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Tuesday, December 07, 2004

The Incredibles & The Polar Express
I haven't yet seen either Brad Bird's The Incredibles or Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express: the former is still several weeks off opening here, and my interest in the latter hasn't yet overwhelmed my certitude that it will not be an enjoyable experience. Yet it has been fascinating to watch the way that the reaction to both has washed across the internet. Animation fans are generally pretty supportive of any new feature: the industry is small enough that any success or failure will affect all production. Hence animation fans who despise Disney features nevertheless tend to hope for they'll succeed, because box-office success for a Disney feature will help other more interesting work to get up.

Despite this, the relatively poor performance of The Polar Express has been met by many with open glee. Take this comment from Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew back in November:

I can't think of anything sweeter than watching Zemeckis and Hanks fall flat on their faces with the absolutely pathetic opening of POLAR EXPRESS. The film, which cost well north of $250 million to produce and market, couldn't muster better than a $23.5 million weekend, a financial performance almost as decrepit as the film's visuals. Hopefully now that they've been taught, Bobby and Tommy will crawl back onto their live-action sets and halt this make-believe fantasy that they're animation producers. Leave animation to the people who have actually bothered to learn the craft and who have dedicated their lives to the art form - artists like Brad Bird, whose INCREDIBLES managed to pull in another $51 million in its second weekend.

Of course, the forward momentum of the computer animation industry at the moment is such that people don't fear it will die off, so they don't feel the need to be protective the way they do about hand-drawn animation . (This could all change pretty quickly - if a few Disney computer features go belly-up, or Pixar's 2005 release Cars turns out to be as bad as its trailer makes it look, watch how quickly cartoon buffs start barracking for every new film again). But what really has set the fans against The Polar Express has been Zemeckis' hubris in the film's publicity. Amidi quotes this comment from Zemeckis:

I think when you see [POLAR EXPRESS], you'll realize it's absolutely nothing like an animated movie. You'll see such subtlety in the performance of these characters that you would have to have the genius-of-all-genius animators. In my opinion, there's no animation in the world that could have created it.

Such comments are not only insulting to conventional animators, but they seem to betray a deep ignorance of the history of animation. The Polar Express was made using a particularly elaborate form of motion capture, which means that the movement of characters is mapped off the movement of real actors. This is a technology heavily used in special effects features where animation is to be used alongside live-action: think of Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace or the computer generated armies in films like Attack of the Clones or Return of the King. It has its place in that kind of filmmaking, but in "pure" animation it has generally been used as a labor-saving device: something used when there isn't the time, budget, or need to properly animate a character.

There is a counterpart in traditional animation: the rotoscope, which allowed animators to trace live-action footage onto drawings. Examples of characters whose animation is very heavily reliant on the rotoscope include the Prince in Snow White, the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio, Gulliver in the Fleischer Studio's Gulliver's Travels, or the entire cast of Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings. While there is a certain striking quality to the animation of these characters, it is never entirely satisfactory: compare the Prince's animation to Snow White's (for which live action was used as a reference, but heavily reworked) and you'll see why. Rotoscoping gives a certain kind of literalness to a performance, but the Disney artists established early on that a different kind of "acting" was needed in animation. Zemeckis' belief that motion capture somehow allowed him to raise animation to a higher plane shows that he doesn't understand some of the basic lessons of animation learned over sixty years ago. This is bizarre given that he directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Even allowing for the fact that Roger Rabbit has always had a mixed reputation amongst animation buffs (see my retrospective review here), you'd think he must have done some kind of crash course in animation history before he did it, or perhaps talked once or twice to its animation director, Richard Williams.

The Incredibles, meanwhile, is the product of Brad Bird and the team at Pixar, who most definitely have learned the lessons of animation history. From all accounts, the animation in The Incredibles is some of the most fluid and "cartoony" that has yet been seen in a computer animated feature: even long time computer animation sceptics like Michael Barrier have been impressed. The good will directed at Bird's film reflects the fans' appreciation of his awareness of the legacy of animation, as well as recognition that he was desperately unlucky not to have had a big hit with his marvelous The Iron Giant back in 1999. Good on him.


Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.12.04 - 0 comments


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This page is for assorted musings and editorialising that don't fit elsewhere on Cinephobia.

It was formerly referred to as "Rumours and Ruminations" but has been renamed to better represent the haphazard nature of what appears here.


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