The Landmark in Gaming Animation

To begin allow me to explain why I made this blog. Over the years I'd always seen blogs but never really cared much for them. Just people blabbing about their personal lives most of the time. And while I likely will put up some stuff of my own, it will include quite a bit that I've come to respect in animation over the years. It was John K's blog ( http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/ ) that prompted the idea for me to do one of my own.

While John K does do lots of good in-depth animation posts on his, he doesn't ever touch on a subject that I know he never will. Video Games. We all played em growing up by this point. Fortunately for me I was born into the 16-bit era where attention to detail really started to pick up in gaming. Things looked better, you could tell what they were supposed to be, and overall more life was put into the games (something that sadly is usually missing from a majority of titles these days).

And even though the graphics were undoubtedly better the characters themselves popped with actual new things that they did. No longer were they just pixels standing there forever until you did something on the controller. They moved. They looked at the screen. They had life. They went through animations to amuse the viewer when the controller wasn't being used. Sonic would get annoyed and lay down irritatingly, Vectorman would mess around with his orbs, Yoshi would bounce up and down and scratch his nose, and that's only popular characters.

But inspite of all the advancement the games still mainly focused on being just games, which I personally don't mind. Games should be games first and foremost. The controls and gameplay should be gotten down above all else. Once those are in place any other details can be slapped on to pretty the package up. To my dismay however, they usually don't "pretty it up" as much as I'd like. Of course as a little kid I didn't realize it or the effect it'd have on my subconscious and all that crap, but looking back on it there are quite a number of 16-bit titles that could use a lot more life.

The game I played in my youth though that hit the nail on the head in animation and really pushed the envelope on what all could be done with the liveliness of a title I feel is what I consider a candidate for the best game ever created. It's what I would say is one of the most revolutionary titles ever. Earthworm Jim.

It was just jaw-dropping. It was a cartoon. It was an actual cartoon.  It was what so many games had been trying to portray themselves as but never quite reaching. With Earthworm Jim though it pulled the stunt off perfectly. The character wasn't ever still like Sonic. He was constantly moving and breathing. 

Even as a child I knew there was something special about him. It wasn't until years later when I refound my Sega Genesis and played through it again that I started doing research about him and found out just why the way that he was done was so much more refined than other video games of the time. It turned out that the people that had worked on the Sega Genesis version of Aladdin that I'd also played as a child had made him. It was clear that they knew how to get across life on the pixel screen.

But what was their secret? Well, the main thing was that they did actual animation. And I'm not talking "make things move on-screen". I'm talking actual going in and drawing frames.

They would then digitize the animation frames into sprite-format to put into the cartridge.

After having made Aladdin for the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, Dave Perry's team went on to become Shiny Entertainment and brought aboard an artist called Doug Tennapel.

With that he got to creating Earthworm Jim and his wacky cast of villains and allies.

Along with other animators like Mike Dietz, he and Shiny brought these pieces of art to life.

The ever handsome Mike Dietz btw: 

But they weren't just drawing. These people knew cartoons and they knew how they worked. The squashing and stretching that brought these kinds of characters into surreal believability was as prominent in them as in any true cartoonist's DNA. The characters held weight and had frames smeared just like the classics. Tex Avery himself is even acknowledged in the credits of the game. Some pages of concept art for the game look even more Warner Brothers-y than the game itself with Jim's expressions reminding more of something that you'd see in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas".

But this only shows the still concepts that it came from. You've already seen how they turned the pictures into sprites in a gif above, but for more reference here's some more actual frames of animation Mike and the other animators did for the game.

This kind of detail and understanding in the movements and energy of the characters is what brings cartoons to life and few games ever reach that point, with Earthworm Jim being the first in my eyes to do so. That is why I hold the game with such high regard. Half the video game industry doesn't even attempt such a feat, and most of it has just shunned cartoon characters to the point of near non-existence in favor of boring dark gritty titles that every damn thing seems to be turning into these days. All the same crap. The only reason Sonic and Mario really survive is because they are legends. Relics from a past time. If they were made in today's era of gaming they simply wouldn't survive. They'd just have one or two titles and never be seen again just like Rayman almost ended up like and like so many others have unfortunately fallen to the fate of.

That's why I was so pissed at Earthworm Jim HD. About a year back a new team went in and gave Jim a graphical overhaul to be released in an "HD" version on the downloadable market. The chance to bring the classic back looking even better than ever!

There were quite a few problems with it however, namely the biggest one being that it was just crap. No one of the original team was brought on to the project or even asked for help. Doug always seems willing to take part in a new Jim title (which unfortunately always get scrapped) and I'm sure quite a few of the others from Shiny would love to get involved.

But this new team just handled it not even understanding how cartoons worked probably and...well...****ed it up. I'm not going to lie when I say entire frames of animation were TAKEN OUT of the game for the HD version. It should've looked like a hand drawn cartoon, but instead we got...this...

....I'm sorry...but...what the hell am I looking at? How does...what? 

Obviously the right side of the screen is the original game's sprite. And the left is the HD...refining job of it...

...and the rest of these faces are just ****ing offensive

THIS is what happens when you get people that don't know how to do cartoons to redo a classic. Not only that, but they OUTSOURCED their work to China when making the game...they outsourced...a downloadable title...and because of that they also ended up stealing someone's deviantart fanart for the game

as well as a certain "Finding Nemo" fish...

 Now...I have to ask...why did this turn out as such a disaster? Yes the backgrounds are nice, but everything else in the remake is just crap. The difficulty even on classic is completely gone so that the newer generation of gaming doesn't get upset, the "HD"-ifying uglifies even the most basic of characters, Tommy Tallarico's once gorgeous music is now crap, and the new content doesn't look at all like it belongs in Jim's world. I have never understood how big business heads think. Waste the little money it'll take to get people who worked on the old titles to help out and you'll make that money back WITH interest because the product will turn out so much better in the end. Basic common sense here.

*sigh*

But I just wanted to give a look back and analyze what I consider one of the best and most important games in history. A title that I'm sure many games these days could learn from.