Holy Animation Batman

Fringe, everyone's favorite new X-files-esque conspiracy thrill ride, premiered their new episode the other day and, while the style is a bit done by now, it's still interesting and exciting to see tv shows trying to do new things. The episode features the "realistic" animation seen in movies like "A Scanner Darkly" and more crudely in "Waking Life" as well as those very uninteresting Charles Schwab commercials (I'm not talking to chuck).

The interesting thing isn't that they decided to do the animation this way; this type of animation has been used quite a bit in the last decade, but that they decided to use animation at all. It's an hour long sci-fi show jam packed with special effects and more characters than DragonBall Z, yet they risked losing the drama, acting talents, and human interaction to a somewhat lifeless, at times, style of animation. For some pretty cool results, they mixed the "scanner darkly" animation with some more computerized effects, enhancing the dreamlike state taking place in the show, without completely removing the plot from reality.

I guess I'm less impressed with the choice of style, as it has been seen many times before, and more impressed by the idea behind it. Shows have been getting more and more elaborate with their SFX, leaning on them like a crutch in some cases. Movies have largely become showcases for the ability of computers to make things explode instead of really investigating new ways to use them. While this isn't a new style or technique, the fact that a fairly popular show is willing to try something risky, turning around an animated episode is less than 6 weeks, is promising. It shows that maybe some shows will start trying some new things. Try to gain more viewers through drastic changes. We've grown tired of seeing spaceships and explosions, it's time to move on to the next benefit computers can give us.

Anyway, it's no clear sign that anything's going to change, but at least a few producers were willing to try something other than upping the explosion count. Hopefully more will follow in the footsteps and really have a break through television program that we can marvel about. Cool idea, nothing ground-breaking, but conceptually promising... Check out some of the stills and a more in depth article below.
http://www.dexigner.com/news/22930