undercurrent

December 11, 2003

Animation, Realism, Representation

This programme on BBC about Pixar as the manifest destiny of animation; a beardy bright-shirted californian extolling pixar's vacuous overworked corporate progimations:
'In a Pixar film, you don't get anything for free; everything you see, every little detail, has to be thought of, has to be engineered, and put in there, that's why it takes us four years to create a film'
Yeah, and that's why they're all so fuckin shit, mate.
Next (this man, as most californians do, reminds me of the fast show character Prof. Denzil Dexter):'What really drives the films is still good old-fashioned stories'
Yeah, heard it all before. Just like Oasis and their good solid old-fashioned pop songs that you can't not like without being made to look churlish and miserly. Listen, storytelling may well be a wonderful and ancient art - it doesn't necessarily follow that if you spew up an lumpy puddle of every cliché you ever saw and emboss it with a bit of wiseguy irony, you become Homer's rightful heir.

Another phrase I must quote. 'The enhanced realism of computer characters'. What can I say. The pursuit of realism in this sphere is so blind, so utterly misguided. Art doesn't become great by cultivating accuracy but by a process of translation from the real of sensation through the body and mind of the artist to the real of the artistic medium. Nothing against the use of digital, but meticulous modelling of the physical is not of itself sufficient.

Across the atlantic, and next up is that plasticine chicken man, with his pathetic rejected-last-of-the-summer-wine-scripts britflick sausage factory. Hardly preferable. IMHO being 'represented' by this stuff is worse for the UK than Hugh Grant. Also it seems to be a typical example of miraculated mass appeal - everyone's always saying how great it is, so it must be...but...er...it's not, it's tired, unambitious, samey tat.

Now (this wasn't mentioned in the programme) over the channel....I saw Belleville Rendezvous a couple of weeks ago and was impressed - it's the first time I've seen digital animation integrated with traditional animation to some purpose; other than shouting at the viewer 'look we've integrated digital animation with traditional animation'. Fantastic sound design and soundtrack, very close to those early cartoons' melding with jazz. Obviously intentional. The film 'pays dues' but not in an annoying self-satisfied way.

Equally obvious, BRV is influenced in all the right ways by the wayward genius of Jacques Tati. Like Tati, not afraid to take risks with boring the viewer by using stretched compressed and twisted duration itself as a humorous device. And because it takes the risks therefore it isn't; at all boring, but has consistency, thickness, solidity, guts. It's great animation because it uses all the things that are important to animation - time, plasticity, non-human characterisation, judicious sound-sync.

To go back to the point on computer animation. What you really notice in Belleville Rendezvous is the translation of affect, of sensation, into images of the becomings of fantastical living bodies. Not a modelling of 'real' bodies that 'look as if' they are labouring under some type of emotion. There is; a difference. It's encouraging that BRV shows that, as I suspected, it isn't CGI that's the problem, it's the people who are using it, the way they're using it. It's to do with the commercial structure of filmmaking. I think it's also something to do with the auteur; - as far as I could see, BRV was conceived and produced by one person with a singular vision (although there were a huge number of people involved). Aardman tries to score points on this too, although the stuff becomes less apparently idiosyncratic and more evidently a tacky heritage scam with each repetition. Pixar and co. are obviously completely unable to take the risk of going with one person's vision, and, here as elsewhere, mediocratize by corporatizing. Vive le France!

Posted by robin at December 11, 2003 01:13 AM