Early CGI Was Horrifying 

Imagine being the guy who invented cgi only to moments later have countless bowling ally owner’s knocking down your door demanding a piece of this new technology

It’s easier for me to appreciate Veggie Tales now since you realize that in the beginning it was just four college dropouts working on one computer. Even if it looks crappy now, it looks incredible for 90s standards

*5 years from now* “Early AI was horrifying”

As someone who lived through this time as a child I can say that even though the graphics were crude they looked incredible and inspiring. I knew by the time I was an adult that they would improve immensely. I remember going to an early imax theater in a museum and watching a 20-30 minute movie all done with grids and triangles and feeling like I was witnessing something incredible

Imagine if there was a horror movie that would end up taking advantage of this type of CGI, it would be very interesting honestly

what's wild to me is that the early animations from the 70s predate digital storage of the actual animations, it's all stored on film, you can see the artifacting. It's wild that they were able to produce the images digitally, but had no easy way to reproduce those images at the time besides film (or maybe videotape, still analog though)

I love how for toy story, the animations of the toys were a bit staccato due to technical limitations, but in the later movies they kept it as a stylistic choice.

Early CGI really went hard on the "haunted circus" aesthetic.

It's so interesting that "Dinosaur Stuff" is now basically the kind of thing someone would make after just a couple weeks messing with Blender.

For anyone wondering why early CGI is so abstract, its to show off that you could do literally anything with CGI, an example of what i mean is when Tin Toy was first shown one guy from a studio asked "how did you program fear into that toy?", people genuinely had no idea how it worked or it's capabilities if they had no prior knowledge.

I think the main issue with a lot of these early CGI attempts is that real artists weren't involved a lot of the time, and computer engineers came up with the video ideas and did all of the artistry. You can tell which CGI animations had traditional artists involved.

That demo from the 70s with the purple guy with the uncle Sam hat is amazing! I would have NEVER guessed that was made in the 70s. That's truly amazing.

A lot of the best CGI animations took their technical limitations and ran with them. Surfaces look like plastic? Make your movie about plastic toys. Animations are robotic and clunky? Make your characters robots or AI. The world seems artificial and computer-generated? Set your whole story in a virtual world inside a computer.

I love old CGI. It was so weird and surreal and dreamlike but now it just replicates reality

Growing up with early cgi is what got me into psychedelics.

To be honest, "Andrè and Wally B" from 1986 looks really beautiful to me. Simple, dreamy, smooth, something I would like to expect from a TV show for little kids.

Shitty CGI has a charm to me, especially the early 2000s CGI. Nostalgia pumped into my veins via IV.

You know, the fact people thought that the moon landings were CGIs when the CGIs looked like THIS even after 1970s is kind of funny. Edit: The main arguement is that it staged sorta like a live action movie set, but some people actually believe it was CGI.

It's interesting the things you think are a con - the dark, empty backgrounds, the odd feeling of the imprecise animation, the uneasiness caused by inconsistent lighting, the bizarre faces - because those are my favorite parts of these shorts

"The waves move in a very mathematical fashion" is now one of my favourite quotes.

It's funny how I can see the vaporware aesthetic was so influenced by 80s animation and its limitations.

if you were around when it was emerging you'd know it was the most fantastic thing any of us had ever seen. there was no concept yet of "good" or "bad" CG. it was just magic

Personally, I find Early Computer Animations as a pinnacle at its time. I mostly call it "Abstract CGI" b/c of the unusual polygons, appearances, etc.

27:08 the sound disappears for a bit.

The strongest CGI fan vs the weakest Claymation enjoyer

The amazing part about this is how Blender is capable of doing all this tenfold, and is completely free

Early CGI has a bit of a charm, nowadays, i look at CGI and i am like "BORIIINGGGGG" but i look at old CGI and i am just fascinated by the things it was able to do back then and the plasticky style of shading AHHHH MAN i love it

none of these animations creep me out, strangely enough, they make me giggle. i love them

A note about the humans in _Toy Story:_ The limitations of 90s CGI is the reason why PIXAR waited until _The Incredibles_ in 2004 before making a film focused on human characters. They knew it would be off-putting, so they instead made their first five films about toys, insects, toys again, monsters, and fish, before feeling confident enough to make a story focused on humans. And they came a long way in the twenty years since their first film: The shots of the newborn Riley Andersen at the start of Pete Docter’s _Inside Out_ (2015) are praised for how good CGI had gotten by the mid-2010s, often being compared to the _Tin Toy_ baby for these reasons. In fact, I’d imagine that some people found this uncanny, not because it’s not quite cartoony, but not quite human, but probably because it’s almost _too_ realistic, which would be repeated a year later with the CGI faces of Grand Mifflin Tarkin and Princess Leia in _Rogue One: A Star Wars Story._ (2016) In addition, another great achievement in animation in _Inside Out_ would be the particle effect on the emotions. Originally, this was only meant to be applied to Joy, (Though whether this meant all Joys or just Riley’s Joy is unclear) before being scrapped for being deemed too expensive and time-consuming. After the animation team got over the shock of an impressed John Lasseter having the effect applied to all the emotions, they actually pulled it off, and it really helps emphasize how different the humans are from the emotions that inhabit these extradimensional planes of the mind by having the latter have this grainy, almost fuzzy texture to them. You could almost say that they’re felt.

I had literally no idea that there was CGI animation that good in the 70s, it just blows my mind

I recognized a lot of these, because I grew up watching the "Mind's Eye" tapes in the 90s. They were collections of these early CG demo reels set to soundtracks by people like Jan Hammer and Thomas Dolby. Beyond the Mind's Eye specifically was always my favorite. Also, Reboot is one of my favorite shows of all time. Partially because of the CG that was mind blowing for the time. But also because it is just plain a good story. Growing up with things like that, and early 3D video games, and seeing where the technology is now, is incredible. Its amazing how much the technology has changed in only a few decades. Though, I do miss the pure, surreal, and dreamlike essence of these early CG animations. By comparison, most modern CG just feels boring. The only thing these days that comes close to capturing a similar feeling is AI generated animation.

Thank you for putting this together - it showed a lot of the shorts shown on the BBC's Micro Live (and possibly a few other programmes) - that I hadn't seen for decades - that inspired me to pursue a career in CGI/editing/motion graphics!

For finding early CGI terrifying, you do have a lot of favorites.

I'm blown by how complex 70's animation was. And the teapot hits as a cute nostalgia perk.

I legitimately didn’t know these even existed. I had no idea this was even being messed with as early as it was. This is absolutely fascinating.

black sky boxes and the limited atmosphere is what really draws me towards the uncanny look of old 3d animation

Back in 1990, I worked with 2 animators who produced CGI using an Amiga computer outfitted with a Newtek Video Toaster. Each frame had to be rendered and layed down to tape on a JVC MII machine. A short clip would take all night to render. My job was to edit all this animation together. Heady Times. 👍

It’s honestly crazy how CGI has gotten exponentially better over a pretty short period of time

I know this is meant as a jab toward the old and uncanny early demos, and even though I am someone growing up in this new technological Era, I can't help but still be struck by this. Fascinated like a child by this display of old groundbreaking technology. It's still so cool how this can be created by the resources collected from the earth, minerals and such, put together as this box which generates images; in a crude sense. It's just fascinating.

Thank you for this video, I've probably watched it at least 30 times. It's great background noise and I've gotten to the point where I have unintentionally memorized parts of it.

the devs who created cgi are legit supergeniuses. it's really really really hard to make simple figures from early versions of code.

I am a 3D artist and I think I should unite with a group of other artists and recreate this dark vibe with lowpoly cgi

I love this video so much. Thank you for making it. I keep coming back to watch it

The fact that this groundbreaking technology has come so far that it can nowadays be used by the common man like you and I to animate Patrick Star dancing to "Como te voy a olvidar?" has got to be one of the greatest testaments to human ingenuity.

Honestly I wish that early 90s cgi horror takes off just like analog horror it feels and almost looks purposefully made to be scary with the uncanny characters, dead background, weird action and plot along with the static noise I’m surprised that no one used it to its full advantage yet

As a kid i always LOVED seeing these Computer graphic animations because of the synthetic look and vibe and the awesome atmosphere they had. I never saw them creepy but the uncanny feeling was part of the fascination. Photorealism can be impressive too but personally i always preferred computer graphic animations to embrace their synthetic digital nature and really love the smooth flat shaded looks with very simple visual shading. It is a visual style i just really really love. Especially when such CGI sequences are coming from a film source and having this film-layer added to it with the smoother edges and soft glows.

people don't talk enough about the Sonic Adventure intro cutscene. It looks phenomenal for 1998, like on par with Pixar

My clearest memories of early CGI were the "Genesis Project" in Star Trek and the "Money for Nothing" music video. They were so impressive at the time. The Dire Straits video looks ridiculously primitive now.

I love how 80’s CGI is simple but underneath, there is a lot of complex computing power for its time. Nowadays, making a sphere, a cylinder and a cube are close to nothing.

I would have loved to watch “Tin Toy” as a Pixar short before seeing their feature film. That baby looked horrifyingly hilarious.

I've re watched this about 30 times. Never gets old. It's a comfort video for me...

As a kid, we had a couple VHS that were just dozens and dozens of early CGI shorts and I watched them so often they are basically baked into who I am today. I need to find them and digitise them, because I have yet to find full rips of them. They were called 'Imagina [insert year here]'. Seeing a handful of these shorts again was such a serotonin boost!

The part that CGI was missing until the mid-2000s was "Subsurface scattering" of light. Most objects that look bad in most CGI are partially translucent (esp. humans)

I am shocked how good the CGI was in the seventies! I thought it was a nineties invention.

The Amazing Digital Circus nails that feel, but updated

I remember a lot of these tech demos between cartoons growing up. It's amazing how far we've come.

Is it just me or does mid-80's CGI feel like your watching a dream lmao.

It’s insane how far CGI has come, some scenes in love, death, and robots you can barely tell it’s CGI

I also think we used to be stunned about the technological representation of these amazing artworks rather than their perfect aesthetics but now we are able to admire them as they deserve.

did the sound get muted towards the end?

Got into CGI in 1989. Got instantly hooked on making graphics. 30+ years later I'm working in the industry. All because of these simple demos, that at the time were awe-inspiring.

Something about bad CGI feels very nostalgic

Nah, early CGI is underappreciated art. Truly wonderful art that doesn't deserve to be coupled with meme buzzwords like "liminal", etc.

I loved ReBoot. I did notice that the animation/characters/shading/etc. improved for the better towards the end of the series. What a difference

The moment when that weird _"bowling alley screen animation"_ every time you get a strike becomes an opus magnum on its own rights. The early CGI is what happened if you look at the mind of Salvador Dali when he sleeps.

I actually like creepy early CGI aesthetically, and I think in the right media it really works. Like in the case of a game like Persona 1, the surreal and unsettling CGI adds to the overall dream-like feeling of the entire game.

One of, if not my first experience with CGI came from a VHS called "Elroy's Toy", which is compilation of scenes, two of which "High Fidelity" and "Breaking the Ice" were mentioned in this video. It remains as one of my oldest memories.

The Minds Eye animation shorts were amazing to watch back in the early 90s. Even revisiting them decades later they still have a novelty coolness to them that's worthwhile.

I feel like I should be creeped out... yet I find these animations more mesmerising and oddly calming than anything else.

Fun fact: The movie Casper (1995) was the first movie to have a CGI character as the main lead and was the first movie to capture a CG character with realistic human emotions and expressions using motion capture on a animator's face to capture the ghosts' facial movements convincingly. And redesigning Casper's wider eyes from the cartoon to more rounder "sympathetic eyes" like E.T. which was also suggested by Steven Spielberg along with taking elements of the voice actor's dental or eyes when creating them. And... I'm gonna have a hot take but I think the animation on Casper aged better than Toy Story. It's more smoother, more expressive, not plastic looking, it's fluid and not stiff movements and the character expressions hold up well today, like they blink at the same time unlike Toy Story where they blink slightly before with each eye. And that movie also came out months before Toy Story as well. So we can really thank Casper and his uncles for making CG protagonists and more convincing emotions like today's Disney movies and live action remakes.

For every compliment for these monumental accomplishments there are 3 complaints from this guy…

I find it really amazing for its time, there was a 1972 cartoon with some pink ball character from Synthavision. Then there was the 1984 Andre and Wally B, all were really good for its time. I wouldn’t say it’s horrifying, but rather hilarious and goofy.

as a 90s kid, honstly early CGI scared me and often I would have abstract, limited light source, low poly nightmares 🙈 liminal space nightmares, imagination lands you couldnt leave unless you woke up or learned to be aware The opening for the Eye Whitness kids educational tapes creeped me out too x'D

As a kid I had this VHS tape "Beyond the Mind's Eye" which was essentially just a collection of a bunch of CG shorts (including some of the ones you show here) but all edited together under this astounding Jan Hammer musical score. It completely recontextualized what were originally unrelated commercial pieces, tech demos, etc. If you're not familiar with it I definitely recommend the "Mind's Eye" series but particularly "Beyond the Mind's Eye". That "little Death" sequence, with the dog and the pyramid etc., is truly haunting with the new music over it

when I seen many of these animations as a kid in the 80's. I was so blown away, I just wanted to learn how it was done.

I don't know why, but my dad had a lot of these shorts on various VHS tapes when I was growing up as a kid and I would watch them SO much! I recognize almost all them from 84' onward which is weird because I didn't even exist for over half a decade later. High Fidelity is one of my earliest memories even! So glad he showed this all to me. RIP dad, thank you for all the core CGI memories!

I am obsessed with the sort of absurdist horror that seems so common in a lot of these. Some of it seems pretty intentional, but even the ones that aren't still have a lot of artistic merit I think. The abstraction that was necessary due to technical limitations just makes it feel so alien and interesting.

14:35 Kinda surprised you don't like how Andre and Wally B looks. I've been deep in the 3D animation field since I was a kid, but besides that bias I have an immediate affection for the lighting of the forests and such.

I grew up across the 80s so I got to watch most of this unfold in real time but I'm impressed with some of the stuff from the 70s that predates TRON. Looks better than I would have guessed.

what i'm curious about is the jump in technology between toy story and shrek. they're really not all that far apart time wise, but shrek is one of the earliest examples of a full length CGI film that i feel still truly stands up to today. toy story is still great (says the person who was absolutely obsessed with everything buzz lightyear for a solid chunk of my childhood lol) but like you said there are definitely things that don't quite look right. sid's dog is probably one of the creepier things. but shrek somehow seemed to like. finally for the first time really nail ALL the elements it needed to, and it seems like very little of it jumps out as obviously old CGI. they even figured out semi-realistic people without getting all uncanny. they may have overestimated how big the moon should be in that one scene, but like, it still looks good even if the size makes no sense. granted it has been a little bit since i watched it, but not so long that i feel like it's impacted my thoughts of it compared to other stuff.

I love how a number of early CGI demos look exactly like a youtube creepy pasta

9:28, "The Teddy Bear's Picnic" by John Walter Bratton, 1907. Lyrics were later written by Jimmy Kennedy in 1932. The most well-known version is probably the one recorded by Henry Hall & His Orchestra in 1932. This song was the inspiration for the "Gruntilda's Lair" theme in the 1998 video game Banjo-Kazooie on the Nintendo 64.

11:48 went from happy hat man to Sweet Tooth's cousin from Twisted metal

This was a great thing to stumble across and watch and it was put together really well. Thanks for this.

Holy crap, I have a Laser Disc with almost all of the 80's examples on it, It is called Art of Computer Animation. We used it to demonstrate primitive NTSC video projectors. Chromosaurus blew people away. It's hard to express how futuristic and engrossing this stuff was back then, especially to computer nerds. We boggled over the horsepower required to render each frame--which took days.

Fun fact: All of those little toys under the sofa in Tin Toy at 25:13 have their own names that are listed in the short's end credits. Each one was also created and modeled by each team member in the short's production. Here are the toy's names: Toypot (the yellow tea pot) Ace (the pilot in the airplane) Helicopter Sheep (the sheep with the propeller on its back, my 2nd favorite of the toys) Rallye Guy (The man in the little red car) Flip-n Beth (The green caterpillar) Clocky (The red clock) Zoo Train (The train behind Clocky with all of the cage cars) Renderman (The superhero wearing blue and red, named after Pixar's developing software) Spot (The orange horse/dog looking creature) Les and Frodo (The two little toy people with knobby hands) Chrome Dome (The blue and silver robot) ??? (A decapitated head who doesn't have a name) Bouncy (The basketball with eyes) Gumbo (The stupid-looking elephant whose name is a parody of Disney's Dumbo. He is my favorite of all of the toys, and my favorite Pixar character) Eben's Car (Based on Pixar director Eben Ostby's own blue car, or maybe his dream car) Fire Hydrant (You probably know what those look like) Tin Toy has always been one of my favorite Pixar short films, even before I was at the age to notice the quality in old CGI animation. The cursed traits and weak CGI are what give it charm and nostalgic qualities. I will always put this cartoony style of 3D animation over the hyper-realistic stuff Disney has been leaning towards these days.

It's unfortunate such a key part of the video got its audio muted. :(

I remember renting a VHS that had a bunch of these on it. I remembered thinking I was glad it was only $.50 but it was kinda cool to see all the early cgi stuff.

You can tell how many edgelords of that time that dwelled into programming was working on those demos as directors. Especially in that "dinosaur meets dragon" demo.

To this day, early CGI is one of my favorite aesthetics, it's so surreal and dreamlike. It's also super nostalgic to me as someone who grew up with N64-Gamecube era games that had so much promotional art making use of the medium

I really love this video I keep coming back to re-watch it very often just because of how much I like it and just because it's a great video

Awesome deep dive. Reminded me of 'Outside In', that short about how to turn a sphere inside out. It's cheesy, but I watch it every time it comes up in my recommended. Ever seen Hypernauts? It was a '90s kids show by the Babylon 5 people (same universe I think?), and even though some of the CGI looks pretty '90s-tastic, a lot of it holds up.

I would have loved to have heard your thoughts on "The Works".

As a kid, my dad had a set of 3 VHS's with compilations of a bunch of mid 80's to early 90's CGI tech demos. The chrome dinosaurs, mega cycles and the two fish lovers clip, were all on those VHS tapes. I remember watching them, and enjoying them so much. Though some of them were kind of creepy for a young child. Haha. Thank you, this brought me back. So yeah, the VHS tapes were "The Minds eye." They were so cool.

I do computer aided design and computerized drafting and I gotta say, this stuff is so interesting after understanding how take 2D drawings I create and extrude them into 3D model items in computer programs is so cool

The Hawaiian Punch ad won a bunch of awards not just for the CG but for the music. The soundtrack for it was by Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO fame, who formed Mutato Muzika, a production music company where Mark & his collaborators have produced soundtracks for numerous TV ads, TV Show, and films over the years.

The progress is insane.

4:59 Ummm, guys, is this the Freddy Fazbear and Bonnie The Bunny? Ur ur ur ur ur.

Reds dream is one of my favorites, I just loved it as a kid. Love all these animations, they just have something too them that is great!

When Money for Nothing came out it was mind-blowing, and holds up largely due to the fact that it never aspired to realistic representations of the people characters. It owned it's CGI-ness. Pretty amazing considering that almost nothing designed for standard-resolution TV looks decent on a modern high-def or 4k video platform.