Do pixels make perfect?
Pixar and DreamWorks worked outside the rulebook for animated films. In the process, they wrote new rules. But will Hollywood take the wrong lesson?
The animation industry, says Brad Bird, director of the new
It's a funny thing to hear from Bird, because if all goes right, his movie, which opened this weekend in a blitzkrieg of marketing and product tie-ins, should make approximately a bajillion dollars. What's so dumb about that?
Bird's critique is that Hollywood has leapt at computer generated animation as a kind of holy grail of technology, turning up its nose at traditional, hand-drawn animation in the process. The motivation is easy to understand: Even though fewer than 20 CG feature films have been released in the United States, some have made huge amounts of money. "Shrek 2" grossed more than $436 million at the US box office, and "Finding Nemo," at No. 2, made $340 million. The last hand-drawn film to even come close to those figures was Disney's 1994 "The Lion King," which grossed $313 million in theaters domestically.
Who can blame people for being a little infatuated? So far, Pixar Animation Studios has batted a thousand in CG with "Finding Nemo," the two installments of "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc.," and "A Bug's Life," setting the bar high for using computers to bring a visual freshness to storytelling. They hope to continue their streak with "The Incredibles" and, next year, "Cars." Blue Sky Studios, which made 2002's "Ice Age," will roll out "Robots" next spring. And DreamWorks Animation, the company responsible for "Shrek," got a shot of validation when it spun off from its parent company two weeks ago and raised $812 million in an initial public offering. The company pledged to investors that it would release "two high-quality CG-animated feature films per year" and no hand-drawn films at all.
Even Disney now has the bug. Its most recent 2-D feature was "Home on the Range," which came out last April and grossed a relatively paltry $50 million at the US box office. While the company will put out another traditionally animated film in February, "Pooh's Heffalump Movie," it's shed much of its traditional-animation staff in recent years, and its next big animated film, "Chicken Little," will be computer generated. That movie is due out next summer.
"It is kind of depressing to hear that the 2-D units at Disney are evaporating," says Stephen Hillenburg, creator of the "SpongeBob SquarePants" cartoon and director of a 2-D SpongeBob feature film coming out later this month. "If this movie helps people regain interest in 2-D, we would be happy. Ultimately, my feeling is, 'Whatever works.' If 3-D is the best way to represent your story, that's great. If 2-D is, that's great."
What focusing on the technology does, however, is risk missing the point of the success of CG films up to now. With all the energy spent on visually wowing the audience, storytelling has sometimes gotten lost in the shuffle.
DreamWorks' recent CG film "Shark Tale" has done well, making $147 million so far, but it received mixed reviews, and critics accused the makers of the film, which features Mafioso sharks and graffiti-tagging hip-hoppers, of falling back on insulting stereotypes. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," which folds live actors into computer-animated backgrounds, received rapturous reviews for the visual world it created, but many found its story cliched at best.
And technology can even get in the way. "The Polar Express," which opens this month, turns Tom Hanks into a computer-generated figure who merges into images from Chris Van Allsburg's popular 1985 book. The movie has a wondrous look, but its "motion capture" technique, which digitizes the performances of live actors, can't fully animate characters' eyes. Writing in Variety, David Rooney found the movie "visually impressive yet emotionally frigid."
Ron Diamond, copublisher of the online Animation World Network, says that the focus on CG animation "is very much Hollywood hype, and I think that we are going to swing back to the 2-D arena. One question, though, is whether people are still being trained for 2-D animation, and whether we're going to lose our skilled artists through attrition."
Bird, even though he presided over the state-of-the-art computer-animated "Incredibles," says he has no particular preference for CG over 2-D. He spent many happy years at "The Simpsons" -- which uses gloriously simple 2-D animation to its full advantage -- after moving over from Disney because of pressure to churn out movies that re-created the huge success of "The Lion King."
"You had to have five songs in every movie," Bird recalls. "You had to have the 'I Want' song and the villain song and the duet between the guy and the girl that would be reprised over the end credits -- there was a rulebook."
Pixar and DreamWorks stepped outside that rulebook, in both the types of stories they developed and the way they executed them. Audiences adored the stories and characters, CG-animated films won two of the three Oscars in the Academy Award's new "feature animation" category ("Finding Nemo" and "Shrek"; the other winner was Japanese 2-D master Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away"), and the money rolled in.
"It's just happened that the newer, better, fresher stories have been done in CG," says Bird. If studios "idiotically assume that all you need is a computer and someone to control it to get a smash hit," he says, "the inevitable headline down the pike will be 'Audiences losing interest in CG films.' Well, no, they won't be, any more than they are particularly interested in them now."
What movies still need are engaging narratives and creative directors who can focus the large teams that work under them. Bird describes his own movie, which he began developing 12 years ago, as a "gumbo of spy movies and action movies and superhero things mixed together with family stuff." As a director, he says, "the important decisions are exactly the same [as with a live-action film]. If an actor is using his hands too much, you would say, 'Simplify it.' You talk about something external, but you're refining something internal and how it gets through on the screen. And it's the same thing with an animator -- you're trying to create a performance."
The current obsession with computer-generated animation is risky, which some major studios are only too aware of.
"Part of the appeal of CG animated films may be due to their relatively recent introduction to the market," reads the fine print of the DreamWorks stock prospectus. "We cannot assure you that the introduction of new animated filmmaking techniques, an increase in the number of CG animated films, or the resurgence in popularity of older animated filmmaking techniques will not adversely impact the popularity of CG animated films."
Animation World Network's Diamond says that we're at the moment when CG has come into its own, but that it is also just the flavor of the moment. "The choice to replace one style for the other is a pretty important decision on an economic level, because it's very expensive to produce 3-D animation," he says. "But there are a lot of people who would rather invest in technology than on personnel."
Bird puts it this way: "Look, the people that have prospered in the movie business are people with good instincts. The problem is that others try to apply business-school principles to what is, essentially, gambling. They think, 'Well, we've had two films with a guy that wore a red shirt, so red shirt must equal success!'
"What they don't want to face is the very scary fact that it's about stories and characters and -- who knows? You don't know," Bird continues. "Artists make the film, and they either make good decisions or bad decisions, and there's nothing magical about the equipment. It's just a tool. And I think the people that will survive are the best storytellers."
Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lesliebrokaw@yahoo.com.
