Be Careful What You Wish For

I'm a little surprised at Cartoon Brew's insistence than Avatar be considered an animated film. I don't know if the reason is because it is the highest grossing film in history and they want animation to have some of the glory or if it's because James Cameron is so insistent that Avatar should not be tainted with the 'A' word. In any case, there are reasons (beyond whatever anyone thinks of Avatar) why I don't think considering it an animated film is a good thing.

Those outside the film business may not be aware of the distinction between production and post-production. In a live action film - one with no animation or special effects - production is the shooting of the film. Post-production is what happens after the film is shot. Those things typically include editing, music, sound effects, dialogue looping, the sound mix and titling.

When a film does include special effects, unless they are done in camera during the regular shoot, they are considered post-production. In the past, certain effects like in-camera matting, hanging miniatures and glass shots were done during production, but most effects were done during post.

In what we would all acknowledge as typical animated films (Snow White, Toy Story), animation is production, not post-production. In films that have animated elements added (Jurassic Park), animation is done in post-production. This may seem like an esoteric distinction, but it's the difference between what is central to a production and what sweetens a production. I am not in any way dismissing the importance of post-production. A film's music score has a huge impact on how the film affects audiences and certainly Jurassic Park's impact depended tremendously on the quality of the dinosaur animation, but in each case, the post-production elements are driven by what has already been shot.

Animators may have worked over Avatar's motion capture and added creatures, but their work was driven by what had been shot (or in this case, recorded). To pretend otherwise is disingenuous. There is no question that Jack Pierce's Frankenstein make-up added to the audience's perception of Boris Karloff as the monster. However, many actors at Universal played the monster (Bela Lugosi, Glen Strange), yet Karloff is generally considered the definitive performance. While Avatar's animators supplied more than digital make-up, it's still the underlying motion captured performance that counts.

I've written extensively on how fragmented the process of making an animated film is and how so many of the acting decisions are made before the animator starts work. The character designs, the storyboard and the voice performance all make acting decisions that constrain the animator's interpretation. There is no question that motion capture is yet another constraint, probably larger than all the others. To insist that Avatar is an animated film is to marginalize animators even more than they are in what are generally considered animated films. Is this the direction we want things to go? Better to agree with James Cameron and focus our attention on films where animators create, not enhance, performances.

Disney's New Strategy

Robert Iger's free-spending ways have caught up to him. Having purchased Pixar and Marvel for a combined total of $10 billion, the studio has to start making some serious coin in order to pay off the purchases.

The strategy is to focus on $150 million films that can be heavily merchandised or films that cost less than $30 million. Anything that falls in the middle of those two budget neighborhoods is out, even if it's a proven money maker. The Proposal, a Sandra Bullock film that cost $40 million and that grossed $315 million worldwide won't have a sequel as a result of this policy.

New York magazine reports:

The franchise-intensive mantra came after Disney CEO Robert Iger admitted publicly and unflinchingly that 2009 had been "awful": Having started the year with Confessions of a Shopaholic (domestic gross: $44 million) in the worse recession of all time, it then summered with the costly $150 million rodent flop G-Force (domestic gross: $119 million), and spent the end of the year eating turkey upon turkey: The Bruce Willis action flick Surrogates (domestic gross: $38 million) was laughable; the comedy Old Dogs (domestic gross: $48 million) was not.

To help pay for the whopping $10 billion Disney spent acquiring Pixar and Marvel in recent years, Iger decreed that s the world's largest licensor of consumer products, Disney needs its film not to merely succeed in theaters, but to sell gobs of spinoff merch, as well: In 2008, the company sold some $30 billion worth of licensed consumer products, and suffice it to say, exactly none of that came from Sandra Bullock hand towels.

The problem, as I see it, is that this is a high risk strategy. G-Force proves that. It's at exactly the budget that Iger thinks is going to save the company. Flops at that budget level will hurt badly.

If Eisner's tenure was defined (at least initially) by how successfully he capitalized on Disney's brand, Iger's tenure is going to be defined by how his purchases affect the bottom line. He's dug himself a $10 billion hole and now he has to climb out of it.

Forgotten Firsts

Often, a first isn't really the first. It's simply the first that people remember. Steamboat Willie isn't the first sound cartoon, but it's the one that made a difference, so it's the one that enters the history books.

If a first isn't very good, it tends to be forgotten. That's the case with Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, the first TV series to include computer animated characters. It ran only 22 episodes in syndication in 1987-88. I wrote the article below as production on the series was ending.

It's ironically fitting that the article appeared in the first and only issue of Cartoon Quarterly, edited by John Cawley and Jim Korkis and published by Gladstone in the fall of 1988. The magazine had a fannish slant, but the roster of writers is one that readers of the blogosphere will recognize. Besides Cawley, Korkis and myself, the authors included Leonard Maltin, Jerry Beck, Floyd Norman, Will Finn, Scott Shaw! and Mark Kausler. The magazine showed a lot of promise and this 22 year old issue is far more interesting than any recent issue of Animation Magazine. Unfortunately, the magazine is as forgotten as Captain Power.

Ed Hooks on Avatar

Ed Hooks is the author of Acting for Animators. While his own background is not in animation, he's identified many things that animators need to be thinking about while doing their work.

One point that he's made is that the quality of a performance is based on the script supplying the necessary foundation for building a character. In his February 2010 newsletter (scroll down for the relevant material), he talks about the shortcomings of Avatar's script from an acting standpoint.

Zoe Saldana is Neytiri, the Na’vi female lead. She has been raised in a kind of New Age Garden of Eden. The Na’vi spend a lot of time tuning into trees, plants and their spiritual vibes. But what are Neytiri's personal values? The script really doesn’t say. In her first scenes, she's helping chase off those pesky humans. But then, in the second act of the script, she befriends the fake Jake avatar and gets romantic. And, at the very end of the story, she slays the dragon, Col Quaritch. You look through the script again and again, searching for clues about Neytiri's values, childhood, former love life…anything at all that might help. Not much there. She’s a Na’vi princess, that’s all, and she does what Na’vi princesses do. She is reactive to the events that happen to her. It is difficult to find her objectives. The transitions in her character don’t really work.

I found this essay particularly interesting in light of James Cameron's complaints that the actors in Avatar were passed over for Oscar nominations. Cameron specifically mentioned Zoe Saldana as being ignored. Cameron's view was that the technology involved was somehow seen as cheating, but as Hooks points out, the problem was not the technology, it was the script.

Hooks criteria could, and should, be applied to recent animated features, many of which suffer from the same shortcomings. While animation artists are constantly asserting "story, story, story!" the truth is that their understanding of story is lacking. Too many animated films have a disconnect between personality and plot, where characters do things based on the needs of the plot rather than the needs of the character.

Ink and Paint

Patricia Zohn writes about the women of ink and paint during Disney's golden age over at Vanity Fair.

Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”—the all-male assembly line—once stood 100. Walt was the impresario of a troop of young women, most under 25—a casting director’s dream of all-American acolytes—who made the screen light up, not with feathered swan dives or the perfect tip-tap of a patent-leather heel, but by making water shimmer or a tail wag just so. It was a job complicated by his unrelenting perfectionism—Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors—but reducible to a simple imperative of the time: ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.

The article includes original interview material with some of the women, one of whom was Zohn's aunt.

(link via Mark Evanier.)

Mindy Aloff Interview

Mindy Aloff, author of Hippo in a Tutu, is interviewed by Kent Worcester of The Comics Journal.

"Both animation and theatrical dancing are labor-intensive activities that benefit from a benevolent visionary at the helm. Animation today could learn much from what Walt Disney arranged for his staff to do: to visit the ballet and sketch the dancers. And dancing could benefit from Disney’s appreciation of melodic, song-based music with a clear pulse as a floor for dancing. Unfortunately, the simple pleasures of dancing that asks the performer to use a comprehensible vocabulary of steps and expressive gestures, which relate moment by moment to music, are exactly what most students of both animation and choreography want to evade now. Balanchine, in fact, once wrote about how dancing could learn about the elaboration of fantasy from cartoons. Artists globally, though, don’t want what these historical animated films are equipped to teach – joy as the text and complication as the subtext; instead, they want complication, edge, as the text and more complication as the subtext. I think the culture is going to have to change for either group to learn from one another, and I just don’t see that happening in my lifetime. Perhaps a few individuals will take this as a challenge and prove me wrong. I certainly hope so."

Payton Curtis Interview Part 2

Chris Walsh has put up part 2 of his interview with stop motion animator Payton Curtis. Part 1 is here.

Henry Selick Podcast

The Museum of the Moving Image has posted a 76 minute audio interview with Henry Selick that was recorded on November 18 and 19 of last year. You can also download an mp3 of the interview at the link.

Payton Curtis Interview

Chris Walsh is one of my fellow instructors at Sheridan College. While he lectures on story and animation history, his main area of expertise is teaching stop motion. Over at his blog, Walsh-O-Matic, he has the first part of an interview with stopmo animator Payton Curtis. Curtis recently worked on Coraline and The Fantastic Mr. Fox and talks about the process of animating on a stop motion feature.

Hothouse

The National Film Board of Canada periodically runs a program called Hothouse, where they offer emerging animators the paid opportunity to create short films at the NFB. The program is only open to Canadian citizens or landed immigrants and the call has just gone out for the sixth edition, for which all films will be made in stereoscopic 3D.

The deadline for submissions is February 19 and the program will run from April 5 to June 25 in Montreal. Anyone interested can find out more details here.

Cordell Barker Master Class Part 2

"This Is Not An Animated Film"

As a follow up to my earlier post, here's James Cameron's take on what he's doing.

Cordell Barker Master Class

Cordell Barker talks about The Cat Came Back.

(link via Jim Caswell.)

Schism

Updated at the bottom.

(There are no spoilers below.)

I saw Avatar and quite enjoyed it. Many people have pointed out similarities to Pocahontas, Ferngully and Dances with Wolves. There are also elements of Tarzan and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. I'm sure that some enterprising person will set up a website showing all those references and many more. James Cameron's strong suit isn't originality; what he's best at is taking existing elements, weaving them into a solidly structured screenplay and then kicking it up a notch with his directing ability. Avatar doesn't break new ground from the standpoint of content, but it does deliver that content in a very satisfying manner.

It's basically a fish out of water story combined with a romantic vision of simpler societies. Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the Tarzan, John Carter and Carson of Venus stories) specialized in stories like this. In Burroughs' case, there was an underlying racism; white men were always destined to rule the natives. There's no racism in Cameron's point of view in Avatar (though there is in many of the characters'), but there's still the arrogant conceit that allows the hero to admire a foreign society and then rise to the top of it. Heaven forbid that the hero could admire another society but fail to dominate it, which is much truer to the immigrant experience.

Cameron adds a strong criticism of capitalist exploitation to the mix, which has apparently raised the ire of the Fox News folks. However, given the current economy, people who have seen their jobs downsized or outsourced, who can't afford health care and who have walked away from their mortgages don't need a movie to tell them that capitalism can be brutal. In this regard, Avatar has a lot in common with Up in the Air, a low-tech film that is built around laying people off. Fox News can complain all it wants, but Hollywood follows the zeitgeist, not the other way around. And the final irony is that while one division of Fox is condemning the film, Fox itself produced it, which proves that Rupert Murdoch is only concerned with profit, not ideology.

Avatar crystallized something for me that I should have realized years ago. There has been a lot of discussion of mocap and its relationship to keyframed animation. I now realize that this is a symptom of a larger division within the film industry. When James Cameron or Peter Jackson use mocap, it's for almost-but-not-quite-human creatures that have to share the screen with human actors. The goal is for these characters to be believable within the confines of a film that has a realistic surface.

The schism isn't between mocap and keyframing; it's between realism and caricature. James Cameron's goals are very different than those of Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks or Blue Sky. Cameron's use of mocap is an attempt to extend reality. The film wants to fool us into believing what we're seeing is real. The all-cgi features have become more detailed and lush in their visuals, but looking at the characters, it's clear that they aren't real. The character designs prevent the audience from being fooled.

This presents an interesting problem. Caricature has never been taken as seriously as realism. The history of Western art, with the exception of the dark ages and the 20th century, has always been derived from realism, and the art of the dark ages probably had more to do with the loss of knowledge and craft than with a conscious artistic choice. Caricature might be seen as clever, but except for artists, nobody values caricature as more than a lightweight diversion. Disney moved more towards illustration when he went into features. The all-cgi features have pushed their visuals towards greater complexity (which sometimes clashes with their character designs). Video games have also gravitated towards realism. I believe that this has been motivated by a desire to be taken more seriously by getting closer to what Western eyes value in art.

Caricature can be serious. The early Disney features prove it and Pixar hasn't done too badly itself making that point. But there's the gravitational pull towards realism, one proven by Avatar's box office to be satisfying to audiences. The move to stereoscopic 3D is another aspect of that pull towards realism. The challenge for animation is to find the sweet spot between the realism that computers are capable of and caricature, which strips away detail to get to the essence of something. It's not a problem for comedy; if caricature is thought of as lightweight, then it's perfectly suited to getting laughs. But just as all comedians yearn to play Hamlet, all animators yearn to be taken seriously, if not in terms of subject matter then in terms of respect.

As the success of cgi features, with their greater dimensionality and visual complexity, suggested to some that drawn animation was old hat, I wonder if Avatar will suggest that caricature is fit only for children's films and comedy. Should the schism between realism and caricature be narrowed or made wider? I think the executive decisions in the wake of Avatar will have a big impact on the future of keyframing and while I admire the film, I'm afraid that its influence won't be wholly good.

Update: David Brooks has an interesting article in the N.Y. Times, referring to the story formula used in Avatar as the "White Messiah fable."

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

His entire article can be found here.

The Box Office Boom That Isn't

You may have read articles crowing about the box office record set this year. For the first time, movies have grossed more than $10 billion at the North American box office (which includes the U.S. and Canada). However, a closer look at the numbers shows that while the box office gross set a record this year, attendance is not the reason. It has to do with the increase in ticket prices.

(Click to enlarge.)

A quick look at the chart above (lifted from Deadline Hollywood Daily), shows that ticket sales, while up for this year, fall in the average range. For the 11 years on the chart, 6 of them have higher ticket sales than 2009. Furthermore, except for the years 2002-2004, movie attendance has basically remained stable at fewer than 1.5 billion admissions a year during a decade when the population of the U.S. and Canada grew by approximately 33 million (See here and here).

Note that ticket prices have gone up 47% since 1999 while paid admissions have actually fallen from that year.

Furthermore, Dave Kehr reports that DVD sales have fallen $800 million in 2009. Standard DVD sales fell $1 billion with Blu-ray sales increasing by $200 million.

So while Hollywood is basking in its record year, it's an illusion. Attendance is relatively flat over the decade, DVD sales have fallen and only rising prices have led to increased revenue. They haven't grown the pie, only charged more for each slice. Should the audience tire of stereoscopic 3D (and its higher ticket prices), the box office gross may drop significantly next year.

The Night Before Christmas

As there are only 359 days until Christmas, this seems like the appropriate time for this mosaic. The information on the animator draft, courtesy of Mark Kausler, can be found here and here. Click any of the images below to enlarge.

Pixar and Miyazaki

"At the same time, though, Miyazaki's presence points up the limitations of Pixar, which are the limitations of American commercial entertainment generally. Pixar landed on this list, and in the penultimate slot, not strictly on its own merits (which are, as I've said, considerable), but because of its imaginative dominance of family entertainment, and its capacity to shape future moviegoers' sense of what animation (and entertainment) should be. Pixar represents the best of what American commercial filmmaking is. But Miyazaki shows what might be possible without Pixar's inhibitions (or constraints, take your pick).

"Factor out the few dark and disturbing moments in Pixar's films this decade (there haven't been many, really) and you're looking at a body of work that's fairly easy for even the youngest children to grasp and process, and ultimately not challenging compared to Miyazaki. In Pixar films, good characters sound (and usually look) conventionally lovable. Good and evil are clearly defined, and no "good" character's goal is left unmet. And no potentially confusing or disturbing apparition, incident or twist is left unexplained for long.

"Contrast this with Miyazaki's much freer and deeper approach to family entertainment, and you start to see the aesthetic gulf between his work and Pixar's (and, by extension, between the splendid array of animation that thrives internationally and the homogeneous, Pixar-inspired type that dominates U.S. screens). Miyazaki's films are just as visually imaginative as Pixar's and often more so — more painterly and less beholden to the rules of "realism." More importantly, they are never content to define characters as good or evil, or even mostly good or mostly evil, and be done with it. Through a canny combination of sharp draftsmanship, clean animation and simple dialogue, Miyazaki throws children (and often adults) off balance, leaving them unsure what to make of a certain character or situation and forced to grapple with what Miyazaki is doing and showing."

Read the whole article here.

A Revised Survival Kit

I got an email from Amazon, informing me that there is now an expanded edition of The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams. The cover is above and the contents for the additional material are below. If anyone has a copy of the revised edition, please leave your thoughts about the new material in the comments.

A Swedish Holiday Tradition

When I was growing up in New York City, every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Channel 11 would run March of the Wooden Soldiers with Laurel and Hardy. In those days before home video, it was the only way to see the film so you didn't want to miss your chance. As a result, the film became a local holiday tradition.

You may be familiar with the Disney TV episode "From All of Us to All of You." It first ran on December 19, 1958 and was re-run for years. It's a clip show, using old shorts and feature excerpts. Apparently, the show is a huge holiday tradition in Sweden. It's been running for nearly 50 years and is still attracting one third to one half of the TV audience on Christmas Eve day. Jeremy Stahl discovered this when he traveled to Sweden to celebrate Christmas with his fiance's family and has investigated the phenomenon in this article for Slate.

Txesco's Season's Greetings

I've written about Txesco, an animator who worked on the Pocoyo series, before. He's created this beautifully designed and animated holiday greeting. Take a look.