I don’t think it is a good standard for judging a civilization, really. But CGI, 20 years ago? A lot of it was really quite bad. CGI has always had bad and good instances because of the interplay between increasing technical skill and totally random director-determined skill at selecting shots.
I mean, like, Disney has been getting worse at CGI, but only because then whole company has given up. This is just normal companies shifting around, though.
Anything from 20+ years ago that someone still thinks holds up as great CGI probably wasn't CGI in the first place.
The problem with CGI today is that it's over-used and mis-applied in areas that still have Uncanny Valley type issues (fight scenes, car chases/crashes, etc).
>I mean, like, Disney has been getting worse at CGI, but only because then whole company has given up.
I think that's the main point, yes. There's a sense before that companies were trying to push the envelope. These days it's just a shrug and cynical minmaxing of funds to the shareholders. CGI 20 years ago was objectively worse but you can tell they had way to hide the flaws or redirect the eye away from them. Now... Ehh, who cares? Just get the first pass through.
If you want a relevant example: some people say Lili and Stitch's life action has a weird looking stitch model. Part of thst is because way back in 2005, the original Stitch was simply never meant to be looked at in a side profile for an extended time. Art directors made sure to avoid that angle in every frame they drew. 20 years later... meh. Ship it. Screw the outsourced CGI trying to model something better, the cinematography begin careful of angles, nor any reaction from "nitpickers". We got the IP, it'll make money.
It's not a franchise killer but it'd just one example of the many broken windows
I don’t completely disagree, but I think it is, at least, going to require a lot of work to generalize from “American large corporations” to “the West” (which has always been a fuzzy concept, but at least includes Europe, which seems to be getting better over time).
I mean, like, Disney has been getting worse at CGI, but only because then whole company has given up. This is just normal companies shifting around, though.