Forget the movie, I want the animatics!

Just finished watching the extras on the Incredibles DVD with the missus. Wow. I always thought of storyboards as these hasty little sketches that weren’t really all that interesting in their own right. But for this cartoon, they created some darn fine animatics that are just about as exciting as anything in the finished film. In fact, because these animatics combine 2D drawings with 3D backgrounds and objects so expertly, they are a lot more interesting than the animatics for, say, the Lord of the Rings films, which tended to have rather boring and blocky 3D figures running around their 3D environments. (I had a similarly positive reaction to the considerably more stylized mix of 2D and 3D in the Hong Kong cartoon McDull, Prince de la Bun.) The fact that the Incredibles animatics are all black-and-white also lends them an extra aura of cool. I think I’d like to see the entire movie that way, at least just once.