Let's reminisce about the old days of computer animation

[Mysterious Dude]

When I was a kid, I was very interested in computer animation. After the mid-nineties, my interested waned, and I think a big reason for that is the mainstreaming of computer animation. After Jurassic Park and Toy Story, computer animation is everywhere. Almost all animated films are computer animated now, and almost all of them, I think, try to mimic the Toy Story model, at least in visual terms. As for its use in live action films, you can now do almost anything with computer animation, whereas in the old days, it was more limited, so filmmakers had to use it more carefully.

Granted, some of these films don't have a lot of artistic merit, but they still remind me of a time when I thought computer animation was cool.

Fair Play (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx97ULNV5Ao)

[balmakboor]

Remember Pong? A little white blip drifting back and forth across a greenish-black screen while two big white blips try to hit it? That was introduced when I was ten. I'm 47 now and am staggered by how far computers and computer animation have come in 37 years. If you showed people footage from Avatar back when I was ten, they would've had freakin' heart attacks.

What were we talking about again...

[[ETM]]

I was 3 when TRON came out, and I probably saw it on TV when I was 8-10. I remember not understanding anything in it (it was on Italian TV), but being mesmerised. The same after seeing The Last Starfighter, the first film with quasi-realistic computer graphics, and Flight of the Navigator. I don't know, now that pretty much everything is possible on film, I'm truly missing the old days where you'd be dreaming about the stories you saw in films for days afterwards, because they'd tickle your imagination, instead of force-feeding it.
But I truly admire Cameron's efforts with AVATAR - he's literally saying "I'm going to show you things that you could only dream of before." And I want to stare at the screen in awe again. I truly do.