And now for something completely different

I went and saw The Incredibles last night. Good flick! As a point of history, Toy Story came out right at the same time I was in my Computer Graphics class in College. Our teacher took us out to the local theater and we watched it as a class then dissected it the next day. How neat is that?

Skills that came in handy, I tell you. Though not for anything Pixar did. You see, we saw this movie in a Regal Cinema venue. Not surprising since every single first run theater in town is a Regal Cinema. Ahem. In the place where The Twenty usually was, they ran lots (oh god, lots) of ads for a piece called "Bigg's Adventure". The ads were coming so thick, that when the last one ran before the previews even some kids were complaining about it.

But the animation quality of this flick is abysmal. When compared with what Pixar put up after the previews its like night and day. Twice I caught hidden-surface-removal errors when a character opened his mouth and I saw trees behind him. A couple of other times I saw physics or frame-of-reference errors where the actor wasn't moving quite in sync with the background. Movements were far from natural, far enough that they even looked like animatronic pupets rendered by computer. Shading, always a rough patch in CG, was haphazard at best; in fact it looked like they skipped lighting in favor of making *everything* bright. Where Pixar has skin react to the environment by deforming, this film ignored that completely. I've seen better stuff come out of a Playstation II.