I suspect @Brainspore has an opinion on that animation.
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Being another graphic artist, I’m sure that he does.
Concur. I also find with Dick that I wish he’d been a better prose writer, or a had a co-author to better realize his imaginative stories.
It’s…not that great.
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As a film lover and animation instructor my take on rotoscoping is generally “it’s a great time-saver but kind of an off-putting technique for a feature-length film.”
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Insert joke about most animated performance by Keanu Reeeves.
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He’s more ‘wooden’ than this sculpture, which is ironically far more expressive than Reeves himself is.
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If you haven’t tried it yet, he co-wrote Deus Irae with Zelazny. I haven’t read enough Zelazny to know for sure which parts are him (just Lord of Light and this) but it’s definitely a PKD story with some editorial control to it. 
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Interesting. Looks worth checking out. Lord of Light is wonderfully written IMO, but I too haven’t read a whole lot of Zelazny.
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Oh dear sweet Starspawn of Cthulhu!
I am worried.
It is a very long overdue sequel to a cult classic film which was iconic for a generation of science fiction mavens and film set designers. A film whose elements have been copied, mainstreamed, and parodied in the last 30+ years. In the current Hollywood anti-creative atmosphere, the chances of avoiding the big giant suck appear rather slim.
One hopes for a Mad Max Fury Road re-imagining. But Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull seems more likely.
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I always found it weird that Rankin-Bass did the Hobbit and Return of the King but assumed everyone had seen the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings in the middle.
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The TV stuff was not Bakshi. It was by Rankin-Bass. The producers of all the stop motion Christmas specials and later Thundercats.
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Curious, what do you mean by off putting?
I don’t love or hate rotoscoping, I like good rotoscoping and dislike bad rotoscoping. A good example would be Fleischer’s Superman from the 40s.
Fleisher studios used rotoscoping pretty sparingly, but their animators clearly knew how to do their jobs without it. A Scanner Darkly struck me more along the lines of “didn’t have the budget to do the film as live action, didn’t have the talent available to go full animation.”
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I thought Scanner Darkly used some sort of digital filter/algorithm. It looked to me like if one imports an image into a vector program like Illustrator. Haven’t seen it though I’d like to.
It has been a long time since I have seen LotR that Bakshi did. Though I think now I know what you’re talking about. There is some stuff, and IIRC it was in his other films too, where it just looks like they took live action and used what ever method to up the contrast and shift two two colors. I don’t really like that, but IIRC it was done to cheaply get it done and speed it up.
I did like its used in Fire and Ice and Cool World. IIRC Disney used it in parts of Snow White. And while some of it was a big crude, it was used well in some of Heavy Metal.
So, bad rotoscoping is bad, and some people use it as a crutch, but I think it can be a good tool as well.
In my best guess, the guy who came up with the animation process (used also in Waking Life) has been friends with Linklater for years, so naturally it developed this way to make it easier than a huge FX budget for live-action, and maybe even a good deal between friends.
I was living in Austin at this time, and remember Linklater was still needing to keep things inexpensive despite his increased popularity over the years.
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Bakshi got a little lazy by the time he animated Wizards. He rotoscoped over footage from Alexander Nevsky for a bunch of battle scenes.
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