Did We Lose Something In The Third Dimension

Watching a film in its birthplace sears the experience across your mind.

I went through the backlog of Studio Ghibli films with a dear family friend (she had them all on DVD) as a kid on the cusp of adolescence. Where? Japan.

Fitting, then, one of my favorite film scenes in existence is the train ride in Spirited Away.

Before you say the only reason I like it is because I adore trains: let me finish the sentence.

The train glides across an endless flooded plain. The water reflects the sky so perfectly, you wonder: is there even a division between the two? The passengers watch the world go by. So does the viewer.

The scene lingers far longer than most contemporary films would dare, with its complete lack of sound. (No punchline, endless quips, or swelling monologue in sight!)

So simple, perhaps. A quiet scene in a film full of stunning ones.

Why has it stayed with me for over a decade? Why do the scenes that stick in my mind, the ones I return to when I need to remember why I love cinema, almost always come from Studio Ghibli?

Because…of how it was made.

Every painstaking detail has a beautiful quality to it. Not because it's realistic, or accurate to reality, but because each shot was a deliberate creation from a human's hand. It bursts with feeling.

And that care is vanishing from mainstream studios. Like most slides into oblivion, it often happens unnoticed. Allow me to trace the timeline, because it matters.

Disney's last traditionally animated feature was Winnie The Pooh, in 2011. Not their last great one. Their last one. The studio that built its entire mythology on ink and paint closed its 2D animation department in 2013. If you're looking for a symbolic death, that one's a useful contender.

DreamWorks followed a similar trajectory. So did nearly every major Western studio!

The story's well-documented: Toy Story changed everything in 1995, and over the following decade, the industry decided three dimensions were the future. But why?

Don't misinterpret my intent here: I don't dislike 3D animation! I grew up with it as much as anyone in my generation. I adore Rise Of The Guardians, Onward, Finding Nemo, even Toy Story!

The films of my childhood are wonderful, and their animation is a large part of that.

Still…I yearn for the different, the unexpected, the tiny details. And when everything's rendered in the same polished, dimensional style…in gaining a dimension, have we lost a kind of depth?

Two-dimensional animation carries an inherent honesty despite the magic. It's just a series of drawings (thousands of them!) creating the illusion of movement. When a character moves across a landscape, you're aware artists made that happen. There's such intimacy in that.

Three-dimensional animation, for all its technical brilliance, tends toward a different relationship with the audience. It invites you to forget it's animated at all.

The goal, often, is seamlessness. And it succeeds. Which is impressive. Obviously!

I wonder, though: at what point do we enter the uncanny valley? For those unfamiliar, originally it referred to humanoid robots that looked almost-but-not-quite real and therefore unsettling. It seems a subtler version applies to animation. The closer a rendered image gets to photorealism, the more our brains measure it against reality, and the more the inevitable gaps become distracting.

A drawn image, however? It never triggers that comparison. It exists on its terms.

Consider the 2019 Lion King remake. A stunning technological marvel! Yet the animals looked so real, the filmmakers had to limit the facial expressions to maintain the illusion of watching wildlife. Th results? Strangely…inert. In 1994, these characters could convey heartbreak through an eyebrow raise. Now they were so photorealistic, they had the emotional range of nature documentary footage.

Sure, the original was far less impressive, technology wise…but the tools and specs aren't the point. The drawings weren't trying to be lions or meerkats or warthogs! They were trying to be…characters.

It matters more than first appears, I swear. As Scott McCloud so beautifully posited in his book Understanding Comics, when someone draws a face, it becomes a shorthand for feeling. (Simplified, sure, but in that, universal.) A curved line for a mouth. Two dots for eyes. And somehow, impossibly, you see yourself in it! You project, connect, and become immersed in the work.

Yet photorealism closes that gap. It gives you a face so specific, there's no room left to climb inside it. The character becomes something to observe rather than someone to inhabit.

Do you see what I mean?

There's also the question of stylistic range. Hand-drawn animation can look like anything! It's infinite, only limited by what someone can draw. 3D has endless possibilities too, but there's no such thing as built-in specifications or defaults when one's tools are a canvas (digital or otherwise.)

You can tell the difference between a Pixar film and an Illumination film, but the visual language is related. Dialects of the same tongue, if you will.

I guess that's why I adore Hayao Miyazaki's films. They seem to treat the hand-drawn feel as an art form, rather than an outdated filmmaking technique. And Ghibli isn't alone, regardless of what plays in mainstream cinemas. There are countless gorgeous works from all around the world.

Cartoon Saloon in Ireland has made The Secret Of Kells, Song Of The Sea, and Wolfwalkers. Then there's The Breadwinner, Ernest & Celestine, Flee. And that's nothing to say of the countless international studios, small and large, and the incredible industry that is Japanese filmmaking.

Films that exist and found audiences. Most folks have never heard of them.

On television, the picture is a little brighter, at least in Japanese media, adult programming, and the clever way some shows mix 2D and 3D techniques to create something new.

Arcane with its freeze-frames and detailing, the almost-renaissance of kids cartoons in the late 2010s (Gravity Falls and Over The Garden Wall and The Hollow) quietly doing the most emotionally sophisticated work on television. It's all there, if you look sideways at the schedule.

I don't believe the argument folks don't want two-dimensional visuals. If you're never willing to take the risk to show them something, then how can you turn around and claim there's no interest?

Like many things where art meets the needs of this world, it seems to be a business decision dressed up as progress. Nothing about technology is inevitable, even if sometimes it seems so.

Someone I know has always been interested in art. In their quest to gain new skills, they happened across a YouTube channel belonging to an animator who'd worked at Disney for twenty years.

They showed me a two-minute clip he'd made and posted to his channel. What could've been a simple and absurdist tale about a penguin wanting to fly turned into a beautiful lesson in hope, camaraderie, believing in the impossible, and friendship.

Through not a word of dialogue! Just the animator's deft choices in facial expressions, experiments with form, and camera techniques.

I wanted to cry after watching it. Trite, I know, but like all good film does to me, it wrecked me in a small way. The irrevocable humanness and universal emotion and storytelling. All done with just a pen and a piece of paper, or a stylus and a tablet. Isn't that at least just a little extraordinary?

From the internet to vinyl, from VHS tapes to printed books, anytime someone says they're dying, they lie, unknowingly or not. The artists and the appreciators and the in-betweeners are still there.

Here, they're working in television, independent studios, video games, cozy internet corners. What we've lost is the institutional willingness to put this work on the biggest screen.

I grew up in that gap. Old enough to have watched 2D Disney films on library DVDs, young enough most of the animated films I saw in cinemas were 3D. I carry them inside and adore them both.

But I notice which one the industry treats as current and which one it treats as…forgotten.

It bothers me. So I keep thinking about the Spirited Away train scene.

The image's flatness somehow makes it so vast, the water's simplicity somehow contains so much mystery, and the silent translucent passengers communicate loneliness, transition, and growing up.

Who knows? A child today might never see a hand-drawn animated feature in a mainstream cinema. Not because they don't exist, but because the people who decide what gets made decided it wasn't worth it. What a tragic failure of imagination. Isn't that what the art form is for?

There's room for all animation! Always, forever. But the mainstream's near-total abandonment of two dimensions in favor of three is such a heartbreaking narrowing.

Only one thing (at least for this piece) is certain: if we witness something (seemingly) dying a slow death, and we don't wish for that to happen, we can act.

So, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch a two-dimensional animated film.