The first thing most people will notice about the dreamy, heavily stylized animated noir Phantom Boy is that it doesn’t look like any other animated film from the past five years. Ever since Pixar’s Toy Story hit theaters in 1995, American theatrical animation has been an aggressive tech race, a competition between studios that keep raising the bar on how elaborate and immersive CGI images can be. Films like Finding Dory and How To Train Your Dragon create such rich, fully realized environments, it’s easy to fall into them without entirely noting how similar they all look. For the past 20 years, Pixar films have been a visual template for American animation, just like Walt Disney’s character designs and overall style became the expected...
via The Verge
