THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND TRAILER TV

It's what the Monkey Island games have always done. I didn't want Return to Monkey Island to be just a throwback game, I wanted to keep moving Monkey Island forward because it's interesting, fun, and exciting. You can't read an article about Thimbleweed Park without it being called a 'throwback game'. > When Dave and I first started brainstorming Return to Monkey Island we talked about pixel art, but it didn't feel right. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art. > Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. Pixel art is what they used due the time and circumstances of the original games, not because they like pixel art better than other media. Ron Gilbert directly addresses the use of pixel art in a blog post. One is done by hand, one is trying to adapt these kinds of abstracted shapes into 3D models without super-abstracted rendering. Two relatively modern examples of this style actually working: Samurai Jack and Psychonauts. And super easy to make animation with no lines. Instead we just have cool drawings that are snipped into a few pieces and moved around, which is a thing that hasn’t really been satisfying since Flash made it super easy to do this. But I doubt Gilbert had the budget to do this, given the results in this trailer. If you’re willing to split your drawings up into smaller shapes and create more of an illusion of three dimensionality, you can do some gorgeous stuff. And design drawings that were inevitably reworked into something less stylized - pick up any Pixar art book and you’ll find a ton of great drawings in this mode.

THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND TRAILER TV

Over time this look went from super hip and new to the cartoons cranked out for TV by Hanna-Barbera. It’s a lot harder to animate than it looks to really make it work you need to have a firm grasp of animation and 3D movement despite the drawings looking super flat. The sound sync will probably be off by a few frames, which is super noticeable in things this stylized, but you’ll still be able to see how striking this kind of animated cubism can be. Find a copy of Amid Amidi’s book “Cartoon Modern” for a nice survey of this time in animation look up anything in it that sounds interesting on DailyMotion or Youtube. In stills it feels like it’s waving towards the UPA style, as filtered through modern tools.īack in the late 1940s and the 1950s, there was an animation studio called United Productions of America, founded by Disney-trained animators who wanted to rebel against the “illusion of life” so beloved by Walt and experiment with the cool new visual ideas coming from an art movement known as “cubism”, as well as experiment with highly abstracted and stylized forms of movement.

The secret of monkey island trailer