I'm gonna start to write some personal views on the world of animation, and talk a bit about myself and the experiences I'm going through (good or bad, who knows), within this context.
It would make sense to say that every person is a different world. Animation encompasses such a huge array of methods and ideas that each and every single "animator" can have it's own perception of things, making this popular statement even more evident. This might be why in order to be "good" you should adopt a "habit of knowing" (Eric Larson on "Our work habits"). I assume this is common in every single art form, but animation somehow is enriched even more by the combination with all other ways of expression like drawing, painting, sculpting, music, dancing, acting, acrobatics,... It doesn't go away from being another medium to "express", but at the same time is even broader and has a deeper effect, its disadvantage being that is harder and more time consuming to create.
Which at the same time makes it even more difficult to criticise. What are the judgement criterias when we talk about "good" or "bad" animation? Is it about "the torso needs to be rotated on the right position and moving the arms a bit higher can give a balanced pose with good arcs", or is it simply about having success at giving an emotional message to the audience? Is it about expressing yourself the best way you can, or approaching certain techniques and styles for the sake of matching a designated "look"? Maybe in something like "South Park" you wont need to apply the "12 principles of animation" from Walt Disney but it certainly is animation because it's visual content being "created" and brought to life on its own way, faithfully delivering emotional effect.
Another element to consider is the bias towards a medium, an example of this being my self claim as a "3d Character Animator". The initial reason behind calling myself like this was because basically my foundation in animation has closely been attached to the Computer Graphics Imagery tools, and I'm very familiar with it since most of my portfolio of work consists of "3d" animations, being able narrow down the market in which I wanted to focus on to get jobs. However I do not consider myself being dependent on the CGI toolsets if I want to "do animation", because the principles and processes are shared within every medium, and that's what I'm trying to do as an animator: to create based on such principles. So I guess is something vital I've realised now, that I should rectify once I update my portfolio of work.
To conclude this post, I would like to share a link with all of you out there who bother reading my blog, where you can appreciate some really unique animation work, not mainstream at all, and that is amazing and worth knowing about: http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.2/3.2pages/3.2student.html
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