The Monday Question: Update!

The Monday Question

The movie industry as we all know loves to look into their past in order to take properties and make them again. This can turn out great (The Thing), but also can go horribly wrong (I think you’ll be able to think of enough examples yourself). The result is that there are a lot of complaints of there not being enough original movies being made. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but can understand that feeling. This past weekend I was listening to a Filmjunk podcast and they were discussing something which I found interesting. If there is one genre of movies which are quite dependent on technology, it is animated movies. They were talking about something which the game industry has been doing quite a lot lately, which is release “HD” versions of older games. So no changes are made to the game itself, but the graphics get a visual upgrade so they look nice on your HDTV. Their example would be applying this to the first Toy Story movie, which of course was made when the technology to render movies like this was still taking baby steps. So it would get better character models with more detailed texturing, more details in the locations with everything else left untouched (so no changes to the movements/dialogue etc.). I would be very interested in seeing something like that, but how about you?

Would you like to see movie studios update their older (CG) animated movies to current technology, so it will look better?

8 thoughts on “The Monday Question: Update!

  1. I don’t think this is such a good I’d a for movies. I understand it for games because of the potential for new sales. For movies, it sounds like a lot of money to invest in something with little chance of recouping it. Besides, part of the charm of many older cartoons is how they look.

    • Of course they have their charm and you could argue that Toy Story 3 or the latest Tron movies showed what an updated look would be. Still…I wouldn’t mind it myself if the original movies got an update.

  2. I think they should leave them alone as I think recent animated movies look pretty good as they are. Instead of focusing on technology, Hollywood should focus on crafting a great story as that’s ultimately what people remember movies for.

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