Pixar designs mascot character for NTV’s “24-hour Television”
July 3rd, 2009 by James
NTV got a team of character designers from Pixar to create a mascot character for the 2009 edition of “24-hour Television” special (not to be confused with Fuji TV’s “25 hour Television” special) :
When watching this announcement on television, I was initially surprised that they were able to get pixar to design a character for them. After the character was revealed, it became clear that Pixar had created the character as an advertisement for its new movie, “Up,” so things made more sense.
Do you think this character is cool?
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It’s OK I guess. Looks like a throwaway character they decided not to use.
i am not looking forward to even changing the channel on the 24-25 hour tv days in fear that i may have to watch a even a few seconds of the crap.
I like the retro styling, but I’m sick of mascots generally.
The face on that TV looks like 1940’s Japanese stereotypes in the US:
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/pics/seussjap.jpg
Have to agree it does look Asian, not that there’s anything wrong with that per se.
I admit I winced a bit when I saw the eyes of the mascot. The angle is a exaggerated a bit too much for my taste. I wonder why they thought that would be a good idea?
Pixar’s a very savvy company with strong multicultural sensibilities, so I’m sure they meant no offense. It’s just an odd character design choice.
Just out of interest – do they resynch the lip movements when dubbing a Pixar film into Japanese? I couldn’t tell from the clip.
No, they don’t. This would be too much trouble. Lipsynching can nowadays be done automatically by the computer for digitally animated 3D characters with more or less good results (although usually there are still glitches that need to be fixed), but rendering of complex scenes with raytracing still takes lots of time.
The human mind si relatively forgiving when it comes to this.
Also this would mean that with several audio tracks in different languages on a DVD/BD, you’d also need the different video tracks. It’s easier to force translaters and voice dubbers to stick to the original lip movements as much as possible.
Also, watch some Japanese anime. You’ll notice, that even there the lip synching is far from perfect, even though the animations are made for Japanese voice acting. This is because of the way that Japanese animation gets produced, compared to, for instance, The Simpsons.
With the human mind being forgiving, I meant being forgiving when it sees wrong lip movements that are generally ok, but don’t seem fit occasionally.
You need some training to notice the less obvious errors, mistakes and problems.
I think the worst problem with the way that movies are translated is that because the translated text has to fit the movements and the time frame that the voice actor has to perform at a certain point, the translations are often a bit arbitrary and not really fitting.
Ever watched an episode of Futurma in German? That’s pure torture!