Don Bluth is a fucking treasure.

His hand looks like the bad guy in Comix Zone

I generally agree with the premise, but Rango's better than anything Bluth has ever done in many ways. It's not realistic, just detailed. I was kind of surprised he mentioned it and not some mo-cap movie or something. Bluth's stuff is technically very good but I've always found them stylistically not as appealing as some other peoples' animation.

Much like Harlan Ellison, anybody who comes to Don Bluth looking for advice on how to be an artist will quickly find themselves realizing that even the most rudimentary of novices has far more credibility and respect than the 5 decades of experience both bring to the table.

Don Bluth is incapable of making a cartoon where anything is happy or cheerful. I mean he tries but the result is always sickly. Like he saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit and didn't realize that the toonland was a horrifying place.

agreed that realism as a "goal" in animation seems kind of silly but I'm pretty sure that not what most CGI films are going for

Remember when Rat Porn Lady tried to sic Don Bluth on PoE? IIRC he sent us a brief message expressing his sincere desire to remain uninvolved in her LAWSUITE, and also his sympathies to PoE for us having to deal with her.

In art school they hammered into our heads that the only photographs we should ever draw from were ones we took ourselves. No matter how much your finished work varied from the source materiel, a bit of the reference showed through. If you were taking from a published photo, you were taking from someone else's artwork, therefore possibly plagiarizing and opening yourself up to legal action. I'm pretty sure they just wanted to protect the school from getting sued, but it sure filtered out all the no-talent, put-the-tuition-on-daddy's-credit-card, I-only-draw-anime-characters scumbags.

I agree with him. I think people respond a lot more positively and with a stronger emotional reaction to films with a distinct visual style over these realistic and yet unrealistic films we've been subjecting ourselves to since the rise of CGI. However, there's certainly a place for both, and I think every option should be available these days. The problem isn't really the style anyway with these films, it's the content.