The Debate Between Animation and Reality

I just wanted to elaborate on a point that I touched upon briefly in yesterday's post, and that is animation and CG's interesting relationship with reality.

3D and animation exist to play with reality. It's goal is to create a living, moving world in it's entirety. It has the visual stimulus words lack no matter how striking the prose and vivid the imagery, the movement you can't find in paintings or comics, a disregard for physics that can't be found in live action film. This is why filmmakers turn to animation. Anything is possible, from the stop motion used to make King Kong to the CG Na'vi on CG Pandora. Hell, if you think about it, Transformers and 300 are just as much cartoons as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. You'd be hard pressed to find a Hollywood film these days that didn't at least use a green screen.

However, even though animation tells physics to buzz off on a regular basis, it needs a grounding in reality in order to work. You can have giant robots that change into cars to your heart's content, but they need to have weight. They need to have realistic movement. If you drew a person, the most realistic person possible, but the movement was jerky and the expressions were stiff, the audience would not relate. On the other hand, if you took a sack of potatoes and made it move very realistic, you had the top corners hang down, bag hunched, shuffling it's bottom corners, stopping to sigh, the audience will feel it's expression of dejection and associate more with that than the human. I mean, It was impossible not to feel bad when Wall-E was falling apart and breaking down near the end of the film. He wasn't human, he was a box with eyes, but the movement of his hands and eyebrows, the tilt of his head, were so realistic that they felt human.

Successful animation is a bit of a paradox. You can do the most unrealistic things possible, but you have to do them realistically. You have to both ignore it, and never forget it. It is a cruel, cruel mistress, it is.

Those aren't the only levels to this debate either. If you want to make realistic CG, you have to go a couple of steps further. In film school they teach you that the best sound design is one that you don't notice. One out-of-place sound immediately draws the audience's attention towards it. I would argue that the same goes for CG as well. How many times have you seen a movie and said "Oh. That's CG." It's so ubiquitous that it's often not as impressive as it should be. In my mind, the movie with the best use of CG to this day is Jurassic Park, a film made in 1993. That is because it very intelligently combined CG with animatronics to cover up the weaknesses of the other. The results were nearly flawless.

Too many films nowadays don't try and hide it. They get up and go "Hey everybody! Look at my CG!". A person can't swing from building to building on webs, so they used a CG Spider-Man, but that was only a stand-in for the original. The second he landed, it was Tobey Maguire in a costume. Not the best CG, but they tried to hide it.

This is where I both applaud and condone Avatar. James Cameron was telling us to look at the CG. To actively judge if it was the best CG ever made or not. That's the same thing as a magician, before sawing a woman in half, telling the audience there is a second woman in the box. However, when it came to mundane details, he passed with flying colors. As silly as the Na'vi looked, he choose a design for them that could have easily been prosthetics and make-up. He decided to animate blades of grass instead of using actual grass. He got animators to makes little nicks and cuts in the beads on the Na'vi headdresses instead of using actual headdresses. He could have easily used real things, but he chose not to. It's not practical, and quite a bit pretentious, but if you're trying to prove you have the best CG, then it's a brilliant way to go. No matter how advanced your technology is, things like the giant hammerhead-rhino creature or six-legged horses will never look real, because your brain knows no such thing exists. However, if your characters could have easily been guys in make-up, and for a second they actually look like guys in make-up, you've won.

That's why I will be forever convinced that that one shot of Sigourney was really her and they were f**king with us.