The post had two aims:

1. To spur further thought and questioning on the term Anymation, and

2. Attempt to make sure that a ‘culture of excuses’ if you will (although Hugh doesn’t believe this exists , doesn’t carry over from Machinima to Anymation, and I brought this up because I DO fear that we (the Machinima universe at large) are sometimes afraid of using the word “Animation”.

I’m not trying to suggest that the term “Anymation” is in it’s entirety a direct result of that fear.

Like I said in that post, the key to judging or maybe even defining our films is context. Some people use it as a reason, some as an excuse. whether there is a difference is up each film’s creator(s).

I’m sure that’s true for you, Phil. I would have no qualms about showing any of your work to any type of audience (indeed, I regularly do!) In fact, when I said in my previous comment that

… the cream of current machinima (or anymation) is good enough to stand on its own as superb entertainment.

you were one of the people I was specifically thinking of.

I don’t think that you can claim that this is the case for everybody, though. I stick by my point (and Leo’s original implication) that for some people, the anymation manifesto is being used as at least a partial justification for not seeking (or paying attention to) criticism from the wider world.

That doesn’t invalidate anymation as an attitude or an ethos, though. As I’ve said several times before, I’m fully in support of it, and I think that some of the often bizarre criticisms that have been levied at anymation recently are entirely unwarranted.

If you tell someone you do Anymation in real life, they’ll give you much more cred and your explanation of the term will be much more respectable than if you say ” yeah, machinima, it’s video game movies”

Anymation all the way

Anymation (I grow wary of repeating this) is an ATTITUDE. One many stuck-in-the-mud animators don’t have. It’s most definitely NOT someone’s attempt to make excuses for how their films look.

I am proud of how my work looks, without reservation, and as a thing in itself. There’s nothing (other than budget) stopping me from doing live action film at the level of quality I’d want to do, and there’s absolutely nothing in the age of Blender to keep me from learning to do CGI. I just don’t want to. I like the kind of animation I’m doing now. I enjoy the process, I like the aesthetic.

And those closed-minded dogmatists in the various animation sub-families… are not my audience. And frankly, I’ve got an expletive-laced message for their uppity attitude, which I’ll spare your readers.

I explicitly intended for BloodSpell to be compared, without much context, with works like Beowulf and Stardust. It did rather well out of it – for example, Dreamwatch reviewed us with a score of 7/10, the same as Stardust and one below Beowulf.

Again, with When We Two Parted, most viewers didn’t know anything about Machinima, and still enjoyed it.

I get rather frustrated with the inferiority complex about other media that frequently crops up in Machinima circles. Sure, Machinima can’t achieve some of the graphical highs of CGI. But viewers don’t just watch films, TV, animation for their visuals. “From Hell” had prettier cinematography than Season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’d still rather watch Buffy. Blair Witch wasn’t as well-shot as the English Patient, but more people watched it.

And there are ways to achieve some fantastic visual styles and effects with Machinima. Look at Phil Rice’s Radiohead entry, or anything Friedrich Kirschner has created, or Still Seeing Breen. You can show all of those videos to people who’ve never heard of Machinima and they’ll still appreciate them.

It’s perfectly possible to compete on the world stage with a Machinima production. If I didn’t believe that, I’d have given up on the medium long ago. If Molotov Alva didn’t succeed, that’s a failure in its writing, direction, acting, whatever, not a sign of the Apocalypse for us.

If we really want to ghettoise ourselves, resort to special pleading, say “well, yes, but if you consider how it was created…”, then we can. But we don’t have to.

Ahem. Rant over.

I think you’re quite right to suggest that one of the factors involved here is an unwillingness to allow one’s work to be compared to any other animation or digital video on an equal and unbiased level. I believe that is the case for some people in our community.

I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with this – perhaps somewhat defensive – position. Everybody’s reasons for creating machinima/anymation are different, and equally valid. If someone isn’t comfortable with their work being criticised (positively or negatively) outside the machinima community, I see no reason why we should force it upon them.

There are other prominent members of the machinima community, though, who are only too keen to have their work seen by as many people as possible, with or without context.

Some people – and I’m one of them – believe that the cream of current machinima (or anymation) is good enough to stand on its own as superb entertainment.

There’s a feeling from a lot of people that the word “machinima” no longer embraces or defines what they’re doing. Personally, I identify almost 100% with the manifesto and ethos of Anymation. I don’t particularly like the word itself though (purely on a subjective personal level), and I’ve always thought of the core Anymation tenets as falling under the increasingly-wide umbrella of Machinima. Not everybody agrees with me on that point, of course, which is fair enough.

The recent debates over the “anymation” have involved people with all of the above motivations and more, which is one of the reasons that it’s caused such strong feelings and heated debate amongst the community.