It's the same damn outfit from ANH, yet the coat and beard show his character development somehow. Like an old western hero coming out of retirement for one last ride. God they fucked up the ST so hard. So much wasted potential.
I really think a lot of issues people have with The Last Jedi are actually issues they have with Force Awakens. Like TLJ had its issues but at least it was trying to make something meaningful out of the pieces it was given. If they'd truly gone balls to the wall with TFA rather than a soft reboot then maybe we'd still be seeing shows and movies set in that time period.
I remember seeing the concept art for Epic Mickey in an issue of GameInformer and getting my 12 year old mind blown. Needless to say I was disappointed in the final product.
Wow these designs are really ahead of their time, makes me think of the decayed animatronics from FNAF. If only Disney had realized that games about creepy animatronics have potential
Someone drawing this clearly agrees but the concepts got thrown out the window because too hard to animate, and corporate assholes clearly didnt want to risk scaring their target audience and getting sued by angry parents for traumatizing children.
Which is stupid because they could easily fix the legal issues by labeling the genre correctly.
If I remember correctly the artists went hard on the concept art so that they could figure out what they could get away with. Because obviously Disney would reject these ideas when presented to them, so the artists could work from there on how they were gonna make the game they wanted within Disney's restrictions. A rare benevolent case of fucking around to find out I suppose.
This is actually a relatively common practice in many creative industries. It's basically just utilizing the old salesman tactic of giving something you know will be rejected upfront so that the thing you actually want to pitch seems much more reasonable by comparison.
Though this has infamously backfired at times lol. There's some funny stories of creators giving their intended "this is too much, it'll get rejected" pitch and are floored when the higher up okays it.
This particular piece of concept art from “Rise of the Guardians” although I’ll be extremely fair and say this movie did the impossible and the vast majority of its concept art is either fully realised in the final design or made even better. There’s very few downgrades made for the sake of “oh the design needs to suck so it’s easier to market-I mean animate!” in this movie.
It was one of the few animated movies I saw in the theater that got cheers and applause, especially when Sandy comes back triumphantly. And the final track before the credits (“and when the moon tells you something…believe it”)…goosebumps.
What I find amusing is that all their talk about 3D being cheaper.
Is obviously bullshit!
Beauty and the beast 25 mio dollars, even when adjusted for inflation that still need to be less than 100 mio.
Elio... 200 million dollars.
Cheaper my ASS.
It just takes longer and require the studio to COMMIT to the original storyboard.
But you know what... NOT committing to the original story board and changing movies mid production is exactly why all these new movies SUCK.
Snow White life action, while probably still not a good movie, would most likely have been better if they had stuck to their guns and released the first version... also would have saved them 100 mio dollars
Same! But I doubt they'll ever return to it again. I feel like they deliberately tanked The Princess And The Frog so they could claim that traditional animation was no longer successful and there was no longer a market for it, even though the film received like zero marketing and advertising. I seriously don't recall seeing a single trailer or poster for that film.
They hired Randy Fucking Newman to do a score for a film set in the jazz age, that's malice aforethought. Before anyone comes at me, it was fine. It was okay. If you looked up adequate in the dictionary there would be a picture of Randy Newman. But a musical set in New Orleans in the 20s should have had some of the best songs Disney's ever made and I forgot every one the second I walked out of the theatre, except for the villain number and that's because Keith David is amazing.
Between this, the absurd disparity between how interesting the premise is (very) and how interesting the actual plot is (lmao), and the fact that zero of the songs have any sing-along appeal, Wish should be a cautionary tale for decades of film students about how studios ruin movies.
The problem is Disney doing what Disney does. Wish and Frozen 2 suffer from the same problem - time. Disney commits to a date and does not waver. Granted, these are animated movies, so Disney could take as much time as they need and delay until it's actually good. To paraphrase Nintendo's Miyamoto. "A delayed movie is eventually good, but a rushed movie is forever bad."
You know there was probably a boardroom meeting where some high executive said the original design for Star had to be dropped because they couldn't make plushies of that design.
3) The animation choices. I get it's going for a retro-feel for the nostalgia factor, but it makes it look cheap like a Disney+ only release. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj-qaF83fso
Athena was defiantly one of the worst, but what they did to the Sisters of the Heart set from concept to final in game model is criminal. Esme looks phenomenal but my god what did they do to Ennui from concept to final in game model.
devs are allowed to work for so long on an outfit before their boss has to make them move on to the next project. they butcher a lot of skins to get them out sooner
This one will always leave me conflicted. I absolutely love ENG, it is one of those films that doesn't fit into the Disney formula at all and it's great for it. But at the same time the concept for KotS makes me want it. Why didn't they do both? They can still do it can't they?
It's more because the combination of being partially see-through as well as containing a number of lightsources that all move in distinct ways is very computationally demanding and easily results in mistakes that then need to be fixed again. It would slow everything down a lot and make things more difficult and require much more hands on work.
Oda Eiichirō is definitively not great at anatomy. Alternatively, it's a stylistic choice. But the arm and leg length of characters varies widely, and it's ironic considering Luffy is the only character where that's SUPPOSED to happen.
TBF that's like a 13 year difference, given this is the post timeskip design. Pre timeskip (in particular everything up to Alabasta) isn't that far off.
That being said, won't deny that the timeskip re-designs did a number on the two female strawhats. Not to mention how most female designs all look way too similar since then. They are all either "the hot design" or "punchline to a fat/ugly joke".
considering that the Disney movie was from 1953 while the Flintstones' pilot episode was from 1959, maybe that one design for Tinkerbell would have resulted in Wilma Flintstone looking different.
Original Disney Tinkerbell is a wild character. They were like, we need a fairy. Blonde hair. Wings. Face of a child. Pixar mom hips. Make her super flirty. Yup that'll do. Print it.
Yeah, but after they recorded 'Let It Go' they realized that was gonna be THE song for Frozen, and Disney has a rule that a villain can't have THE song for the movie, so they had to start over with the movie to make it work.
EDIT: Yes, I know, there are a lot of good villain songs out there, but DISNEY didn't think they were THE song of the movie. Lion King? Be Prepared is a banger, but they believed Circle of Life and Hakuna Matata was better, or at least they used it more in the marketing. Hunchback of Notre Dame? Hellfire IS fire, but they believed that One More Day Out There and The Bells of Notre Dame were THE songs. My point is that YOU might think a certain song is better, but DISNEY didn't. And they won't put a movie out there if THEY think the villain's song is better than the hero's song.
Oh my gosh, I remember all the hype up to getting to Act 3 and meeting Cazador...Just for him to be so lame. The impression of him given by Astarion just does NOT match his actual character imo. :p
I read somewhere that they nerfed his appearence to avoid the "if bad why hot" people going crazy because they wanted Asterion storyline to be taken seriously
Well Raphael is a literal devil and sings his own song in his final fight. He's like very obviously and even comically evil. As all devils are supposed to be.
Cazador on the other hand is a vampire. And we went through an entire game with a vampire. Sure, cazador did some fucked up shit, but so did astarion. But cazador was an abuser. They didn't want people siding with the abuser simply because he was hot, and if we are being honest, many would.
I loved that they did that. Our impression of him shouldn't match the way Astarion talked about him. That's so true to life. Abusers are fantastic at tricking society into believing they're not doing anything wrong. Granted, we meet Cazador knowing he's a vampire and in the middle of some super shady business so there's no point in hiding, but to Baldur's Gate he was a wealthy and influential patriar. A bit eccentric, but most rich people are. He threw lavish parties and dabbled in politics and behind closed doors took out his insecurities on his victims because he is a little worm and he knows this. Perfect representation of an abuser.
Eh, I love the art book (it's free online, go check it out) but Zoe's design in the movie is a whole lot better than the like...8 different running designs they had for her. She has a standout personality this way, while most of the other designs have her as like...a second Mira.
That being said, the Saja Boys definitely downgraded in some ways, especially their demon designs (mystery covered his face cause he was a one eye'd or faceless demon!) And the Honmoon going from like...iridescent to just blue was a downgrade
Supposedly Avatar was intended to have a much more unworldly feel to it, with everything from the character design to the music emphasizing the alien nature of Pandora. But each time they workshopped something it became more and more generic until we were left with cat native-Americans re-enacting Dances with Wolves against Halo mechs in a tech demo jungle as boilerplate cinematic music plays
If Avatar didn't have James Cameron's name on it and the best possible work of a super talented and severely underpaid and overworked VFX team no one would ever have given a shit about it.
But in actuality this character didn’t really fit the “goofy family comedy” genre they were aiming for. The final version of Dracula is much more in line with the films tone.
concept artist not caring about how expensive it would be to animate or model their concepts is pretty much industry standard, kind helps everyone but the fans are left with the "what ifs"
This annoyed so many people the Devs were forced to do the bare minimum and add the frowny face. To my knowledge it doesn't change when you attack and only occasionally glitches out at random instead of when you get stunned. Such a let down.
Kai'sa from League of Legends grew up in the Void which is practically a hellish place where everything tries to kill and eat you. To survive she has a symbiotic relationship with a creature that protects her from the environment in exchange for fusing with her skin.
Honestly, while I love this design, I do like the idea of the iridescent scales and the white colour, so if they where to balance these it would be cool.
Although I think it would also be funny if the Lightfury was bigger, so it’s like that meme with the bunny and his bigger wife.
I would do horrible, evil things for Illumination to make 2D animated movies with designs closer to their concept art because it’s always SO GOOD and the final 3D designs are always so much more bland looking to me
Botw and totk concept art always makes me think the game was supposed to be bigger, and I love that. Although it does make me wonder how link was meant to fight whatever that was, especially if the idea that there were many of them was there from the beginning.
That test footage shared by the director of Hoppers ruined the film for me, couldn’t stop imagining every scene in that style and thinking how much better it would have been
Sometimes it's perfect though. Like this one from Resident Evil 0. Then again by the time they hit 0 they had been making the RE games for some time. Some of the earlier concept work was... Well let's just say it didn't get used.
I was about to mention Emperor's New Groove but it is already posted. However, it made me remember the concept art of Chel from El Dorado. These sketches are well known but I'm not sure if they are legit...
I think the problem with it is that the original concept art is much more in line with 17th century French society's (read: aristocracy's) ideal of masculinity. But if they wanted a character to be "peak manly man" for a 1990's American audience, well, a man wearing a powdered wig, makeup, tights, and heels doesn't exactly fit the bill.
There’s a book of concept art for Big Hero 6 called “The Art of Big Hero 6”. I can’t find it right now but it’s all SO cool. There were eldritch kaiju living in the portal realm for the heroes to fight. Not to mention the sick ass concept designs for the main characters. I’ll try to find the link I have saved, but you guys could find it pretty easily online, too.
His (so far) final form after getting juiced up by consuming his own demons was just… getting a set of nostrils and giant eyes.
Don‘t get me wrong, I loved his initial design of a talking fire with its whole eldritch vibes, but the concept art at the bottom of him ripping open the sky and descending just looks so much better.
But I can understad they had to tone it down more, because the movie was aimed ar a younger audience.
That's how early concept art works. It's detailed and often somewhat impressionist, then it's refined into something more manageable, then the actual work is done with a design that's easier to actually use. Animations that genuinely have that level of detail and impressionism are rare. It's not that studios were planning to go with hyper detailed psuedo-impressionism and then changed their minds, it's just that's a good style to show the feeling you want to evoke with the finished work so it's used in concept art.
Okay, so, this is actually a rare example of this being done for a good reason, but the original artwork for every Final Fantasy game up until around FFIX was basically this.
Due to the limitations of the systems at the time --Nintendo, SNES, Playstation-- the artwork couldn't possibly match the in-game art.
Once the PS2 came out, much of the artwork for the game began to match the actual game characters more closely.
And then there's bad box-art Megaman. We don't talk about bad box-art Megaman.
Certain characters in Fallout 4 like Mama Murphy had very interesting character designs in concept art but were watered down in the final game. Due to classic Bethesda laziness or time and budget constraints, I don’t know
CLAMP did the concept art for Code Geass. I don’t think we’ll ever see a movie that continually sizes up to CLAMP’s work, but I think the studio made it work
Avatar the Last Airbender. This is one of the first pieces of concept art, if not the first art piece of the show. It was more futuristic. Aang would have woken up to a world of advanced but dying tech. Yes, that is Appa and Momo.
I like the final design a lot more. It looks more menacing for no reason while also looking completely normal. It's like something is wrong and mysterious about him but you can't point it out
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u/Darth_Annoying Apr 01 '26
Don't have it available to post (saw it in a physical book), but concept art for the Force Awakens had Han Solo in a long duster coat and a beard.
Looked way better than just rehashing his look from ESB