Questionable Opinions of Dr. Sues

Ruining Children's Books/Origin Stories

2008-06-10T18:56:00.000-07:00

Through a convoluted series of clicking links and searching Wikipedia, I found out that Sony Pictures Animation, who made Surf's Up and Open Season is producing an adaptation of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a book that I have fond memories of from elementary school, and you probably do too. The book describes a town called Chewandswallow, where all of the weather is in the form of food. If you're not familiar with this book, ask someone who had a childhood.
I actually became somewhat excited about this, even though I feel a certain apprehension of translating a beautifully drawn children's book to CG. But honestly, this is probably one of the less stylized children's books, and thus is less dependent on being hand-drawn for its feel.
What absolutely enraged me, though, was that they plan to explain the origins of Chewandswallow's weather. I think Patton Oswalt put it best:
"I DON'T GIVE A SHIT WHERE THE STUFF I LOVE COMES FROM! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE!"
Why the hell would they ruin a perfectly quirky and magical story with something like an explanation? Isn't what makes books like this so memorable the fact that it's so matter-of-fact about the situation, and it lets the kids escape to a world that is at once familiar to their own, yet completely alien from it? The book never asked kids to become the wet blanket in their first-grade class and ask "But teacher, how is such a town possible? Ground beef and soup don't occur naturally." Creating an origin story would just ruin this perfect fantasy because providing an explanation for the town would indicate that something had to make it that way, instead of the much more fun idea that that's just how things always were.
Come to think of it, why are producers/writers so enthralled with origin stories? As far as movies go, the only origin stories I've seen that I liked significantly and actually added something to the character/story were Batman Begins, Iron Man, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And even in those cases, one had ninjas, one had Robert Downey Jr., and one had a kickass chase scene and beautiful scenery. Well, what actually made the former two stories good , particularly in the realm of superhero origins, is that they were the rare self-made superheroes. Unlike most of Stan Lee's lazy "something radioactive happened" or "born that way" origins, in these cases character development --> superpowers instead of superpowers --> character development. Most of the time, again particularly in comic book movies, an origin story is a writer's easy way to fill 40 minutes without having to worry about a plot yet.
The fact is most of the time, not only do we not care how someone or something was created or became they way they are in the present, but often the presentation of an origin actually ruins the already established story *cough*starwarsprequels*cough*. Most filmmakers today seem to have forgotten that people like a little mystery, because they to fill in the blanks themselves. Darth Vader and Boba Fett were way cooler before I was spoon-fed the whole story about how they were kids with single parents (for a lack of a better word for the relationship between Jango and Boba Fett). That one shot in Empire Strikes Back when you saw the back of Vader's gross pink head, and then at the end of Return of the Jedi when you saw his gross pink face, were awesome because they pushed the question about what horrible event led to his condition. People were able to use their *gasp!* imaginations to answer it. More importantly, before Episode III spelled it out for us in the form of "He had a fight with Obi-Wan and he fell in some lava and caught on fire", it was easier to accept this condition as metaphorical; a visualization of how the Dark Side had corrupted him, and probably a thousand other metaphors depending on who you ask.
Fiction, particularly fantastic stories like surreal children's books, fantasy in its varying forms, and science fiction, is so great because the best of its storytellers are able to create a world that you can become immersed in and begin to believe in, with characters that you can feel like they exist on some other plane, and can imagine interacting with the world they live in.
The best worlds and characters in fiction already feel like they have lived a life/existence before the story began; you don't need to make up the whole life.

Say you have a black box with a bunch of white gaps in a checkerboard-like pattern. Now fill in all of the white with black. What's more interesting, the black-and-white block with the gaps, or the solid black box, with all of the gaps filled in?

Brad Bird/Big Lebowski

2008-06-07T18:38:00.001-07:00

Brad Bird
This occurred to me shortly after seeing Ratatouille for the second or third time, within the week-long period of seeing it four times in total, and a week after watching The Incredibles three times within a week. I feel like in many ways, Brad Bird is the Steven Spielberg of animated films, and in a broader sense American film today, especially if you consider Spielberg's earlier films. This idea struck me initially because of their shared talent for creating films that are both artistically viable without compromising commercial viability, and vice versa. However, after pondering this for a little longer, I realized that they shared other qualities.

Both showed a talent and passion for their medium from an early age, Spielberg with his little alien film that ended up being his very first film to make a profit, and Bird with his 3-year labor of animation that he sent to Disney and resulted in an apprenticeship with none other than Milt Kahl.

Both got a start in TV, Spielberg most famously for his TV movies like Duel, and Bird for his involvement in The Simpsons.

Hell, even The Iron Giant has a similar story to E.T. I'm sure there are more similarities than I've listed off the top of my head, but really what it comes down to is their pure and unbreakable passion for their genre.

The Big Lebowski
I don't know exactly how this occurred to me, but soon after watching The Incredibles and Ratatouille, the two Pixar films with probably the most human characters, I realized that The Big Lebowski has all the qualities of a great animated film. There's little denying that the characters are basically well-developed caricatures. The plot and dialogue are hilarious and absurd, and the visuals have a precision that is seldom matched by anyone besides the Coen Brothers themselves. Even though the hilarious dream sequence is probably the clearest argument for this, what really convinced me was imagining the "World of Pain" scene as if it was played by characters modelled and animated the way I would imagine Pixar would do it. Try, if you can, to imagine any scene from The Big Lebowski as if the movie was a really fucked up Pixar film, and it just works.

What this really got me thinking about, though, is the idea of choosing whether or not to make a movie animated. The thing about the Big Lebowski feeling like an animated film is that because it's live action, the ridiculous situations and caricaturistic characters make everything that much funnier and more ridiculous. However, by that logic, you might think that any animated film would be richer or whatever by going to live action. I think what should really be considered during this hypothetical choice is not how you want to present the characters and situations, but how you want to present the world you're creating. If you want the more improbable/impossible aspects of your film to blend in with the world of your movie, then that's what makes (well one thing) a successful animated movie.

If I go any longer, I'm going to veer off into a rant about CGI in live-action movies, so I'm going to stop here.

Still Pictures!

2008-05-28T17:36:00.001-07:00

Okay, until I figure out how to link to a Quicktime video, here is the storyboard still by still. I worked too much on details for it to be diluted by yucky compressed format.

Camp Storyboard/Animatic is up!

2008-05-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

Well, a day over a week since i told myself I would be done storyboarding the animation, I'm finally... kind of... finished. I'm still missing an ending, but I figured I just need to get animating before I let this thing drag on too long. I'm still basically teaching myself to draw beyond characters in blank space, so there was some unexpected puzzle-solving I had to do. So anyway, here's an extremely rough version (both in animation and quality. I need to figure out how to put Quicktime files up.) of what I intend to do. I have some notes below it.

Notes:

1. When I was creating the fire circle, I basically fell in love with Mopey Camper (on the far left). I'm seriously considering putting him in the place of Happy Camper on the far right, since he's more interesting, and there would probably be a more interesting emotional change.

2. I will make the archery target more three-dimensional for the real thing, as you can see, there are many parts of this where I was kind of rushing.

3. I totally messed up the perspective in the pool shot. It looks like a vast Olympic-size pool instead of a camp swimming pool, and the lifeguard, and more importantly the lifesaver, are too small.

4. I will probably add someone (Ropes staff) onto the platform in the tree.

5. Okay, the kid falling behind in the Run and Scream shot looks like a retard.

6. I don't know why I put space between the initial four kids in the Nature shot, since the whole point is that they crowd around.

7. Yes, there will be an ending, but this is almost the whole thing anyway.

I'm deciding between animating from beginning to end or in order of ostensive (sic?) difficulty. Either way, I need to start... tonight.

Camp Storyboard Update

2008-05-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

Despite not having left the house since Saturday, I didn't get nearly as far into my storyboard as I expected or wanted to. The amount of accomplishment I've made in general in the past two days has been less than desirable. This has largely been due to the fact that I take forever to actually sit down at my lightbox when I know the first thing I have to do is the most difficult part. In this case, it's the initial shot of the group at the fire. Going in, the reason I was so reluctant was because I'm still teaching myself to use perspective.

That wasn't the problem. Once I started drawing, I realized that if I wanted to have two separate logs (as in logs to sit on) of kids at opposing angles, I had to figure out how to compose this whole scene so none of them are so far from the fire that their sticks bear a closer resemblance to fishing poles than roasting sticks, as well as make it so the marshmallow sticks and stick-figure limbs of the characters don't end up overlapping into a complex and confusing network of lines. I finally came up with a composition that more or less works, and now it's just a bitch to draw over and over again. How the fuck did I think I could make the fire circle the entire short?

Anyway, though I will definitely not be finishing the boards tonight, I'm really hoping tomorrow I won't be too burnt out from work to do the rest, scan them, and make a Quicktime movie. Or... at least scan them. I also still have to figure out how to bring this to an end. I have an ending, but I haven't figured out how I'm getting there.

Camp Animation Update

2008-05-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

I looked at the date today and it kind of scared me to realize that it's only little over a month before Staff Training begins. I am confident in saying that I will not be finished with this project by then. At this point, my goal is to have enough to show at the talent show at the end of Staff Training, as a way of introducing the whole staff to this project. I'll continue to work on the piece during the summer, hopefully finishing it before the first half; my motivation will depend on how much is colored by when. In the short term, my goal is to have a full animatic by the 20th, so I have exactly a month to animate a significant amount. If I only work three days a week, and my social life doesn't unexpectedly spring into action (Shit, I would imagine prom and Justin staying over for a week counts), this should be plausible.

I should also point out at this point that I've made some changes to my idea. I was really sold on the fire idea, but seeing this short thing by Bill Plympton gave me an idea that, while it may be more... done than the fire thing, it flows way better and doesn't seem as forced. The fire is now more of a frame for the body animation, which is a kind of metamorphosis/match cut flow of camp activities. This will make more sense in the animatic.

On Voices

2008-05-10T13:36:00.001-07:00

The other day, I was digging around the internet to see if there was any way I could see Shane Acker's brilliant short 9. While I wasn't able to find anything about a DVD release or a festival in the near future in my area, I found some new information about the feature film that gave me some mixed feelings.

Now I knew for a while that a studio offered to finance/distribute a feature-length version of the movie, but what was news to me was that they're going to use voices.

I'd been a bit confused/conflicted for a while on the subject of dialogue in films, particularly animation. One of the things I love about the medium is that it lends itself so well to communicating ideas visually. Live-action filmmakers only have so much control over the non-actor elements of their film, and real people can only go so far in physical acting, so in the age of "talkies", dialogue-less films are often placed in the realm of quirky comedies like Mr. Bean and... not much else, maybe some student shorts. Animation is, meanwhile, almost expected to lack words. Animators construct their own reality, so they can make anything the way they need to in order to communicate something. Characters are virtually limitless as far as physical acting, and because lip-syncing is such a pain in the ass, it's fairly common to see silent animated characters.

So what I'd been conflicted about is that I was under the impression that our society/viewership had become largely visually oriented. Doesn't the lowest common denominator prefer to see a bunch of guns, monsters, and tits than sit through 90 minutes of talking? These are obviously extremely... extreme examples I pose, but the point is that it confused me that the masses would beg "Stop the action! Talk about things!".

This isn't to say I have some sort of personal vendetta against dialogue. It's my favorite part of writing, because oftentimes it's the best way to make a character who they are. And of course, there are obviously plenty of animated movies where dialogue genuinely adds a new dimension to the film. It's the necessity of dialogue that I take issue with. The Coen brothers have written some of the most brilliant dialogue I've ever heard on film, yet they knew how to stop when No Country for Old Men came around, and let the film speak for itself.

Which, really, is what I realized. The populous wants voices in their animated movies because we need everything spoon-fed to us. If a plot point or communication to another character can't easily be conveyed using gestures or expressions, they damn well better straight-up tell us lest we resort to thinking and constructing our own interpretations. So even if it's a beautiful movie whose plot is driven by something as subtle as a Tyrannosaurus Goddamned Rex (The Land Before Time was on my mind throughout writing this, which didn't have the kiddy voices until Michael Eisner said so), or a surreal, suspenseful CG thriller (9), we apparently can't be trusted to understand a movie unless a celebrity's voice outright tells us what's going on.

But at any rate, I can't complain that 9 is becoming a feature. Sure, it will have celebrity voices, but I would hardly consider Elijah Wood, Martin Landau, or Crispin Glover to be among the Pixar/Dreamworks crowd. If my previous post is any indication, it just makes me happy enough to think that if a relatively mature and surreal animated feature like this becomes popular enough, it can open the doors for a load of other animation that doesn't fit the Disney mold, not to mention independent animation period.

I have no doubt in my mind that WALL-E will one of, if not the best, movies I see this year. Pixar is one of the few things that truly gives me hope about the state of the industry, but if that damned little cute-bot beats 9 for Best Animated Feature, I will break things.

Just like to clear something up

2008-05-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

Last night, I found myself talking to a total stranger on the phone (It was my friend's phone, but someone she had met at the current party decided to pick it up and assume her identity, under the pretext that this was still Kait but "with a really bad cold". I played along). We were making small talk for essentially the same reason this blog came into existence: to not do my Media Production final, and at one point he asked what I was studying/majoring in. I told him Animation, and he gave me the exact response that I would imagine many animation students dread and learn to expect: "Oh cool! I love cartoons!" If it weren't for the fact that it was very late, I had never met the guy before, he was drunk, it was very loud on his end, and we were breaking up, I would have taken direct issue with this. So allow me to make this clear:

ANIMATION DOES NOT EQUAL CARTOONS.

The latter often means the former, but it's things like what Phil (I think that was his name) said that illustrate the unfortunate state this medium is in. Invariably, if you mention animation to someone, the first thing they think of is along the lines of, if not exactly, Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. Decades of the industry's domination by Disney and other kid-oriented franchises have left anything beyond a PG rating to be considered "edgy"; a risky fringe venture that scares the shit out of producers because the only thing they've seen animated are cute anthropomorphic animals and heartstring-tugging kids. They have no idea what might happen if they had an animated movie with serious themes or blood or sex or curse words because none of them have noticed that Japan's been doing this for years and PEOPLE LOVE IT.

I'd feel like I'm not doing any good here, because this point has probably been made many times before, but even fucking John K. is under this impression. I know this because he frequently complains about "cartoons with story and heart" or similar movies. There doesn't seem to be any difference to him between Daffy Duck and... Yuri Norstein. I know that sounds like a ridiculously snobbish and esoteric sentence (depending on who's reading this), but really I'm pretty sure he'd wouldn't think twice before bashing Hedgehog in the Fog, if only for having a good story.

Now, I have nothing against cartoons; Clampett, Avery, and Jones, to name a few, are some of the most talented animators of all time. But in my mind, cartoon is a relatively narrow term that ends up being used as a blanket. In my opinion, a cartoon is an animated movie/TV show that is very comical and relatively light and relies on a lot of visual gags and exaggerated facial expressions/features for its humor and has an extremely exaggerated sense of weight and flexibility. Now of course, according to this Miyazaki has made some terrible cartoons. But he has made some of the most incredible animated films ever seen.

This is why I thirst for blood when people call movies like Spirited Away or Watership Down a "cartoon."

Some Points on Editing

2008-05-02T21:35:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about a certain anonymous friend's video project(s) lately. Particularly, the criticisms I made of it and more importantly, her defenses of it. Having seen varying degrees of mediocrity in video making since my freshman year of high school, I feel it is necessary to begin laying down some personal beliefs about editing, and student video in general.

1. "Style" is not a valid excuse for mediocrity.
I believe one David St. Hubbins put it best: "Such a fine line... between clever and stupid." Simple is a style. Weird is a style. Even sloppy, when done with intention and control, is a form of style. However, making something with no apparent sense of composition, progression, or focus, not to mention hard to watch, is not "going for a style". That is what I call "dicking around with a camera and Final Cut".
2. Music is not a valid substitute for rhythm.
Just because you set a video to a fast song does not necessarily make the video fast-paced. If the action on the video is not similarly paced, and the editing seems to have no sense of rhythm, you're just adding a song. If you're going to add music to a video, one needs to compliment the other. The music needs to emphasize the rhythm of the editing, not try to create it.
3. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you necessarily should.
Chroma-keying can do amazing things for a video. Split-screen can tell a story in ways that no other technique can. Slow-motion has been a staple of film-making since the invention of film. But these are all things terribly prone to abuse. If there's a simpler, less distracting way to get something across, DO IT. If you can do what you want with cover shots instead of chroma-keying, go for cover shots. Similarly, if you don't need to use a cover shot for the audience to understand something, don't bother. Cover shots should be used for:
a) Covering up cuts in an interview
b) Illustrating a point where words don't suffice
People seem to be under the impression that if they use some cool technique that's somewhat more difficult to do than a cut or dissolve, that makes them a better editor. Being a good editor is knowing when to use certain tools, not how. Which brings me to my last point of the night:
4. Fast editing does not equal good editing.
People think, because music videos and other flashy things use a ton of quick cuts, that the more and faster cuts you use in a video, the better you are at editing. Any asshole with iMovie or Final Cut or Adobe Premiere can cut a lot of short pieces together. This essentially goes back to point 2, which is that "fast" does not equal rhythm. If you're going to have a seizure-inducing series of one-frame long cuts, you better damn well be trying to induce seizures.

Obligatory Intro Post

2008-05-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

So you may be asking right now, "Stephen, why the fuck are you making a blog? Are you another blogging college student douchebag? Didn't you use to decry this kind of behavior?"

Well:
1. No, not really. I may have mocked blogs or vlogs or whatever, but I've actually become a somewhat frequent blog reader as of late. Blame John K. if you must.
2. I'm supposed to be doing finals work now, but have no inclination towards doing so at the moment, so I decided to make a blog in the pursuit of procrastination.
3. I have a lot of strong opinions, but the realm of comment boards and the like doesn't seem to be the appropriate forum for my tangential, paragraph-multiplying style of writing.
4. No, I'm not another douchebag. Fuck you.

What can you expect from this blog? Ranting. A lot of it. Ranting about movies, animation, works in progress, animation, prospective work, and animation. I... I like animation.