Hikarian 2012-09-30 13:57:51

Art versus entertainment... In the world of animation it seems like two sides of the same coin. When I first began animating, I only did it with thoughts on the entertainment, while I've later become so obsessed with the art that I sometimes forget all about the structure. A teacher of mine once said that the most difficult thing about animation is that it is both a form of art as well as a kind of craftmanship at the same time - especially as you get further into it.

Well... If we had a good story, we might as well choose to write it as a book, tell it as a joke, or just make a plain old live action movie out of it. But we choose to animate it instead, and I guess that's where the "art" comes in. Uh, well it could be a kind of paradox, because it really does seem like you can't have a good animated movie (by the old standards) without some kind of structure/entertainment value. On the other hand, it's hard to take seriously if it isn't somewhat well drawn. But even a movie with an abstract plot line doesn't seem like a mistake to me as long at it's intentional...

Matija27 2012-09-30 14:06:50

The bottom line is that it is all just a matter of taste.

Brewster 2012-09-30 15:21:09

I think it really depends on what you're looking at. Take a look at SickAnimation. The art is shit, but the humor is great. If the art and the drawings were higher in quality, it'd be even better. But the shit art works fine because you can still get the jokes.

Then look at chluaid and the Bitey series. It's beautiful to look at AND the story is entertaining. But I think that if it didn't have the characters and animation quality that it has, there'd be nothing to keep the viewer interested in the story.

So yeah I don't fuckin know.

Poniiboi 2012-09-30 15:43:12

Wnat to be on ur nxt project.

Twisted4000 2012-09-30 17:27:01

Is it art or entertainment... well that is a good question. To me, it can either be a bit of both, or it can be whatever the creator chooses it to be.

If it's something completely abstract that doesn't make much sense, but the author is aware of this, it can indeed be a form of art... art has no rules, no boundaries. Anything goes. Everything is a matter of opinion and preference.

Now, that being said, there is also the "industry", and the "majority of the audience". There's certainly things in art that at least MOST people want to see and experience, and what MOST people would consider "good" or "bad". If most or almost everyone thinks something is bad, does that MAKE it bad? No, but to the world's eyes, it usually does.

In conclusion, I think everything is simply a form of art, anything goes, you can do whatever you want. But it's just what most of the population's preferences are that seem to DEFINE things as "adequate" or "inadequate"... that kept in mind, it's only when you publish work when you can find out if it's good or bad to the world's opinion on it...

Sqeezy 2012-09-30 17:41:31

i wrote a long comment but then i deleted it. ok

Sr-Estroncio 2012-09-30 17:42:57

Art is personal, it's almost impossible to make an animation for a big audience while still staying true to your inicial idea, however, it's not impossible to make it understandable for the public, even though the majority of people might not like it. I believe if the artist doesn't makes as least an effort to ''translate'' his idea to the viewer, he can't blame people for not understanding his work or calling it bad, after all, the human mind is a mess, what makes perfect sense to someone inside their heads might sound vague or non-sensical when simply thrown on a book, animation, game, etc.

The artist might also choose to not translate it at all, and make it completely personal, in that case, it's not about switching entertainment for art, it's about burying the art beneath the entertainment, so that the viewer can enjoy the animation but still reflect about what it brought within, of course, a lot of people are probably not going to give art any meaning at all, but some will, and that's just how things go, I have never seen a work that is seen as art by everyone.

Well, at least that's how i see it.

Luis 2012-09-30 19:46:08

Always make movies that please you first. Theres always going to be points in your life where you'll have to make movies that entertain, be it because its a commission, a homework assignment, popularity(?), your job, whatever. I think stuff that you make that you enjoy first will always have a special place in your heart and sometimes even someone elses and that goes well beyond the satisfaction of a good score/trophy/whatever. Sounds cheesy but its true.

I recently crossed the 10 year anniversary of my career over the summer and I took a good deal of time to think about my career and the things i accomplished, that i liked and didnt and just an overall survey of it all. Most of my favorite pieces were ones that captured memories of the making of them not necessarily the most successful or popular ones. I started to feel like I somewhere i forgot about having fun with it. So I've been getting myself back into just having fun.

Anywho hang in there. The nata thing is such a brutal thing to commit a whole half a year to. You should take a break and make some music or something

IzunaX 2012-10-01 00:16:18

Hell do I share most of your perspective around that topic, particularly the "bad and pretentious", and what Hikarian said is pretty much what I concluded too. Also Animation is what it is, if those are proper works, it is more than either art or entertainment. Art and entertainment are at the end, just categories, tags. They don't define completely, or at all, the value or shape of what can and can't have such tags. They matter at certain times, e.g. producing a TV series for a big network or creating paintings just to experiment with different colors, but not always, that's the point. I can bet that some dump files here were done just to try stuff, conceptually and technically. And many works have been tagged and accepted as art and entertainment, by both viewers and creators (some of them being truly thought as art).

What Luis said pretty much applies to anything you like doing and end up being relevant to your profession so yeah, you'll be forced or required to do stuff you don't have a saying at all, so have fun when you are not in such position. And you are a good composer too btw :D .

... I didn't like the sound about that The Catcher in the Rye quote.

Luis 2012-10-01 01:01:56

also you complain alot about being an animator. youre probably in the wrong profession if youre expecting a non stressful, totally unappreciated profession.

Nobody will give you a break if you have a 10 second or a 10 min animation. They want to be entertained and to be fair, it shouldnt matter how long it took them. thats not gonna make a shitty animation better, just knowing they spent a long time on it. or vice versa really

Eddie-John 2012-10-01 07:10:33

Very interesting read, have enjoyed your pieces for NATA btw. Sorry to sound like a dick for this next part though.

Your 16... your a very good animator for 16, but regardless you have growing to do in every aspect of your life, and I think therefore this opinion is something that could easily change overtime.

I personally enjoyed animation purely for entertainment when I was younger, after studying and exploring over many years I have come to realize that I personally can enjoy SOME abstract animations and SOME "art" animations. There is no place for pretentious animation and I guess that's what your really talking about here, and I totally agree with that, don't get me wrong your general direction is mostly correct anyway. Personally I feel this medium seems to have evolved around entertainment and exploration, and overtime new exploration caused people to try new things, that really didn't always suit animation.

Overall I agree with you, but there are certainly some artsy animations that should be given credit and also some very exploratory animations that deserve a nod as well. I am just glad that a website like Newgrounds can be a place for younger people to talk about their passion for animation, this is the kind of discussion I wish I was a part of at your age, let alone starting it.

Luis has it right too, make an animation for you, regardless if it entertains others, it should most importantly entertain you. That's why there is some really artsy animations out there, someone woke up and said I feel like making the stop motion animation "plume" ... *shudders*. Not my cup of tea, but as long as he enjoyed making that film, then its all good.

SpamClamberton 2012-10-01 10:42:26

Animation is supposed to be a sequence of images which create the illusion of movement. It's a medium, not a genre, and there aren't any shoulds and shouldn'ts outside of personal preference. Personally I think this idea that all animations need to carry clear narratives is absurd, though there's a lot of very important professionals and theorists in the animation community who believe that to be an animator is to be a storyteller, and that narrative is necessary for an animation to be worth anything. I say they can eat a dick.
I mean like, nobody could really say that Leonard Cohen was a better composer than Bach on the grounds that Leonard Cohen had narrative lyrics, while Bach wrote abstract instrumental music and wrote songs purely to explore musical ideas. If somebody tried to argue that, the most obvious rebuttal is that with Bach, communicating a narrative isn't the point, the raw musicality is, and whoever made the previous argument is probably giving waaaaaay too much weight to storytelling over everything else music is capable of exploring and should stop being such a cunt. It's the same thing as saying that painting is invalid and Dali should have done comics instead because they have stories in them, or that poetry is invalid and Alan Ginsburg should have written storybooks because they're easier to follow and have direct narratives rather than a communication of a concept.

If composers are permitted to experiment with raw musical structure (or the texture of sound as well now that we can record things), painters are allowed to explore form and colour, and writers are allowed to explore language and the qualities of words in relation to each other, then I'll be fucking damned if I can't explore raw movement without being considered pretentious. Or communicating concepts in a non-narrative way. Or just communicating imagery that moves without a significant context. That's called enjoying what makes my art form what it is, and it's no more pretentious than any instrumental piece of music or any drawing without a fuckin speech bubble or some shit in it.

Running out of characters, END OF CHAPTER ONE

SpamClamberton 2012-10-01 11:07:11

PART TWOOOOOOOOO

To your main point, in terms of whether things should be art or entertainment, I'd say art IS entertainment on the grounds that I look at art all the time and am entertained by it, and it's really just a matter of demographic. Most of my favourite animations are things that you'd probably dislike going by what you've said, in which case they're still entertainment, only they were designed to entertain me instead of you. It's worth mentioning that most 'arty' internet animation is pretty derivative and flat and amateurish, so if that's what you're basing your tastes on then I'd recommend going to an animation festival or something. That being said, you did say you can't really appreciate galleries anymore, so it probably is just a matter of taste.
In terms of the art 'missing something', I'd say that if the examples you're thinking of are experimental, then 'missing something' is in their nature most of the time. More standard things are safe because they're following specific tried-and-true formulas which have been proven to work. Things that are experimental or avant-garde are by definition trying out new things, and so understandably, they aren't going to get it perfect first try. If you wanna make a movie that follows the standard hero's journey, you have the majority of hollywood films to turn towards and see examples of people who have used it well. If you're not using any sort of pre-established story structure then you won't know if it'll work til it's done. That really comes down to what you prefer as a viewer, if you would rather see something that's polished and refined but is in a lot of ways the same as everything you've already seen, or if you want to see things that are unlike anything you've seen, on the understanding that they may or may not work. Personally I find the second one more exciting, and there's quite a few animated movies I love, where I don't think they quite got it right, but their awkward attempts to achieve something new are infinitely more engaging than most Hollywood blockbusters.

I know I've got more things I wanna say but I don't remember which things I've already said. So uh, yeah. That.

Slackman 2012-10-01 14:18:31

Animation is an art form by definition. What you choose to do with it is what defines it as good or bad art. It's also worth noting that art is a very subjective topic. What some people would consider art, others would consider a waste of time. This is especially true with modern art, where the definition of what we call art has expanded to include pretty much anything. There's plenty of artwork out there that I don't particularly like or understand, but I have a hard time denying that it's art.

I'm struggling for names here (and too lazy/busy to look it up), but there's a dude who set up a booth in an art gallery where he could see the people coming through but they couldn't see him. He would masturbate to them and tell them via a microphone what about them was turning him on. Another guy took a box, took a couple of photos, buried it in a hole and called it art. Chris Burden took a bullet to the arm and called it art. Andreas Serrano filled a jar with piss and a statue of Christ. Hell - I could take a shit in a box, stick a pirate flag in it and argue pretty easily that it's a piece of artwork.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that you can call anything you want art, and you could probably justify it. Animation at its best is definitely art. If it's entertaining too - then you've got a great animation on your hands :)

kmau 2012-10-01 16:53:22

I think good art can entertain and good entertainment can be art.

Emrox 2012-10-01 19:50:05

Get back to work.

Bill 2012-10-07 07:31:37

There's an interesting quote from Alan Moore about art and writing

Moore associates magic very much with writing; "I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman."

He has another quote about how a story itself should hypnotize the audience or something along those lines. I really want to use a clear idea but I really want to mix genres without making people feel like I the writer has fooled them but brought them to the change smoother and more subtle but deliberately under their noses.

I think about the art versus entertainment issue a lot. My favorite problem is when it comes down to the effort of detail. Like if I really dig deep into details for a background or a scene I'll have a friend who enjoys funny youtube videos would tell me it would look better if it was stick figures. Essentially with entertainment or humor it's meant for wider audiences and from a competitive stance simple is always faster and better. For an animator it's a huge dilemma because in every serious animator I tend to see them trying to be recognized by other artists as being artists when a lot of closed minded people don't even see animation as art but as a childish goofy thing. It always comes down to moderation and balance in everything.

DaAtheno 2012-10-07 22:06:29

I feel that asking those kind of questions just make you think too hard about what you are doing and can make art more stressful. If what you make feels right to you, you are proud of it, and other people like it, than you are doing it right.