Visual Style for my Animation

The overall visual style I'm planning on having for my animation is along the stylised lines. I've been looking into other animations to get inspiration and decide what I want to achieve. In feature animations, the environment tends to be more realistic even though the character are of a stylised design. Brave and Epic are prime examples of this, as seen below. As technology has progressed, so has the ability to create more realistic environments. These characters are stylised, however they have a human appearance are are more life-like than previous films such as The Incredibles where there is a lot of exaggeration in the design as they were superheroes.

My dragon has a cartoon appeal to him so I think putting him in a fairly realistic environment wouldn't work too well. The two may seem disjointed against one another. A possibility is to have something simple such as the environments in children's animations. Wallykazam is a new animation for Nickelodeon. The characters are very appealing and would suit a child audience, they also fit well with the environment. The environment itself is fairly simple, a ground plane with foliage and what seems to be an image put in the background to add depth. The trees look to be like 2D cutouts, and whilst this is a nice touch and would suit a child audience, I don't think it's the right route to take for myself. I'm aiming my animation at all ages so I do not want to choose an overly simplified background as this may give the impression of an animation aimed at children.

Something more along the lines of what I'm aiming for is similar to that of Carrot Crazy. The trees are simple in design yet have more detail than those in Wallykazam, and it works quite well with the design of the characters. I might look in to populating the ground with some grass and foliage and this can be done using Maya paint effects. This will add a bit more realism to my scene but in keeping with the overall design that I want to achieve.

nick wallykazam naptime clip 1 640x480 1600 m30W from Jessica Wilson on Vimeo.


Carrot Crazy from littleGIANT on Vimeo.