

- Review or comment or comparison cartoon animator 4 how to#
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None of this is bad material for a children’s animated feature, and The Sea Beast offers several breaks from tedious recent trends in animation. Though the creature isn’t as puppyish as Dragon’s Toothless, its response to the protagonists challenges some assumptions about these sea creatures, stemming from old-timey maps and Maisie’s supposedly true-life storybooks.
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When Jacob and Maisie are separated from their crew, they come face to face with a massive horned beast (possibly amphibian, given its dexterity both in water and on land), who Maisie nicknames Red, after its bright skin color.

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Outside the Disney sphere (though not worlds away), there are strong overtones of How to Train Your Dragon, where a pre-industrial society lived in fear of fantastical creatures. There’s a bit of Moana in this story of an expert sailor mentoring and learning from a curly-haired youngster, as well as a dash of Pirates of the Caribbean, where rougher-hewn sailors are challenged by soldiers of the crown who want to take over the job of monster hunting. He also worked as part of Disney’s story trust on many other projects. Its director, Chris Williams, is a two-decade veteran of Walt Disney Animation Studios, where he was on directing teams responsible for Bolt, Big Hero 6, and Moana. It’s understandable that a Disney influence would inform so much of The Sea Beast. He’s just a generic-brand version of a Disney hero. Jacob Holland (Karl Urban), the strapping sailor who becomes Maisie’s reluctant guardian when she stows away on his monster-hunting ship, isn’t a caricature of swashbuckling masculinity or a clever visual variation on a familiar theme. But in general, the Sea Beast approach to human designs is to imitate recent Disney features like Moana or Encanto and make their eyes a bit smaller. She’s a Black girl, which ensures that she doesn’t look exactly like every other plucky young animated hero. So why is every human in this overpopulated story so dull to look at? The most distinctive by default is Maisie Brumble (Zaris-Angel Hator), a young orphan who reads of heroic beast-hunters and dreams of joining them on the high seas. The creatures themselves are a wonder of economical design: cartoony enough for readable expressions, imposing enough to put a good, momentary scare into smaller audience members. Underneath, when sailors are occasionally dragged down to face enormous, kaiju-esque creatures, the murk creates a spare, ethereal beauty. On the surface, as hunter ships prowl the sea for fearsome beasts that supposedly threaten humanity, the water shimmers and churns. Specifically, this ocean-set adventure story deploys mega-gallons of computer-animated water with great skill. Netflix’s new animated feature The Sea Beast shows how far the medium has come over the last few decades - but it simultaneously shows how uninspired big-budget animation can still look, sometimes moments after it delivers a visual wow. In the early days of feature-length computer animation, there was an unofficial list of objects and textures that were notoriously difficult to master, with hair, water, and human faces chief among them.
