The best visual artists are extremely effective in their use of space. A 4:3 image expanded to 16:9 would just look weird, as the framing would simply not look right.
The alternative is some amount of expansion and cropping but it would still not look nearly as good as leaving the artwork in it’s original aspect ratio.
A great example is Seinfeld which looks frickin terrible in 16:9:
I only know South Park, but from what I remember most of the shots there weren’t particularly cinematic, most of it was pretty “matter of fact” with the main action/focus to the middle of the characters with everything else around just being eye-candy non-important filler. I could imagine it then working much better.
That’s why you have it done by an actual animation studio with actual artists who can redo the composition if necessary. Way easier to do with animation than with anything else, technically speaking, e.g. you can crop out characters, reconstruct the matte and move the characters elsewhere without having to account for fancy realistic lighting.
The alternative is to be Babylon 5 which was shot on 16:9, framed for 16:9 but making sure a 4:3 crop doesn’t cut away important bits, in anticipation of the new format, alas the CGI was done in 4:3 and quite low res and noone has ever bothered to prepare a proper 16:9 release (and with the remake on the horizon that ever happening becomes more and more unlikely). There’s a version out there in acceptable 16:9, though: Most of the footage doesn’t include CGI and so is fine as-is, arguably better than the 4:3 crop, and the panned/zoomed CGI parts aren’t too jarring. Definitely blurry, though. I’d actually recommend it over the original release, imperfect as it is.
Has this ever been done? Taken an entire TV series animated in 4:3, and just adding content to the sides of the screen on every single frame?
God I hope they never try that.
The best visual artists are extremely effective in their use of space. A 4:3 image expanded to 16:9 would just look weird, as the framing would simply not look right.
The alternative is some amount of expansion and cropping but it would still not look nearly as good as leaving the artwork in it’s original aspect ratio.
A great example is Seinfeld which looks frickin terrible in 16:9:
https://consequence.net/2021/10/seinfeld-aspect-ratio-netflix/
it can be done well. off the top of my head, a couple good examples are south park and marvelous misadventures of flapjack
I only know South Park, but from what I remember most of the shots there weren’t particularly cinematic, most of it was pretty “matter of fact” with the main action/focus to the middle of the characters with everything else around just being eye-candy non-important filler. I could imagine it then working much better.
That’s why you have it done by an actual animation studio with actual artists who can redo the composition if necessary. Way easier to do with animation than with anything else, technically speaking, e.g. you can crop out characters, reconstruct the matte and move the characters elsewhere without having to account for fancy realistic lighting.
The alternative is to be Babylon 5 which was shot on 16:9, framed for 16:9 but making sure a 4:3 crop doesn’t cut away important bits, in anticipation of the new format, alas the CGI was done in 4:3 and quite low res and noone has ever bothered to prepare a proper 16:9 release (and with the remake on the horizon that ever happening becomes more and more unlikely). There’s a version out there in acceptable 16:9, though: Most of the footage doesn’t include CGI and so is fine as-is, arguably better than the 4:3 crop, and the panned/zoomed CGI parts aren’t too jarring. Definitely blurry, though. I’d actually recommend it over the original release, imperfect as it is.