I love animated movies, even now as an adult. For me, what a director can do in an animated movie is so much more than one can do in a live-action film. The animated film has the ability to present in an more artistic and more interpretive way subject matter than a live-action film ever could. For me, the point of an animated movie is to present the story in a with unique images we would never see in real life. Animation itself is antithetical to realism.
Oddly enough, the recent trend in animated movies is to do all the animation by computer to give the characters a more realistic look and feel. Each hair must be added in and accounted for. Each pixel purposefully addressed. The one animation studio that seems to have capitalized on this computer animation craze is Pixar.
Don’t get me wrong. There are charming features to the Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and Monsters Inc. However, I tend to think that what carries these films is not so much the animation as the script and voice acting. But why have an animated movie when your goals is realism; a live-action film is probably better suited and a whole lot cheaper.
If I recall correctly, Disney in fact started creeping in computer animation with Beauty and the Beast (1991). They paraded out the scene of Belle dancing with the Beast in a grand ballroom. For me, the scene was the most awkward. The ballroom looked cold and unappealing. The ceiling and the chandelier looked fake. The reflections on the floor looked weird. It was as if they pasted drawn figures on a computer animated screen, which is essentially what they dead.
Apparently, Disney and other animation studios corrected the problem by making all of the elements computer animated. Accordingly, instead of having soulless computer animation suck out the warmth of animation hand drawn by skilled artists, the animation studios the movie is entirely put together with computer animation. The effect, for me, is to make the movie lacking with artistic merit.
When I was in elementary school, I remember a Native American came and gave a lecture on Native American culture. Among the different things he talked about, he discussed Native American crafts. He pointed out that all Native American craft had some flaw in it as a way giving the item humanity. I’m sure that the Native American was probably stretching some generalization a little thin. However, the message was good, and, I believe equally applicable to animated films.
There is something beautiful about the way that hand drawn movies were put together. For example, in Robin Hood (1973), you can almost see the pencil marks of the artists like loose strings flying off the figures. The movement of the figures are unnatural, only just so, to give the movie a wonderfully awkward flow. The colors were not perfect, but, in their imperfection, made the film more intimate and human. For example, there is a beautiful scene when almost all the good characters have been placed in jail. Grayness sits upon the whole scene and washes over the rest of the colors. Everything looks like it is about to crumble.
The hand-done drawings somehow held a curiously adult message. There was no adult language in the movie, no nudity, but, in the put-together, the adulthood conspiracy came through. Scenes were oddly quiet and morose. This is no more true than in the Rescuers (1977), a movie about a child, Penny, kidnapped to be used by her kidnappers as a plunderer of pirate treasure. There is not one scene in this movie pleasant or vibrant; rather, each scene dripped with despair and desperation. All seems dark and thickly ominous.
It appears that Disney was echoing the Film Noir movies made after World War II. Dark and complex, they showed life not in the ideal but as it really was. There were no good characters. Darkness washed everything. Film noir tried to show the human condition. Although the films were about the fantastic, the stories were grounded. Perhaps it was the Vietnam War (1959 to 1979) making the animators bitter and angry, their despair over the number of men being killed in an unwinnable pouring over to their work.
Each of the movies made during this time seem to be a fight against those in power and a call for change. 101 Dalmations (1961) is about going up against a rich, wealthy woman wanting to skin the coats of Dalmatians for the purpose of making a coat. The Sword in the Stone (1963) is about the reestablishment of a king who has been properly schooled in the ways of not just men but all of the world. The Jungle Book (1967) is a movie about a kid who shuns man’s world to live in commune with the natural world. The Aristocats (1970) is about pampered cat heiress who finds love among the common cats of the city. Thereafter, you have Robin Hood, the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which is sad and lonely in its own way, and eventually the Rescuers.
It was not until the Fox and the Hound (1981) when the images and the messages seemed less bleak and little more watered down. Certainly, the Fox and the Hound was much briter than the Rescuers, the movie that preceded it. Even the sad scenes were had a sweeter quality to it.
This was also the time of Ralph Bakshi, a man whose animated films were notoriously made for adults such as Fritz the Cat and more recently, Cool World. For a filmography, click here. Perhaps too much adult content.
Something happened between that golden age of animated films and the late 80’s/early 90’s which destroyed the wonderful richness that the animators had put in the films. The animated films lost their humanity and become cold, lifeless, and bland. Perhaps it was the result of the Reagan era, which seemed to put a gloss over everything. Things were better and brighter; people were making money and were able to afford things. Even though the Cold War raged, people felt secure. This idealism carried through the Clinton era with the afterglow fwlling out in the Bush era.
With the downturn in the economy and true uncertainty facing United States as well as the World, the time may be ripe for the more human and darker animation to make its reappearance. It is clear that computer animation has made its mark such that it is unlikely that it will not ever lose its grip in the animation production. However, the chance for the kinds of stories from my childhood that I grew to love, dark and beautifully morose stories, may now be coming back.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment