Avatar - Four stars

Okay, so where do I begin with a movie like this? There is a lot to discuss.

First of all, let me say that this film was damn good. Secondly, I will say there were a few story elements that prevented it from being perfect. Thirdly, I'll add that although I had heard this from many people, the form which these story problems took were totally different to how I had imagined.

Worry not, there are no spoilers ahead. So with that in mind, let's start at the beginning.

This is where James Cameron shines. We are thrust directly into the story of Jake Sully. Avatar is a difficult movie to reduce to a synopsis without it sounding very silly - for a start, Jake Sully is in a wheelchair. When I first heard this, I moaned and rolled my eyes. What a move.
But alas, upon actually watching the movie, it was nice to see that it was dealt with incredibly well. We are not led to hold Jake's hand and feel sorry for his plight, it's just another dynamic of his character.
We are treated pretty quickly to the forestry of Pandora, as well as the Marines military that pervades the human base. What I like about these machines (bar the walkers, which I will get to in a second) is that they look plausible. All the trucks, choppers, VTOL aircraft and cruisers look like they could exist in twenty years' time, a delicate mix of progressive design considerations and "one-foot-in-reality" conservatism. To use Turkey City Lexicon vernacular, these are actual machines, and not fucking magic.



Once we see the Avatars, however, it becomes obvious that we are in another world, something new and different.
The Na'vi look fantastic, startlingly expressive and human, and it adds a huge dimension of empathy to the film. But a question I have been asking for a long time and have been unable to judge from the previews is, "was it worth it?"
James Cameron and his team over at WETA have been working on this new motion capture technology for almost a decade now, and they have said that it will revolutionise film-making as we know it. Excuse me, but that's a pretty big claim.
While these guys were working round the clock to create something that didn't look "CG", Industrial Light and Magic beat them to the punch years ago with their own super-real micro acting humanoid: Davy Jones.



Davy Jones looked so real, from head to toe, even in the extreme closeups, that I was convinced - let me repeat that, CONVINCED - that he was Bill Nighy in makeup from my first viewing. Damn good makeup, too. I didn't realise gyro tentacles had come that far since Hellboy, and man, he looked fishy. But there was this NIGHY-ness about him that discarded any notion that he could be computer generated. Alas, when I found out he was totally rendered in 3D I had to take stock of what I knew about filmmaking and special effects.
Did Avatar have this impact on me? No, it did not. I could still tell the Na'vi were 3D models. That said, it's easy to forget it pretty quickly and get lost in how human these things look.



Do they look better than Davy Jones? No, they don't. Do they look worse? Not really, no! Less convincing, perhaps, but their performances are convincing and at the end of the day, that's all that matters.
So what advantage do WETA have over ILM? That, at least, is simple. Davy Jones had a team of about twenty of ILM's best animators working hard on the one character. By comparison, his crew were neglected with about one animator each and the result was passable, but very "hollywood CG". Avatar, on the other hand, sports a very large cast of Na'vi (several hundred, in fact) who all look convincing. The special effects are not a revolution by any means, but the logistics of these special effects are. I am personally very excited to see what other filmmakers do with this technology.
Unfortunately, not all the effects are this good. Well, they are GOOD - better than most of the competition I have seen - but there is still that unavoidable fakeness in the creatures, and indeed, the clumsy, organically-moving walkers that I was kind of hoping WETA would have been able to eradicate with all this damn hype.

So back on topic, why did I only give Avatar four stars?
Well, it was nearly five, you know. In fact it was five for a while.

Without revealing any of the story, I will say this: James Cameron stopped trying halfway through. What began as a violently creative tour-de-force of sophisticated ideas and subtle writing was suddenly crushed to death by heavy-handed moralism and generic, by-the-book hollywood scriptwriting, the likes of which I haven't seen since the first Transformers. Perhaps worse.
The second half is still enjoyable - hell, if you are just in it for the special effects and explosions, this film will set your balls on fire from beginning to end. But unfortunately it's like an accidental homage to Adaptation. Ever seen that movie? It begins with Charlie Kaufman, the superman avant-garde scriptwriter, writing himself into a script filled with intense, mould-breaking ideas. Unfortunately, he can't figure out how to finish the film so he takes a hollywood scriptwriter's workshop, and the rest of the film functions like a paint-by-numbers hollywood thriller. It works brilliantly as a post-modern statement on the industry; it doesn't work in Avatar.
You will know what I'm talking about. One minute it's a Cohen Brothers movie in outer space, then WHAM! It's Captain Planet meets Fern Gully. With obligatory Lord Of The Rings-style battles.



I think by these standards I have realised that Avatar is definitely best enjoyed if you view it as a pastiche work. It has a lot of James Cameron to it - hell, Sigourney Weaver, giant walkers (though the one from Aliens ironically looked better, these ones move all cartoony just like in Matrix Reloaded + Revolutions because they're from CG hell), bad-guy US marines - but you will constantly be making comparisons to other movies, try as you may.
"This reminds me of this movie." "Huh, that's just like from that other film." "That bit really reminds me of this."
I kind of hope this is intentional. And it might be - the super-valuable resource the humans are after is called "unobtainium", which is a well known Science Fiction injoke. I think a lot of it IS intentional, but in many cases it just seems like James Cameron was beaten to the punch. A lot of this movie you will have seen before. The sad part is, James Cameron probably came up with it first.

I will give James Cameron credit, though, for bringing this world to life so fluently. It is very clear that Pandora is his high-school brainchild and that he has been aching to get this thing to the masses for a long time, and for the most part he has executed this very well. Particularly as you 'discover' Pandora alongside Jake, it's pretty much impossible not to be spellbound by the poetry in motion that is Pandora.
If anyone frequents ConceptArt.org or reads ImagineFX, they will know what to expect in terms of environments. The difference here is that it moves.




So please, James, for your next movie, go nuts with your crazy special effects and fancy-fresh ideas. But for the love of fuck, maintain your enthusiasm for originality for the entire film and don't try and shove a preachy message down my throat. Then I will give you five stars.
But hey. Big words coming from someone who is looking forward to seeing it in 3D tomorrow. Like I said, it is actually a very enjoyable and clever film - it's just impossible for me to take off my script-analyst hat these days, and the film is not devoid of problems in the script department. It's just...

Gah! He was *SO CLOSE*!!

Order of movements - Avatar, Princess

I'm going to see Avatar as soon as I get paid, which should hopefully be soon.
I've heard a lot about it from friends, and the general consensus seems to be that the effects and world are amazing, but the story is hackneyed.
Comparisons have been drawn to a dozen other movies, and I get the impression that the story was stuffed in to fit the world and the graphics, even though this is apparently James Cameron's high-school baby.
This annoys me because I know James Cameron can do better. But I need to see the movie before I can make a proper assessment. So that's what I'm going to do.

Then, in the new year, I will go see Princess and the Frog.

In the meantime, have some cheese.

Friggin' Aussie release dates...

I was all fired up to tell you I was going to check out this new Princess and the Frog movie. But as usual, because I live in Australia, I will not be able to see it until after every single American who is waxing lyrical about the bloody film in journals right now. I will have to wait until January 1st. Who the hell watches a movie on New Year's Day?
Oh well. It could be worse - Australians are forced to wait, invariably, for at least six months to see every Pixar movie that comes out, six months after Americans have hyped it to the point where I don't even want to see it anymore. Up is probably good, but I haven't had the desire to seek it out, even if I am a Pixar fanboy.

Let me tell you what my first thoughts about this movie are. Hopefully, I will be wrong.
Throughout the nineties, Disney Corporation had mutated into a horrible parody of what it once was, as a result of the slimy Michael Eisner ensnaring control of the board, replacing creatives with corporates and kicking the last Disney off the payroll. During this time of chaos, the studios pumped out some really sorry films that, let's not mince words here, sucked balls. Probably the last good 2D Disney animation that I have seen was The Lion King. After a bunch of box-office failures that frankly looked uninspired and forced even from the promotional posters, Eisner more or less claimed that 2D was a dead art and needed to go. Pixar was making squillions and all the other major studios were vomiting out horrible imitations like Shark Tale and Robots that served no more purpose than to employ a bunch of Maya wizards.
They only got bums on seats because the audience didn't have a choice. 2D was dead, apparently.

Now Disney pulls an about face and says they want to make a 2D film. Admittedly and forgivably, this is probably as a result of John Lasseter getting on the board. Like him or not, John Lasseter can at least be credited with giving a fuck about animation, a rare treat at the controls these days.
Whether or not he had anything to do with it, however, this huge revival of 2D films is... a princess story.
Alright, so Disney are famous for them. But it's been done. All they've done this time is made them black. My thoughts keep diverting to The Cleveland Show, but surely it can't be that bad.

All my American friends are praising the film enormously, and I feel an obligation to check it out. I'm not going to judge this film based on previous failures, but I will admit right now that my expectations are low. In 2010, I will be putting up a review that will reveal - at least from my personal point of view - whether this truly is a return to form for Disney, or the only 2D film that has come out in a substantial period of time that hasn't made people want to kill themselves instantly, and thus reaching the status of "the best 2D film of the decade" by default.

The phenomenon of medium-copying

Here's something I've been contemplating for a while.

I believe animation is a medium, not a genré. I feel the same way about each method of animation - stop motion, 3D, 2D traditional, 2D digital (ToonBoom and Flash), scratching onto the film, whatever.
It's frustrating when the commoner (or as the case may be, the Hollywood bigwig handing out the movie deals) lumps all movies or works of a medium into one neat little package - for instance, 3D movies for a while were synonymous with 'Animal movies'. Madagascar, The Wild, Ice Age, Happy Feet, Over The Hedge; it seemed like everywhere you looked there was a 3D movie about animals and it made me rage. It's a good medium, why let it go to waste? Because it's easier, or cheaper? Are you kidding? It's 3D, you can do whatever you want with it!
This happens of course with just about every medium and submedium in the animation industry, and not only that but it happens in art, too. There have been painters for a long time who make good money by making photoreal portraits of their subjects - when really you could just hire a photographer with a really good camera to do the same thing. I don't consider this a bad thing - as an artist, I can understand the viewpoint that painting something that could easily be mistaken for the real thing is the final destination of 'detail' painting, the opposite of impressionism or minimalism, and the king of that arena. There is a reason painters tried to replicate photos.

In the animation world, this medium-copying is practically fetishised. It permeates everything. Once upon a time it was a technique - the limitations of 2D in the 80's and virtually every point in time before that made the use of digital special effects impossible, requiring 2D animators in some cases to replicate a 3D look.
I can think of an example in Rock 'n Rule; the cars, to look more believable, were filmed models which were then rotoscoped by the 2D animators to keep the shapes consistent (and I don't blame them, as vehicles in motion are about the most difficult thing I can think of to animate).
But now it seems to be done for the sake of itself. "Look what we can do!"

Corpse Bride, while a fun movie, bothered me in a few ways and one of them was the fact that they couldn't make up their minds over whether they wanted it to be stop motion or 3D.



Now don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good movie (I didn't like the beginning or end scenes but everything else was fantastic), and I am all for adventurism with animation techniques. But there was a really odd method of attack for this piece that leaves me wondering, 'why?'



If you've done any research on this movie and how it was made, you'll know that they did not use the usual head / mouth-swapping method typical of the "Tim Burton" animated movies. Instead, there was a very complicated device installed in each puppet's head that allowed the animators to use a key in the back of the puppets' heads (hidden in their hair so you couldn't see them). This allowed gradual contortions of the face shapes so that the animators could get to the exact specific facial expressions they needed without having to swap the heads or even touch the faces.
The funny part is, this is how 3D animators work. They set up a rig with a bunch of controls that allows them to do the exact same thing. As a result, the movie looks that little bit more like 3D.
What bothered me is that I have always been in love with the tactile, ethereal effect of headswapping (just remember a scene of Jack singing from The Nightmare Before Christmas and you'll know what I'm talking about).



But the animators maintained that for Corpse Bride, it looked ugly and they wanted to do away with it completely. Seeing as they work with armatures (who wants to compete with Aardman on the plasticine front, anyway?), they went to a ridiculous amount of effort to cheat something I always considered a benefit of the armature medium.
On top of this, they went to similar scrutinous lengths to find a way to give the Corpse Bride herself an animatable veil. They ended up producing a mesh component that could be animated quite fluidly as a three dimensional piece of cloth. I have to say, it looks incredible, and I tip my hat to whoever figured that out.
However, in some scenes they didn't use the veil - they stuck in a computer generated one because they thought it would look better for the scene.
Again, I have to ask, 'why'? Those silly clockwork armatures used in the film cost $10,000 each, and Stop Motion animation remains the most difficult, expensive and time-consuming method of animation used in feature films.
They could have made it 3D and probably no one would have complained. Indeed, I've met more than one person who mistakenly thought Corpse Bride was a 3D movie - and I'm not even including my half-blind housemate.

The reverse is also true, though it makes more sense to me, at least at a financial level. While at QCA, I met a gentleman from another planet by the name of Mark Upton. This guy is a bit weird but he's very switched on, and he was always one of my favourite teachers. Full of great advice, and one of those guys who just seems to have a great answer for everything.
He quit teaching at the end of last year, and this year I was fortunate enough to catch him in John Eyley's office after he had finished a rather large project.
Be as it may, and this will dunk me right in the cold waters of Hypocrisy, he beat me to the punch on an idea I had - to deliberately replicate the look of a stop motion animated film by using 3D.
He had been working on a petrol advertisement about dinosaurs. I wish I could find it somewhere but I don't think it's on the internet. Suffice it to say, we all had to be told that it was actually 3D. Not only did it look like real stopmo, it looked like real plasticine. They did the fake water and everything.
For some reason I found this more impressive, but by the same token it seems to be a bit disrespectful to the passion and energy displayed by stopmo animators, who I consider to be the best animators alive. A good stopmo animator is something to be valued, because not only are they rare but they are patient, dedicated and very fucking talented indeed. I guess it comes back to the old-man-with-technofear argument of, "these newfangled computers will be taking everyone's jobs, soon!"
Of course, the ultimate pro of this instance was that 3D animations are much cheaper and more easily controlled - not to mention fast - than animating in real stop motion. That makes sense to a producer. Corpse Bride doesn't. I'm still not sure how it got off the ground.

Likewise, with computer technology today, you get a lot of animations trying to incorporate 3D into the ensemble and disguising it with 'cel-shading'. Personally I consider cel-shaded 3D to be a cold sore on the animation industry's mouth, a tool that has only been used with any artistic merit two or three times that I can think of. Films like Moonsung Lee's Bert made good use of it (and that wasn't even fully cel-shaded), but if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a 2D film dropping in cel-shaded elements. I notice they do it in anime a lot, but indeed this happens everywhere.



To the trained eye, cel-shading can be seen from a mile away. Once upon a time I would have said the untrained eye, but I'd say about one in two non-animators I've seen who witness a cel-shaded 3D insertion into a 2D animation don't know the difference. The other half do, though - they can't pick it, they don't know how it's done, but they realise it looks incongruous with the rest of the film.
Ironically, I think they would have better luck just throwing in some fucking 3D. Make it look the background or something, they are usually pretty well rendered in these shows. But instead they have to try and match the flat-shaded, outlined look of everything else and it just comes out weird. I mean, if they'd done it with pure 2D anyway, it would look better because you have more control over how the object behaves. In fact, you have infinite control over how it behaves.
So why don't they? Because that would cost time, and money.

See, this is why I want to be an independent animator. I'd make less money but I wouldn't feel like I am selling out by making my stuff crappier simply to bring a smile to a producer's face. When an independent animator does things like this, it's for a reason. They were going for something. It's not because they need to churn out an episode a week or be fired.
Not that independent animators are immune to the effects of budget! Indeed, when you're indie, you need to make every cent count because you're not being backed by a powerful studio. But at least you have a say in how it looks. You'd only cheap out if you were desperate and you had to - when the ironic thing is, studios cheap out because they can.

I guess you just need to become as influential as Tim Burton. Then you'd have the best of both worlds. Studio backing, big budget, and what appears to be total creative control.

"Hey, I was thinking, we could like, make this movie about a guy who accidentally marries a dead body. But we'd need to do it in stop motion, because that's the only way it would look right, so I'll need a bajillion dollars and ten years to make it. The puppets will cost ten thousand dollars each."
"Uh... okay, Tim. We'll... make it happen."
Then watch as the investors shed a single, black tear of liquid sorrow.

If I could ever get that much control, I'd be happy as a pig in horseshit.

A note on the last post

I nearly forgot to mention, at one point Gromit is waiting in the car while he and Wallace are trying to catch the Were Rabbit. He turns on the radio and Art Garfunkel's "Bright Eyes" comes on. He shakes his head and switches it off.
It's obviously a reference to Watership Down and I freaking lost it.

Aardman are so very, very good at what they do

When I was a youngster, a new show was coming to the ABC called "Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers". It was the talk of the neighbourhood and everyone made sure they tuned in to watch it. We even taped it off the telly in case it was any good. It was good - so good, in fact, that I wore the tape down and dad bought me the official VHS of The Wrong Trousers and A Grand Day Out for christmas (for the longest time I thought G.D.O. came after Wrong Trousers).
The penguin became a cultural icon, and I found it enthralling that a penguin could use measuring tape as a grappling hook. I tried doing it myself for about a year before eventually giving up.

Anyway, I watched Curse of the Were-Rabbit again tonight, hence the new rant.
I love that movie, I really do. Only the British can make a film about vegetables being stolen by rabbits hilarious and exciting.



Although they began to dally with these concepts in A Close Shave, Nick Park and his creative team made some interesting decisions regarding the feature film (and very wise ones) - they expanded the universe of Wallace and Gromit into a full town, a full community. The antagonist, Victor Quartermain, is a show-stealer and is a match for the Penguin in villainy (a potential murderer in the Wallace and Gromit universe is actually kind of creepy).


What an excellent composition for a shot!

Interestingly, my housemate Richard kept asking me if the film was CGI; no, I said, it was stop motion. Was I sure? Of course I was fucking sure. I had to prove it to him with the Making Of documentary. He insisted it was a lot more smooth than most stop motion animation he'd seen, and I responded by showing him a bit of Corpse Bride.
It wasn't until then that I realised Victor Quartermain bears a strikingly similar role in the story to that of Barkis from Corpse Bride - both movies were released in the same year, 2005. They are both after the money - not the affections - of the hero's love interest, and both of them are viscious, homocidal cads. Although I like Corpse Bride, I am going to have to say that Victor made for a far more compelling villain, and this may have something to do with the fact that Victor is given more screentime and more opportunity to develop as a slimey bastard. Barkis is obviously a snake from the beginning and we're more or less prompted to just go with it, whereas Victor gradually becomes more evil throughout the movie.

The humour in this film is incredible. There are countless and very English plays on words, puns, and sexual innuendos that are considerably less heavy-handed than those seen in most other modern animated features. Most of the humour, however, comes from the comical exaggeration of how these townsfolk worship plants, and the horrors of having their vegetables stolen and eaten. Nick Park described it as the "first ever vegetarian horror movie". The very premise is comical in nature, and the scenes with the Vicar in particular seek to exploit the horror and thriller genres for comedy at every opportunity.



If I have any complaints about this film, it would be that the ending was a bit cheap (but nowhere near as disappointing as Corpse Bride's, which in my opinion is the achilles heel of that movie), and from a really niggly standpoint, Hutch's up-pitched voice is noticably awful. One wonders if they just cranked it up with time-preservation in Sound Forge or Acid.

Apart from that, if you haven't seen this movie then I strongly recommend you do; this represents Aardman at the top of their game, a purist Nick Park offering, and family stop motion animation at its best.

No, they are not nazis. Nazis didn't wear pickelhelms.

Hey all, sorry about my goodness-knows-how-long absence from the blog.
I've been too busy working on this.



I learned a few things upon making this final film.

• First of all, never over-estimate your own abilities.
• Secondly, an unfinished piece with each shot carefully considered and fully completed looks better than a finished piece permeated by shitty animation.
• Thirdly, university is NOT worth your health, mental or physical. Ultimately, nothing is.

In a few days it will all be over, and I will be free. If I pass all of my subjects, I will graduate and have a year off.
If I don't, well, at least I won't be doing a full set of subjects next year. I feel so utterly burnt out. I cannot wait to simply take a year off to myself. Rest assured, I will be updating very soon with some more reviews (the Shorts collections will no doubt come first).

Stay tuned.