The magic of pixel art like that is that they define a picture but leave the details up to your imagination. Because of that, you subconsciously interpolate in a way that appeals to you, which makes it that much more perfect than high resolution imagery. Well, that's my opinion at least.
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
- Brian Eno
This is my favorite quote to bring out when people are discussing the merits (or demerits) of pixel art. It's really spot on.
I knew someone would bring that up. I actually thought about whether I should treat it shortly to prevent someone from parroting it _again_. No, I feel like pixel art is different. I grew up with cassettes and CDs, even some disc records, but no. I hate the lack of quality and distortion so much. I think the quote is superficial and condescending and I do not like it.
Obviously this is just your opinion, but I think Brian Eno completely on point here, for music at least.
The best real-world example I know is the resurgence of cassette tapes. Whenever I go to see a not-very-popular (indie, for want of a better term) band, the merch stand, without fail, has cassettes and vinyls and sometimes no CDs or optional Internet downloads. Is there a practical reason? No, not really, it's all marketing. Making tapes and vinyls is hard, burning CDs is easy, but people want the nostalgia of the more interactive process of flipping tapes and vinyls.
I guess they could be moving to those mediums for the "grit" of the sound produced. But that sound can easily and effectively be reproduced with an equalizer, sound filters and effects.
Yeah, that's a popular theory. I'm not sure if it's a complete explanation, though.
Pixel art (and other art as well) is often stylized, which means it's trying to present a more appealing version of reality. The viewing angles are carefully chosen, the colors and lights are more vibrant, the shapes of everyday objects are more varied and graceful, the people are better looking, etc. The end result is that you're looking at a rough description of something that you want but don't have.
Both images are very good. IMO the low-res version [1] has slightly better colors, while the high-res version [2] captures the cloudy weather a bit better, but they feel about equally appealing to me. Note that the high-res image is also very stylized for appeal rather than realism, no one would mistake it for a photo.
Some aesthetics categorically reject choice. Everybody else thinks deliberate choice by the artist is what makes art worthwhile. In these gif images, every pixel is chosen for its contribution to the whole. The source photo illustration isn't nearly so rigorous, and IMHO that's what makes it skillful to a point but totally pedestrian and uninteresting. A bit hard to look at, actually. YMMV of course.
For the amount of passion it seems a lot of animators put into their work it seemed more interesting that there was an artistic decision about how the audience will connect with their character to explain the style and not that it was just too difficult. But that may very well be the case and the other is just a convenient side effect.
That doesn't look too detailed, but imagine drawing four of those every day for a year without weekends. 365 x 4 is about equal to 24 x 60. Congratulations, you've created a minute of footage. To make a feature film, you'll spend a life.
I guess Disney-style animated characters occupy a kind of sweet spot. They are carefully stylized to look good enough that adding more detail won't really make them much better, and simple enough that a large team of animators with top-down planning can make a complete movie in a few years. Japanese anime has slightly more detailed characters, at the cost of having fewer frames per second. If you want a lot more detail with good enough framerate, you need more money than your audience is willing to pay.
But since interpolation is subjective it may lead to incorrect interpretations of the image that are different from the artists' intentions.
It's easier to draw a cartoon then to paint the mona lisa. I respect detail and high resolution artistry more than sketching cartoons due to the higher amount of skill required to pull it off. One screw up in a super high detailed painting and you could end up in the uncanny valley.
Either way, lots of respect for both forms of art.
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