Animation &Commentary 10 Jul 2006 08:48 am
Scanning
– I’m going to continue to defend Richard Linklater’s film A Scanner Darkly (at least until I see it next week.)
The director made one of my two favorite films of the last couple of years with Before Sunset. The rotoscoping technique will not make or break this film.
Like cgi or 2D animation, it’s just a technique. If it’s used to good effect, it’ll help the film; if it’s used to bad effect, it’ll hurt.
I read a letter on Animation Nation yesterday in which the writer was crazed over the idea of seeing a film in which they copy live-action. I wonder if he had the same problem with King Kong where a live action actor did all the principal motion for the gorilla. Motion Capture, to me, veers too far from animation to make it interesting solely as a technique. When the movie studio is trying to get an Oscar nomination for the live actor, I have to wonder if I should even call that technique animation. Yet, if it’s used in as good a way as those GEICO ads, where incredibly subtle motion just about makes the spots brilliant, then the technique is excellent.
Yes, I had many more problems with King Kong than the Motion Capture. The technique didn’t help or hurt my feelings for the film. The length, the direction, the script: these made me not enjoy the movie.
The same is true for A Scanner Darkly. I was totally mesmerized with Waking Life and found myself watching it several times in its repeat showings on television. What’s the film saying and how is it doing that. This is all I really want to know.
- At the box office the film did respectably well with $7700 per theater at only 17 theaters. Pirates of the Caribbean made $7600 per theater at over 4000 theaters.
- I doubt there will be a large outcry for the posts that were lost in my site’s glitch (The Letterman comics, the pages from my John Gardner illustrations), so I probably won’t rush to put them back up. Maybe when things get quiet.
- As a Yankee fan, I kinda enjoyed the Red Sox fighting against Chicago’s White Sox for 19 exhausting innings yesterday. Too bad they get a four day break after that game.
on 12 Jul 2006 at 7:29 am 1.Michael said …
I’m sorry, but I’m not a Hollywood person. Sometimes, I wish I were, but King Kong was a Hollywood movie, regardless of where it was made.
Presuming, your information about the NON-use of Motion Capture, I congratulate you on making it look like it was. A formidable accomplishment.
However, I was also using Kong as an example. I could have substituted “Gollum” for “Kong” to make the point. I was defending the computerized rotoscope technique of A Scanner Darkly.
on 13 Jul 2006 at 4:14 am 2.Daniel Thomas said …
I’ve always considered Waking Life as something akin to a spiritual experience, one of those crucial, lucky moments when a mortal human can crack the shell, and look upon the face of God. I’ve had the same feeling with a few other movies I’ve seen in a theatre, like Lawrence of Arabia, Neil Young’s recent concert movie and 2001. Also, this movie set the table for my later discovery of Isao Takahata, arguably among the handful of greatest living directors, with its serious subject matter and slice-of-life observations and its stylistic alterations. I thought, at the very least, Waking Life would have become a college stoner classic.
I’ve never understood the notion of animators hating that movie. From my perspective, Waking Life made it possible for animation to be available to the independent film market. Isn’t this better than the two or three massive studios and their $100 million budgets? Isn’t this a better alternative? So much of Hollywood is a cartoon anyway. Most big-budget blockbusters, packaged to sell to dumbed-down teenagers who have tragically lost their bs-detectors, are animated from head to toe.
I agree with the notion that the best way to critique a film is to make one yourself. Well, it’s been five years now – where’s the rebuttal? That’s what I want to see from the animation community.
A Scanner Darkly hasn’t arrived in Minneapolis yet, but I’m looking forward to it, as it’s one of the few bright spots of the summer season. Would you seriously choose the new Superman “movie” over this?
on 13 Jul 2006 at 8:44 am 3.Michael said …
I can’t argue with you. I did read an interesting interview with Art Babbitt wherein he puts down all rotoscoped animation as not being caricature. Though I’m an enormous fan of Linklater, I also have a problem with the rotoscoping technique and wonder what the same film would look like if it were done in another, “non-Hollywood” look.
These films are curious in that they do seem to be an idela marriage for this technique. You can see I’m a bit mixed about them.
on 26 Oct 2006 at 5:02 pm 4.Wael Kfoury said …
lawrence of arabia…
Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes. Wael Kfoury….