Game engines and the future of animation

In January 2023, Preston Mutanga, a 14-year-old with a passion for animating in the 3D software Blender, uploaded a shot-for-shot LEGO-style remake of the Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse trailer to X (then Twitter). The animation caught the eye of the film’s directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (whose previous work includes The LEGO Movie). They commissioned Preston to contribute a sequence to the final film. Preston, using a new computer built by his father with a state-of-the-art graphics card, worked on the project for several weeks, with oversight from Miller. The final sequence, clocking in at just under a minute, is a charming tangent at the heart of the $100 million blockbuster.

Preston Mutanga’s story sits apart from a wider shift within the animation industry that is being driven by innovations in processing power, 3D computer graphics platforms and game development software –factors that were previously more closely associated with digital game development. The worlds of game development and animation are slipping closer and closer together, with game engine software – such as the Unreal Engine – increasingly becoming part of the animation production process. Over the past half-decade, audacious commissions from the likes of Netflix and Blur Studios – notably the Love, Death + Robots series – have pushed the boundaries of what established studios can achieve with these new toolkits.

Unreal Engine is now celebrated for enabling what is called a “real-time animation pipeline”. Here, production no longer occurs sequentially with each department – modellers, animators, layout artists, lighting designers – waiting for signed-off content before starting their section of the work. Previously siloed and gated tasks take place simultaneously within the game engine. Creative teams can iterate early and often, collaborate across departments and experiment without locking the entire production into a single decision. Real-time animation is quickly becoming the dominant industry practice. But what about the solo animators, the insurgent hobbyists of startling talent, like Preston Mutanga?

Answering this question goes some way to understanding how game engines software are situated within the creative industries. Unlike Blender, which was built from the ground up with 3D modelling and animation in mind, the increasing adoption of Unreal Engine outside of video game development has been driven by its real-time capabilities: that is, it’s ability to render high-quality images which simulate photographic aesthetics with a remarkable fidelity, sixty times per second.

The development history of game engines is key to understanding their current impact on visual culture, the creative industry processes they are disrupting and the visual landscape of the future. Unreal Engine’s core historic functionality lies in the development of first-person shooters such as Unreal Tournament and BioShock. The military aesthetic and ‘down-the-barrel’ perspective is legibly carried over into a range of animated media , from the ‘In Vaulted Halls Entombed’ episode of Love, Death + Robots, to the dojo sequence of The Matrix Resurrections (2021). But the technical defaults of Unreal Engine have more than just an aesthetic impact. By analysing the Unreal Engine’s technical predispositions, we can speculate on the degree to which it can support solo animators.

Upon launching the engine, a user is presented with a range of templates: games, film, video & live events, architecture, automotive product design & manufacturing, simulation.” Where does animation fit into all this?

From the point of view of the engine developers, animation is an amalgamation of various technical procedures. The efficiencies that it offers to large-scale productions are the outcome of data-management processes rather than the introduction of new expressive toolkits. Without the basic skills that Blender’s ‘modelling first’ functionality teaches its young users, a super-powerful multi-tool such as Unreal Engine is not in any position to foster independent young talent. Does becoming an accomplished Unreal generalist in order to enter the creative industries that are currently being dominated by game engines mean being an adept animator? Not necessarily.

This is not to say that young animators won’t be able to use game engines to animate in new and expressive ways. Historically, animators have always been inspired to push beyond the dominant limits of mediation: the dictum “don’t do what the camera can do – do what the camera can’t do” (often attributed to Emile Cohl) may need to be updated. Game engines’ abrupt arrival into the production of non-games media is premised on the idea that game engines can ‘optimise’ what creatives already do. Perhaps the next generation of animators needs to look at the game engine in the way Emile Cohl looked at the kinematograph, and question what lies beyond the vast horizons of its functionality.

Tom Livingstone is a Research Fellow at MyWorld, Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England.