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today in bizarre censorship news: digital boob reduction [Mon, 2-Jun-2003 1:12 AM]
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[music |Tricky -- Makes Me Wanna Die]

Finding Nemo is preceeded by an old Pixar short, KnickKnack. But in this version, the girls (one of whom Pixar's site describes as "a disproportionate blonde from Miami") have all had severe breast reductions! Here are the "before" images. I haven't found "after" images: if any of you have access to an online version of Finding Nemo, please send me captures of these frames, for comparison.

Update: A friend at Pixar says:

The reason for the breast reduction was to get a G-rating from the MPAA. Apparently they threw a fit at the original version. There was some outrage from the team at the change, but the Studio decided they'd rather make the change than not show the short at all.

On an additional geeky note, the short obviously had to be re-rendered, and apparently trying to re-render code almost 20 years old was a technical challenge in and of itself and took a couple of months to sort out all the bugs.

Update 2: Here are the "after" pictures (thanks [info]guyver3!)

linkReply

Comments:
From: [info]vincel
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 2:37 AM (UTC)

(Link)

Was the main feature any good? I thought that Monsters Inc. was pretty lame in comparison tp the previous Pixar output.

[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 12:28 PM (UTC)

(Link)

I didn't think it was as good as Monsters Inc, but I liked Monsters Inc a lot. This one felt much more like a "Disney" movie than a "Pixar" movie (e.g., it began with the standard Disney Scene One: Kill The Mother.)
[User Picture]From: [info]pexor
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 2:50 AM (UTC)

(Link)

I remember seeing "KnickKnack" and others, such as their seminal "Luxo Jr.", on demo tape in the basement of our house back when my dad founded Cineon (and their workshop Cinesite) for Eastman Kodak and Pixar was just getting started. The first time I saw the snowman cluck his tongue, drop his face mask, and fire up his blow torch, I didn't think I'd ever see anything funnier in my life.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
[User Picture]From: [info]lhooqtius
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 9:21 AM (UTC)

(Link)

if any of you have access to an online version of Finding Nemo, please send me captures of these frames, for comparison.
-----------
Har. Good luck.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=598&ncid=600&e=4&u=/nm/20030530/film_nm/film_nemo_goggles_dc

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=filmNews&storyID=2849994

[User Picture]From: [info]malokai
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 11:01 AM (UTC)

(Link)

I would personally be amused if I was denied entry to a theater because they found a camera on me, AFTER I bought the ticket.
[User Picture]From: [info]jfedor
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 11:34 AM (UTC)

(Link)

Har. Good luck.

Thank you.

I doubt these files include Knickknack, though.
[User Picture]From: [info]lhooqtius
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 6:52 PM (UTC)

Re:

(Link)

heh, are you sure any of those are actually the film? there have been large garbage files called 'finding nemo' floating around on the p2p networks for some time now... as well as copies of the finding nemo games and trailers.

eventually the film will make it onto the net, of course, but what Disney is likely trying to do is to protect itself for the big moneymaking weekends (the first weekend, especially). whether or not the expense of the security really prevents loss during that time is probably not yet known, though i'm sure they're paying attention to results...
[User Picture]From: [info]supersat
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 2:16 PM (UTC)

(Link)

I wonder how they feel about cell phones with integrated cameras. I doubt it'd be TOO hard to write an app to stream video over bluetooth to someone's laptop in the parking lot, or writing them directly to sufficiently large memory cards.
[User Picture]From: [info]violentbloom
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 8:53 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Yeah! you could put an eye out with one of those! Didn't you have a large chested grandma who nearly suffocated you with large breasts??

And frankly I just saw the movie day before yesterday and big shiny titties came across just fine even with the new scaled down version... The whole thing is dumb. It's not like you'll be thinking wow big titties and get a hard on when you're surrounded by a theatre full of whining screaming smelly children..or if you do it's not from the shiny titties but that's another movie I guess.
(nope that maternal instinct just isn't going to kick in)
From: [info]secularkangaroo
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 3:59 PM (UTC)

(Link)

I'm a little bit confused as to why large breasts are considered non-G-rated, while smaller breasts are fine for G. Are they trying to say that large-breasted women shouldn't be around children?
[User Picture]From: [info]jonabbey
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 7:30 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Judging from those frames, I'm guessing the problem was more with balloon-breasted women.

You never know when one might blow up in your face, you know.
From: [info]secularkangaroo
Mon, 2-Jun-2003 7:35 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Milk--it does a body good.
[User Picture]From: [info]baconmonkey
Tue, 3-Jun-2003 3:34 AM (UTC)

unrelated to this post

(Link)

But, that rube-goldberg style honda at where all the car parts keep triggering things in a really long chain reaction, used no trick photography or CGI. one long single shot. or rather, the 606th long, contnuous shot.

http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/13/nhonda13.xml
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Tue, 3-Jun-2003 4:56 AM (UTC)

try to keep up, man

(Link)

I posted that link two months ago -- but the next morning, [info]jfedor found an article claiming there was a single digital edit, dropping an exponent from the compexity of the problem. And if they glossed over a "tiny detail" like that, who knows what else they faked...
[User Picture]From: [info]cyeh
Wed, 4-Jun-2003 2:42 PM (UTC)

(Link)


"had severe breast reductions" was putting it mildly. They had no breasts at all, thereby perpetuating the skinny-is-good-paradigm.

I anticipate a wave of breast elimination surgery.

From: [info]schuywriter
Wed, 4-Jun-2003 6:07 PM (UTC)

(Link)

I find the before graphics to be pretty sexist. It's the old stereotypical mutant breasted video game type character. Excuse me for asking but why do her breasts have to be either stupidly large or extremely small? Why not "average"? And why is her waist so freaking teensy? She looks like a freak monster.

Why aren't the male characters in the short sporting HUGE packages that stick out from their pants about a foot from their bodies? How about that? THAT I'd like to see someone have the balls to try and create. Surely some men are well hung and some men aren't. Why not, if we're going to continue showing huge breasts on women, show mutantly large male groins? And then they can prance across the screen in a teensy strip of thong maybe 4 pixels wide trying to "cover" said groinal area.



[User Picture]From: [info]lilmissnever
Tue, 17-Jun-2003 6:09 PM (UTC)

(Link)


It's a cartoon. The girl was supposed to be sexy. The designers chose to make this point by giving her enormous breasts. A freakishly large package isn't exactly the male equivalent. Think about the language of cartoons for a moment. The counterpart of the completely unrealistic topheavy bimbo isn't Ron Jeremy, it's Superman, a giant V-shaped superhero so ridiculously overmuscled that he can't holds his arms at his sides.

But yeah, if you need to give a cartoon a boobectomy to pull off a G-Rating, I'd like to see censors start making Disney's Hercules look like Bill Gates.
[User Picture]From: [info]stephendann
Tue, 17-Jun-2003 6:10 PM (UTC)

(Link)

I'm amused that the emphasis was on re-doing the character's breasts, and frame 1 still has the woman in an ashtray swimming tub. Given the fuss over kids and smoking, I'd have been less surprised to hear that ashtray had to be replaced.

So, for g-ratings, breasts are bad. Ashtrays are okay.

$
(Which took longer - Bug hunting 20 year old code, or re-rendering said code?)
[User Picture]From: [info]westyx
Tue, 17-Jun-2003 10:26 PM (UTC)

i very much doubt it was re-rendering the code

(Link)

bug hunting would be it. i don't know if they ran an emulator, or used the source in one of today's renderers (i'm guessing the later), but i'm sure that different "meanings" of code when-it-was-made/today when put through a today-renderer would have made for some nasty hunting-down
[User Picture]From: [info]netik
Tue, 17-Jun-2003 7:15 PM (UTC)

(Link)

If someone has access to a u-matic 3/4" deck, I have about four huge tapes of siggraph video from 10+ years ago that could use transferring. I think KnickKnack is on one of them.
[User Picture]From: [info]m4dh4tt3r
Tue, 17-Jun-2003 9:16 PM (UTC)

(Link)

hrmmm... let me check my list of video geek freinds. they're may be access to said beastie.
[User Picture]From: [info]loosechanj
Wed, 18-Jun-2003 2:18 AM (UTC)

(Link)

"I'm not small breasted, I'm just rendered that way!"
[User Picture]From: [info]cyantist
Wed, 18-Jun-2003 12:16 PM (UTC)

hahahaha

(Link)

hahahahahahahahahah hehehehe. awesome!
[User Picture]From: [info]retrodiva1
Wed, 18-Jun-2003 5:31 PM (UTC)

Oh man!

(Link)

Even Barbie comes with bigger boobs, what the hell?

/me shaking my head.

Tis a shame at least you still have the originals.
[User Picture]From: [info]cocamide_mea
Sun, 13-Jul-2003 1:10 PM (UTC)

Spheres

(Link)

I wonder if the original reason for the women having exceptionally large breasts was less about the sex factor (yes, yes, I know - geeks who render love large, pr0n-style breasts, but...) and more about the fact that rendering spheres (at the time) was easier. And, afterall, they were playing with lighting techniques and realism; it's more interesting to do light-play on spheres than on flat surfaces.

Just a thought.