Ed's Newsletter - July 2009

OOOPS!
OOOPS! In my enthusiasm to review FMX 2009, I got Dan Moskowitz's job description wrong. Never mind what I said, his actual job at Maxis is Lead Programmer on the in-game editors for Spore. Sorry about that.

WANT TO SEE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL?
Miyazaki has a new movie coming soon! It's called Ponyo.

ACTING FOR ANIMATORS WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
Nov 4-7, VIEW Conference, Turin, Italy
Nov 18-27, Swansea Animation Days (SAND), South Wales
Jan 2010, India - Multi-city, working on it. If your animation studio or school wants to schedule a workshop, contact me at edhooks@edhooks.com.

CRAFT NOTES (contains spoilers)
Up - Pixar
The new hit movie from Disney/Pixar deserves closer scrutiny than it has received from the breathlessly ecstatic mass-media critics. If you look closely, Up may represent an unfortunate paradigm shift for the legendary Pixar geniuses.

At its core Up is a powerful and shamanistic tale about the impermanence of life, the healing urgency of pursuing a dream and the gratification that can be discovered in even the simplest activities - if you are open to it. Carl's late-in-life balloon excursion to far away Paradise Falls provides the platform for the humorous and touching evolution of his relationship with 8-year- old Russell, the good-natured but hapless Wilderness Scout. This story - all by itself - is worth the price of admission, and I wish they had left it alone. The amazing thing to me is that the spine does not bend and topple over from the weight of all the colorful ornaments and half-baked supporting characters that were hung on it.

Yes, as has been widely reported, the silent montage of Carl's life with Ellie may be one of the most moving sequences ever put into an animated film. The acting is excellent, not rushed, and the animators successfully compressed important highlights (adrenaline moments) of Carl's life with Ellie into a very few minutes. It is lovely work. In an earlier and more idealistic era - say, ten or twelve years ago - Pixar's creative team would have built upon this fragile frame, protecting it like a newborn. The central story would have led organically - and logically - to sub-plots and secondary characters. Take another look at Monsters, Inc. or Toy Story II for first-rate examples of how it should be done.

Unless one is personally involved, it is impossible to second-guess what went on during the development of this or any film. I am therefore basing my comments purely upon what is on the screen. And speaking of what is on the screen, the movie is of course uniformly beautiful, and the performances are flawless. We have come to expect state-of-the-art work from Pixar, and the animators there continue to deliver, movie after movie. Up is a visual delight, but that is not the problem.

It looks to me like the creative team knew early on that it had a strong and moving story involving three likable characters, with a nice beginning and satisfying resolution. They knew there would be a wood-frame house pulled creakingly aloft by thousands of colorful helium balloons and that Paradise Falls was the destination. The poster image and main characters were set, but they needed a second act. Something had to happen to Carl and Russell along the way to dream fulfillment. In response to this challenge, they began hanging those ornaments, evidently just pulling them out of thin air.

Let's start with the talking dogs. The writers wanted to hear them talk, and so they put those leather collars on them. I could sort of accept that, if they had stuck to dog talk. But the collars also caused the dogs to change species, developing human brains and vocabularies. They conveniently revert to dog-brains whenever the plot demands it. When they are dogs, they chase balls and squirrels and respond to commands and play just like dogs do. But in this story, the dogs are more often in their human mode, flying airplanes, shooting guns at balloons, manipulating video transmissions, doing a little GPS tracking, and explaining events to one another and to the actual humans. Those are some collars! Even if you accept that the collars can give them a new brain, they still lack the kind of emotion that would generate empathy. These creatures are part dog and part one-dimensional human. Dug is the only one of them that we care about, and that is because he is an outcast and loner - like Carl and Russell.

A magical collar makes a mockery of the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. We can accept that the Pixar lamp has emotion and can hop across the table, that Woody and his fellow toys are alive and that Sully and Mike live in a parallel universe called Monsters, Inc. We can accept that a French rat aspires to be a gourmet chef. But dogs are not humans, and putting flashing collars on them will not make it so, even if the movie is animated. If you are going to assert something like this, you had better justify it.

Kevin the female bird, supposedly a missing evolutionary link of some kind, is basically a multi-colored cross between Big Bird, an ostrich and a Dodo. Fortunately, Kevin remains largely bird-like for the entire movie and doesn't start playing soccer and chess with the dogs. But the character cries out for more thoughtful development. For example, a big thing is made about Kevin's love of chocolate. Her sweet tooth is established early and emphatically because, at a crucial plot point late in the movie, Kevin will have to save the day, and she will be spurred into action by the prospect of eating some more chocolate. I'm guessing that chocolate was chosen because kids everywhere love chocolate, and Kevin is really just an overgrown kid after all. Problem is that, in the real world, chocolate is toxic for birds, as well as for cats and dogs. Also see this link. They can't eat chocolate because it can kill them. I have visions of kids around the world feeding Hershey's Kisses to their parakeets, with awful consequences. Would the Pixar team of Toy Story years have made this kind of mistake? I don't think so.

Which brings us to Charles Muntz, the movie's villain. He is introduced in early sequences as a dashing Charles Lindbergh, Indiana Jones type of guy. Young Carl and Ellie are established as his world's biggest fans. After this set up, however, the script abandons Muntz, in favor of developing Carl, Ellie and Russell. Muntz reappears one hour and seventy years later, mysteriously transformed into an Ahab in pursuit of his bird-whale (Kevin). During the intervening years, he has somehow become more than just a villain. He is a flat-out murderer, a totally despicable animal-abusing human being. Empathy for him is impossible. He is ready-made for the "Up" video game.

There is probably some movie potential in Charles Muntz. What is his dream? Has he perhaps lost the love of his life? How did he learn to make dogs think like humans? Why has it taken him sixty years to find the bird? Has he been hovering over Paradise Falls all this time? Does he play the piano? Can he dance? How come he doesn't seem to age? Carl ages from 10 to 79 years old. Muntz appears to have aged from his mid-twenties to maybe his mid-fifties during the same time frame. Is he on a special diet? Has he been wearing one of those magic collars? And, most important, what on earth happened to the guy to turn him into a monster? When he exits at the beginning of the movie, he's angry that his scientific bona fides are being challenged, but that doesn't explain such a radical personality transformation. The script leaves Muntz's transitions and development off-screen. I suppose they figured nobody would notice.

Maybe this is due to Pixar's more demanding production schedule nowadays. Maybe they just don't have the time to nurse a script the way they used to. But if Up does, in fact, indicate a paradigm shift, I hope they shift back in the other direction. Walt Disney once said, referring to his pioneering studio, "We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies." I thought Pixar was organically rooted to this philosophy and was the American version of Studio Ghibli. Somebody please tell me that I was correct.

Until next month...be safe!
"Actors are Shamans"