw a scene. It gives creators a lot more flexibility.

The 2D equivalent of 3D animation is, of course, Family Guy style animation where characters are very stiffly modeled and posed and every single angle is the same so that they can be reused and re-edited.