Thinking Animation – Bridging the Gab Between 2D and CG

By Angie Jones and Jamie Oliff

Thomson, 2007

7½" x 9", 346 pages

This is another book with a lot of text and little illustrations. I always find this strange for animation books. In addition, most of the illustrations in the books are not there to show examples of what to do or what not to do but are there as caricatures of situations. Not very informative.

Like Tony White in "Animation from pencil to pixels", this book stress, also, the requirement to learn how to draw. Solid drawing is the key to good 3D animation jobs. As more and more of the technical aspect of producing animation goes oversea the jobs that stays in-house are more and more at the conceptual level. And this requires a good and solid artistic foundation.

The most interesting aspect of this book I found is that it is written as a reality check. Animating is not easy and working in the animation industry is not a fun trip either. This, the book goes to great length in trying to get this idea through.

Working in a large animation studio environment is very demanding. The authors even give a set of tricks and advises for surviving in this environment. And doing animation is not easy. This we already know. But it is not easy in more ways than one. The book text is filled with warnings of all sorts for the wanabe animator. Almost half of the book is dedicated to how to survive in a studio environment, How to behave with competing collegues and temperamental directors and save your ass. How to deal with command hierarchy, cross orders, diagonal commissions and double binds of all kinds. How not to burn yourself with those inhumane work hours and demanding production expectations. How to keep a certain sanity and still stay true to your own quality standards and creativity while dealing with sub par production requirements. How to go through all that and still love doing animation.

The litany of not-so-funny-work-situations, we encounter in any work environment where there are enough coworkers to build that sort of dynamic, and the chain of command is high enough to distort that dynamic, and the deadlines and budget restrictions exacerbate even more this dynamic. Just business as usual. But a lot of wanabe animators imagine that since drawing and/or animating alone in front of a stack of paper or in front of the computer screen is so fun, Doing the same thing for a living must be fun too. Not so fast. This is why I qualified this book as a "Reality check". And this is probably why the authors opted for illustrating different work situations in a comical way rather that the animation concepts they were discussing. And if only for this "Reality Check" aspect, this book is definitely worth reading. This book have the honesty to say it the way it really is.

Apart from this, there are good sections of the book dedicated to the task of animating. Nothing is really geared toward drawing or even posing and animating but all the great principles of animation are reviewed in details. As the title of the book says it, the text is more about how to "think" about the animation. How to plan for it. Which aspect of the animation should be paid attention to. How to think in term of acting, intensions, emotions, power centers, empathy, gesture, etc. Things that would be ill to illustrate anyway which probably explains why the book have so little illustrations. The text is really a sort of checkpoint list of things to think about and long explanations of why they are important to think about.

Personally, I found this very interesting. But on a practial level, I think some animation books are lacking illustrations and erring on the verbosity. And this book is one of them. In this day and age where instant talent is the grail and reading seems out of fashion, I still wonder who is going to read such verbose books. At least, when the book have some illustrations, it is still possible to get something out of it by just browsing through the illustrations.

I can imagine that the authors of this book had difficulties getting the rights to publish pieces of the work they did through their carreers since they mostly did works for studios and clients. I understand this situation because most of the work I did during my 13 years in multimedia industry falls in this category. Nevertheless, I think they could have added more illustrations to accompany and support their text. Instead of asking different peoples to draw some situational cartoons that add only a sort of comic relief to the text, they could have used the opportunity to have them draw original material to illustrate their arguments. They went to the extent of having a 3D clown character designed, modeled, textured and fully rigged, which serves mostly as an opening mascot for each chapter.

All the concepts that they discuss in this book could have been illustrated is some way or another. I don't mean that those books should be as illustrated as "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud, but still some accompanying illustrations would be nice. Tony White "Animation from pencils to pixels" is even more verbose and on the same arguments level but at least, the text is acompanied with a lot of relevent illustrations and photos.

To me, an animation book without animation illustrations feels the same way as when I receive a publicity flyer in the mail about a graphics design studio offering their services where the flyer itself is not designed top notch. Show me the meat.

And I don't expect yet another book that teaches the craft of animation. There are already enough and unless an author can come up with really innovative instruction style and approach, I don't see what more could be added to "Cartoon Animation" by Preston Blair, "The Animator's Workbook" by Tony White and "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams.