7 CG Animated Films That Have Aged Like Milk

There’s no shortage of films from the pre-CG era that still hold up well today, and even early films containing CG (such as Terminator 2) that still look amazing thanks to smart and limited use of the primitive effects of the day.

However, when it comes to movies that consist entirely of CG animation, time generally hasn’t been very kind at all. I’ve been dipping back into some of the movies I have fond memories of, and it turns out I should have left them in my recollections instead of seeing them with my modern eyes.

7

The Polar Express

Maybe it’s not fair to say that The Polar Express “aged like milk” because audiences had a sour taste in their mouths pretty much on the day it was released back in 2004. This might be the movie that introduced the concept of the “uncanny valley” to the public at large, as they struggled to explain why the corpse-like CG recreations of real people like Tom Hanks left them creeped out.

To be even extra fair, this is still something we struggle with in modern CG, which is why filmmakers have learned to shy away from trying to make hyperrealistic humans, though there have been some amazing modern attempts at getting it right.

6

Antz

Just like you sometimes get two movies about asteroids hitting the Earth releasing at around the same time, sometimes you get two movies about the tiny world of bugs and insects. Antz and A Bug’s Life were both released in 1998, but I think it’s Antz that has aged the worst by far.

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Which is a shame, because I quite like the story of a neurotic ant who doesn’t quite vibe with the whole socialist thing, but still has a thing for the monarchy. It’s also got some pretty great performances by the late Gene Hackman and even Sylvester Stallone.

The actual character models are pretty hard to look at, and I really think it helps that I used to own this on VHS as a kid, which really helped smudge out the worst of it, but today there’s no hiding how rough this movie looks.

5

Shark Tale

I don’t have much love for Shark Tale as a movie either way, but the vague attempt to put Will Smith’s likeness on a fish body is the least of this movie’s issues. There’s no excuse either, since they did it right for Eddie Murphy in the original Shrek.

The actual animation is pretty decent, and you can see the beginnings of more detailed texture work and lighting, but this is too early to do water right, and the aesthetic choices throughout are not easy on the eyes.

4

Dinosaur

Initially conceptualized by two of my favorite creators, Phil Tippett and Paul Verhoeven, 2000’s Dinosaur is actually a pretty monumental achievement in the visual arts. This is probably Disney’s earliest attempt at a CG feature, although the movie gets away with a lot by blending live-action scenery with CG creatures. This meant more of the effort could go into making the creatures, and comparing this to Toy Story just five years prior shows amazing progress.

We have fur, we have skin textures, and massively improved lighting. In 1993’s Jurassic Park, Spielberg used darkness to hide the low-fidelity of the T. rex CG model, and CG dinosaurs seen in full light were definitely not going to convince anyone, so Disney being bold enough to let it all hang out at the turn of the millennium should be applauded.

However, while this is still a great movie and very watchable, the creatures move poorly and look atrocious. There’s just no getting around it. If you look at the BBC’s Planet Dinosaur 13 years later and 2022’s Prehistoric Planet, then you can clearly see just how far we’ve come.

3

Beowulf

I was a little obsessed with Beowulf when it first came out. In fact, I still own this movie on DVD and I have the production art book in my collection. It’s a retelling of the European saga of the titular Beowulf, and is one of the first movies I can remember that made an honest attempt at digitizing real humans and reproducing them in CG.

For the time, it actually does a pretty decent job at this, and the renditions of Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, and the rest of this A-list cast are clearly who they’re meant to be.

Unfortunately, watching this movie today, the movements of the human characters are just off in a way that really triggers me, and what seemed like amazing realistic CG in 2007 now looks very low-rent.

2

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

I was super-excited that there was a Final Fantasy movie coming out, but very disappointed when I found out it had nothing to do with any of the games. I went to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and there wasn’t a Chocobo or a Moogle in sight.

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Nonetheless, I was absolutely blown away by the actual visuals of this otherwise rather dull film. Squaresoft had always had a knack for CG cutscenes in its PlayStation Final Fantasy games, and this movie essentially took what they did in titles like Final Fantasy VIII and pushed it to the limit of what their poor computers could handle at the time.

I remember squinting my eyes in the cinema and thinking if you just blurred the picture a bit you couldn’t tell that these were CG people. Now, however, this movie looks worse in most ways than real-time video game graphics, which is actually pretty incredible when you think about it. If they had access to modern performance capture technology the movie would have aged much better, but all hand and facial animation was hand-animated, and it shows.

I still have a soft-spot for The Spirits Within because of nostalgia, but you’re much better off watching Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children to see what this movie should have been.

1

Toy Story

It feels very unfair to judge Toy Story for how primitive and rough it looks now. After all, this was the first fully CG feature film. It’s the pioneer of the whole medium. The whole reason Pixar chose toys as the basis of the film was because they were the most suitable for the technology of the time. No fur, no skin, just hard materials like plastic, metal, and wood.

Actually, all things considered, the models and lighting are still serviceable, but it’s in the animation itself that things really fall apart. It’s easy to think back to this movie in your mind and imagine it looking like the later films in the series, but watch Toy Story 4 back to back with the original, and it should be clear just how far we’ve come in 30 years when it comes to CG.

The toys now look like real toys in the real world, artistic direction notwithstanding. The animation and physics systems have come just as far as the lighting and assets.

Still, we have to give Pixar its flowers for creating and rendering this timeless movie on computers that were far less powerful than whatever you’re reading this about right now.

CG is just going to keep getting better, so I guess we should have some perspective here. At some point, the most beautiful and cutting-edge CG films of today will look like they were drawn on an Etch A Sketch.