We're all familiar with the concept of viral videos. Usually, they're harmless time-wasters, something that's passed onto you by your friends, you have a laugh at, and you move on to the next one. Occasionally, these mini-productions will find their way into our pop culture vocabulary (I'm looking at you, Old Spice Guy. Or rather, I'm looking at my monitor, then back at you, then back at my monitor, then back at you).
But occasionally, a viral video will pop up that throws a spotlight on an emerging trend and points out something that may be a part of our geeky career landscape in the future – and I don't just mean as the basis of parody sketches on Sesame Street.
Such is the case with the Thai Beauty and the Beast.
Haven't seen it yet? Follow the link. It's by a company called GM Toons that has made a cottage industry of shot-by-shot copies of Disney films using basic CGI technology. They changed the designs of the House of Mouse's characters just enough to avoid looking like blatant tracings (it's been noted the Thai Beast looks like The Lion King's Mufasa with a pair of striped socks on his head).
And did they stop with Belle and company? Oh, no. They ripped off everything from Aladdin to Snow White, with a non-Disney ripoff (Land Before Time) in there just for equal opportunity. Heck, even the GM Toons logo looks like a blatant copy of the Disney one. (One wonders if they have a video game division with a ripoff Kingdom Hearts).
But what we at Fan to Pro took away from this was more than a mixture of amusement and horror. It was the CGI. Okay, it wasn't exactly Pixar quality – and that's the point.
If something like this exists, it means CGI technology, once restricted to the most prestigious animation houses (like, y'know, Disney), is getting more affordable, more widespread. And this raises an interesting question: How long until the technology to generate CGI on this level becomes available to the fan in the street, and what will they then do with it?
We've seen a revolution in DIY music and publishing recently. Both name acts and newcomers have chosen to release their own music through print-on-demand CDs and on the Internet rather than going through Big Labels. Innumerable writers have been self-publishing instead of relying on Big Publishing to get their works out there (and, heck, one of them won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction).
Is the next step, then, DIY animation? Flash is already out there (it was used to create the pilot for The Venture Bros.), and when it's joined by inexpensive CGI – the same kind used to create the Disney clones – will we then have cartoonists and animators honing their craft not by jostling for the few available internships available at Disney or Nicktoons, but by making their own toons and putting them on the Web?
The same technology currently used to create the laughable non-Disney films could someday be used for everything from animated fanfiction (Troops: The Animation, anyone?) to audition reels for people looking to make the big time, to the animated equivalent of Webcomics – and even cottage industries of print-on-demand DVDs, if a title becomes popular enough. (If you have strong enough writing, you can get by with less-than-Disney animation. Two words: South Park).
What looks now like an amusing Internet meme may be the first stirrings of the next big thing in progeekery. And all this from bad copies of Winnie the Pooh and Princess and the Frog. (Yep, GM Toons did them, too. They're probably working on their version of Tangled as we speak.)
- Bonnie Walling