Topic: Animation VS Live-action

Which is the better, personally I think neither is.

Please keep things clean.

Depends on what it is based off of. Certain things don’t work well in animation and visa versa.

animation, next question

Like everyone else is saying, it all varies. For me, monster/kaiju films tend to fit live action better. Now if you're making a t.v. series based on monster films, well...animation can work. Godzilla the Series & Skull Island are good examples.

As others would say, it depends. With technologies like motion capture and CGI, the lines are starting to get pretty blurred these days too.

In my opinion it's animation, for a pretty specific reason.

I managed to observe one trend throughout the years - the more popular a media becomes, the more bland the creations. This is done to appease the lowest denominator of the consumer, and the reason is obvious - a ticket bought by a normie costs the same as the one bought by a diehard fan that will keep the fanbase alive, recalling the intricate details of the work and creating wonderous and strange theories.

This is how the mechanism works and now how I noticed that trend:

Movies and TV shows were the first to stoop down to nothing. If you recall the best pieces, they would all be very old: Columbo, MASH, the X Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, everything across the board rated from masterpieces to at least very solid in terms of an idea and writing. The Blade Runner was done the way it was because of no supervision. The investors thought it was another bland blockbuster, while Ridley Scott was making an unsellable masterpiece. But the corruption of the media was the quickest one here - there was a series called The Police Squad with Leslie Nielsen which was pulled off the screen because it was too witty, too intelligent. It was later proclaimed the dumbest reason for a tv show to be pulled. We can see what happens now - there is nothing to watch left. The best of 2020s isn't even the mediocre of 00s, 90s and 80s. Mandalorian is an average mess at best, and that's before they made horrible mistakes of putting pieces of the show in other different shows (which means you have to watch episodes from different shows or the storyline crumbles to pieces before you). What a shame.

The video games followed very soon due to rapid expansion of the media. In 90's, 00's, developers were still exploring the possibilites, making unique mechanics and playing, toying with the media. Everything turned to ash after 2010, because it was around that year when normies understood that video games are great and should not be reason to bully the geeks.

Anime was the last to fall - there still were great series up until 2015, but that was the bottleneck year for the media. Nowadays it's all "I got resurrected as a toilet paper in a sci fi universe with my hot classmate noise word noise word noise word". There is no Toradora, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist or Evangelion nowadays.

Of course it doesn't mean that there are no good movies/shows, games and anime, but the bigger the budget, the lesser the probability of something being good. Great media still come out, but the majority of industry budgets go to satisfy the brainless normie hordes. And the live tv media is the most expensive to produce, so you have to appease the investors by making the show as bland as possible.

Animation can be produced with much less, so they can appeal to different groups of geeks and still produce some revenue.

And that is the tragic tale of how normies ruin everything.

Hmm a really intriguing bout. Live Action has a clear weight advantage from being real world so the question is can Animation bulk up to compete with them. Animation has another disadvantage is that they are so scoutable since they need thousands of underpaid and overworked Asian animators beforehand to make things works as well so they can only fight on their Plan A with no deviation so live spontaneity and going off script gives Live Action another advantage. Animation needs to go into this relentlessly, Live Action needs to breath so if Animation can take those moments and don't let up it can swing things their way. I think Live Action are the favourites but I do think Animation can win this as long as their confidence is good and the prep is done.

If I had to call it Live Action round 2 by TKO however I don't care who wins, I just want to see some good bloody hard hitting violence between them.

@OwlHighway1Revisited

Better in live action:
Aladdin 2019
Beauty & the Beast 2017
Cinderella 2015

Better in cartoon version:
Little Mermaid
Lion King
Mulan

Depends on the subject matter and production effort. And nostalgia factor sometimes as well.

It really just depends, some stuff just work better in live action than others, though IMO I kinda think animation has an advantage as the only limit really is your imagination.

And please don’t take that as I think one is better than the other, I don’t. For example I think Godzilla vs Kong Kong could work in animation, it will work, but I personally think it looks really cool in live action, and seeing them fight in real cities is awesome to me. Or alien, that would just not feel right animated honestly, a lot of what makes alien, alien is it’s setting, and atmosphere, which I just don’t think would feel right animated.

But take something like, mmm let’s say (sorry I’m using YouTube a series) murder drones, Hazbin, (just thinking off the top of my head) are amazing animation series, and there art styles to there animation are so good, but live action, while you could would just be hard, and they would need to do it vary carefully.

maybe it’s just me, but I think the live action one piece might prove me wrong, and show me that if adapted right, even something as crazy as one piece can be live action, then again, they have oda working on it so that probably contributes a lot compared to these other series. I’m honestly kinda excited for it but my expectations are low as to not be disappointed if it turns out terribly. I mean I think the fact that they made the den den mushi’s puppet animatronics shows that they are trying imo.

Sorry I always write these long post about simple stuff like this, I just can’t keep it simple ):

I like both. I like options

Depends.

Things like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, & Venus Wars just wouldn't (or in one case actually didn't) hit the same way in live action.

But on the other hand I don't think films like Schindler's List, Oppenheimer, or 1917 could work as animation.

Animation. It's the best way to convey an impossible story. Where as something served up as live action is often embellished with computer animation or green-screen effects and comes off as hokey. The Spawn anime and the Spawn live action are a good contrast.

@jump what do you mean by weight advantage and scoutable? It's a bit unclear to me

@Princess_Lilly think boxing/MMA since the threads is vs rather than or.

@Rambler you have a generation who grew up thinking clickbait top ten articles are legit news worthy, everything needs to be ranked now as it’s the norm.

@jump so weight advantage would be the sheer amount of live shows, rather than quality? And scoutability would mean how widely live shows are advertised? Since I can't really think of any other meanings based on the context

@BobTheBunkerGuy before we rank live action and animation we must first understand what it is to rank, the philosophy behind ranking, the drive behind the desire to rank and what it truly means to rank. If we don’t do that before we rank then it may all end up a bit silly.

@Princess_Lilly You’re over thinking it, it’s just banter.

As long as something is good, I do not care if it is live-action or animation.

This is like asking if books or movies are better ...

Different mediums should be ranked among themselves.

@Zuljaras that is certainly true.

In the past years I've seen some good anime and very few good live action movies/tv shows, so I'm assuming it's because live action is more appealing to normies, therefore it has to be bland. But maybe I'm mistaken.

I have detached myself from live action, but lately I've seen "Cocaine Bear" and I was surprised how good it was. It was a pretty absurd slasher, but it was actually made with a scenario and scriptwrighters, it looked like someone wanted to convey a story. That's rare these days with marvel and disney mashing random scenes and sentences together to create scenarios for their "works"

Neither one is inherently better then the other, it just depends on which one would be most compatible with the story being told
When live action works, it is great
And likewise, when animation works it is great.

And on the other hand when live action doesn’t work, we get things like the little mermaid remake (which really should’ve just been remade in 3d animation)
And likewise once again, when animation doesn’t work, we get met with some uncanny valley (stationary eyes for example), a bunch of animation errors due to dysfunctional handling, and an overall really bad use of it.