Tokusatsu going the way of hand shaped Shinkansen nose cones...

[cteno4]

Sad to see this, but nice that at least nytimes picked it up! So many wonderful childhood memories with ultraman, goji and friends. I do find the cgi tools allow directors go way too far as they seem to be in a race for grander effects instead of clean presentation and having a story.

 

NYTimes: Rubber-Suit Monsters Fade. Tiny Tokyos Relax.

http://nyti.ms/19aYzSA

 

Cheers

 

Jeff

[tantousha]

Indeed. I remember watching Power Rangers as a child and loving how it looked just real enough to make you wonder. Styles like these required imagination to watch them... You knew it wasn't real but you watched it because it was entertaining and fun to imagine... That's not so today.

[cteno4]

The mind's eye is pretty much lost to the designers, directors and producers of our modern culture. Sad as its much more universal, creative, fun, entertaining and lasting when tapped. Solutions also tend to be more elegant and satisfying to the viewer/user.

 

Jeff

Edited September 2, 2013 by cteno4

[Sacto1985]

With the increasing power of desktop computers--just wait till the new Apple Mac Pro arrives in a few months!--the days of tokusatsu movies and TV shows done the old fashioned way may be coming to an end. I've even heard rumors that the Toei Company--the producers of the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai series--may switch to using mostly digital effects in a few years, especially now that cinematic quality digital effects are now within reasonable price reach.

 

Indeed, it'll be akin to the old JNR Class 115 EMU's being replaced by 225 Series EMU's in JR West territory west of Himeji and E129's in JR East territory by 2017--we'll miss the classic old trains.... :(

[Martijn Meerts]

The problem with CGI is that at some point it becomes so realistic, that is starts to look fake. A good example is motion capture. They always need to go in and make adjustments to make it ever so slightly 'fake', because otherwise it just looks completely wrong.

 

I enjoy watching 3D animated movies (although, to be honest, even Pixar's quality has been going steadily down in favour of more realism and technical marvels), but nothing beats traditional animation really. Old Disney movies and Ghibli movies and such just have so much more than anything new coming out.

[Sacto1985]

Martijn, what I've heard is that they're working on CGI that now better integrates with traditional hand-drawn animation or looks like hand-drawn animation--in short, slightly "devolved" in quality from true CGI. The Japanese anime companies are certainly interested in this; in fact, the anime series Hyakka Ryōran Samurai Girls used a high contrast line drawing style that can't be duplicated by hand animation.

 

It's these improvements in CGI technology that made end the age of tokusatsu shows as we know them.

[Martijn Meerts]

It's called cell shading, I guess the best examples of it are the Appleseed movies :)