Flying the digital skies

I sort of implied with the last OIL entry that I was going to move on away from Sky Crawlers. Well, I lied. There were extenuating circumstances in the form of a translation of a radio transcript. It's an educational read, even if you have not watched Ponyo or Sky Crawlers.

The most interesting point made in relation to the direction of Sky Crawlers is the use of expression through form, and how the characters' movements, detailed as they are, are all directed as if they were puppets. We have met the Sheeple, and they are us. With apologies to Pogo.

In terms of the challenges of actually producing the film, the home stretch of the transcript lends credence to the view that hand-drawn animation is dying, due to a shift in demographics. The talent is getting older, and fewer. And then there's the little gem that the quality of animation is sinking as a result. I suppose that means Paul Johnson is vindicated. Not, you know, that anyone should care.

What's also of note is the suggestion that in the past, talent would be literally knocking down the doors of studios. Recruiting was unheard of.

In even mentioning this subject, I feel that I've inadvertently walked into a firestorm of irreconcilable differences. It's like Man vs. Machine, round 5061. Silicon intelligence has gained ground to the point that things are Good Enough while making Good Enough sufficiently cheap to mass-produce.

This is great! Or should be great. And you can disparage the people with money for being manipulated tools and such, but the wallet calls the shots, and the wallet doesn't seem to mind.

Maybe it's worth stepping back a moment.

What have computers traditionally been good at? Crunching numbers. Approximating physics, particle effects, explosions, rag dolls.

What are humans traditionally good at? Spanning the spectrum of those ethereal things called emotions. Gradients and shadows that span the spectrum of our vision. But you just wait! Cheap ray-tracing hardware is on the way, and if you've seen MS IGLOO 2: The Gravity Front, surely you must concede that computers have gotten pretty good at conveying the human touch.

But I will concede that it's not the same. And maybe it never will be.

I remember now just what I feel I've walked into: tubes versus transistors. People swear by vacuum tubes. It's warmer, they say, it brings the music to life. What they don't say is that transistors are much more linear than tubes and will therefore generate a more accurate, a more realistic, reproduction of the recorded audio.

It's the same story with vinyl versus CD. Some people just love non-linear, distorted playback. The engineers recoil at the thought that anyone should prefer anything but the most linear of amplifiers. The reproduction of signals must be as close as possible, and we'll keep throwing bits at you until you can't tell the difference!

Why do video codec developers engage in pissing contests over PSNR and SSIM?

Reality approximated to arbitrary precision. Reality run through a non-linear filter.

Irreconcilable differences.

I'm conflicted. Sometimes the distortion is easier to comprehend, like how we feed our children sugar-coated fairy tales with happy endings. Any problem, sufficiently distorted, can be made to have a convenient solution, and put in a grade school textbook. Any terrible truth, sufficiently distorted, can be made easy to swallow, and cement misconceptions that may never be dislodged.

Sometimes distortion is the only way in which we can understand each other.

It comes down to this: computers can only communicate the reality that they approximate. Humans communicate the reality they experience. And as any unreliable narrator will tell you, what we experience and what exactly happened are not at all the same.

Regardless, the day the dust settles in these debates is the day the old guard dies off. Not the nicest thing I've said all day, but loggerheads will be loggerheads until one side is forcibly removed. There will be defenders (of the ancients?) who will take up their cause, as they should lest we forget, but the cards are stacked against their ability to move the world with the old tricks.

I do sense the injustice of the practitioners, slowly being made obsolete by a younger generation, the future arbiters of animation quality, people who find nothing unusual with digital. Maybe that's just evolution, for better or worse.

A parting thought: Is Makoto Shinkai the vacuum tube of anime?

P.S.

No one on the show did anything to disabuse listeners (or readers) of the (misconceived?) notion that Japanese men are asexual. What on earth … ?