Ed's Newsletter - July 2003

THANKS TO MIDWAY GAMES!
We had a dynamite class at Midway Games in Chicago a couple of weeks
ago, and I want to thank the team of talented animators who turned
out for the class. A special high-five and animated applause for
Marty Murphy who carried the water and made the class happen. The
pizza was swell, guys! http://www.midway.com/

REVISED SECOND EDITION OF ACTING FOR ANIMATORS OUT MID-AUGUST
.I've added 10,000 words, a couple of new chapters and tightened and
refined what was already there. Paul Naas has created twenty-six
wonderful new illustrations plus a new cover, and I think his work is
really terrific. Take a look.

ISSAC KERLOW's very excellent book entitled "The Art of 3D Computer Animation and Effects" is being published in August in a revised Third Edition. I have had the privilege of watching Issac speak and teach on his subject and I highly recommend this book. Issac tells me that the 3rd edition contains a new chapter on VFX, an updated chapter on digital production with multiple production pipelines and info about preparing .....hold on now......demo reels! The animation chapters have been updated with a new interpretation of the traditional twelve principles of animation, an updated historical chapter and a bunch of specific suggestions about how you can improve your projects. For those of you that might not yet know Issac, he is Director of Digital Production at Disney in LA and is a longtime SIGGRAPH member. You can pre-order The Art of 3D Computer Animation and Effects via Amazon at this link.

ANIMATOR KEITH LANGO has always been incredibly generous with his time and talent. I first met him when he was one of the bright lights at Big Idea Productions, and now he is a new transplant to the hot-as-a-pistol Blur Studios in LA. Take a look at this wonderful tutorial he posted on is web site, about the use of power centers in character animation. Wow! Just marvelous stuff! All new animators should study this.
http://www.keithlango.com/powerCenter/powerCenter.htm

NEW CHARLIE CHAPLIN DVD!
The Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Great Dictator and Limelight have been remastered and restored under supervision of the Chaplin family. Costing $30 each, each movie is in a two-disc set completed with documentary extras, production notes, deleted scenes and home movies. I found a really good on-line price for the collection for only $66.24 (A $25 savings over list price). Check it out.

ED HOOKS' S UPCOMING SCHEDULE

July 18 - August 7 -- San Francisco (mainly, I'm teaching acting for stage actors on this trip to the Bay Area. If you're interested in auditing one of my stage-acting classes for free, send me an e-mail at edhooks@edhooks.com)
August 13 - August 31 -- Australia (Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney)
Brisbane public workshop
Contact John Eyley at: j.eyley@griffith.edu.au
Melbourne public workshop
Contact Andi Spark at: a.spark@vca.unimelb.edu.au
Sydney is a private class for Animal Logic.
September 15-16 - Orlando, Fla (Disney Animation, pvt class)
October 5-11 - Denver, Colorado (public class plus more)
Contact Anne-Elizabeth at: inside@centralvectors.com
October 14-15 - Ohio State University (pvt class)
November 6-9 - Cineme, Chicago's first International Animation Film Festival (http://www.Cineme.org)
November 26-29 - Swansea Animation Days, South Wales, UK - http://www.sand2003.org.uk/

CRAFT NOTES
2D, "Sinbad" and "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron"

The July 9th edition of USA Today, page 4D, ran this headline over a review of "Sinbad, Legend of the Seven Seas": OLD STYLE ANIMATION FLOUNDERS.

I'll be candid. This kind of thing really pisses me off. "Old Style" animation is NOT floundering, but headlines like that do a lot of harm to the industry. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for wags to keep saying that 2D is dying. Can anybody spell Miyazaki? Scott Bowles, the incompetent USA Today columnist responsible for these words, compared "Sinbad" to "Finding Nemo" and concluded that
the latter is a success because it is 3D and that "Sinbad" is death at the box office because it is 2D.

"Finding Nemo" is a delightful, if slightly flawed, movie. (see last month's newsletter.) It is excellent Pixar work and is by far the best of what is currently available in first-run feature animation. It should surprise nobody that it is making money. I like "Nemo" a lot, particularly that Ellen DeGeneres fish. Heh. "Sinbad", by contrast, is simply not a good movie. Its story is difficult to follow and convoluted in execution, and its central character is not empathetic. The problem, in a word, is not with 2D. If "Sinbad" were 3D, it still would flop.

"Sinbad" is a gorgeous movie to behold, which is to be expected from the top notch reamWorks/PDI animators. I sat in a Chicago theatre auditorium with only one other paying customer and was awed by the action sequences, the vistas, the mythical creatures and all the rest. The DreamWorks animators did a brilliant job on it. But you cannot animate your way to success if the foundation underneath is weak. The problem with "Sinbad" is not with the animation, but with the green light.

To wit: There is a scene in "Sinbad" in which Sinbad's ship, Chimera, is suddenly caught in a Goddess-induced ice storm. Snow and icebergs appear from nowhere, and suddenly it is very very cold outside. Kale, the muscular and foreboding First Mate, is typically bare-chested. So Sinbad says to him, "Get a shirt on before you poke someone's eye out!" The cold was making his nipples hard, you see? Jeez. This was a sniggering sexually-tinged weak line from the beginning and should have been cut somewhere along the way. DreamWorks had to spend good money animating that nonsense so that Scott Bowles in USA Today could blame it on the failure of 2D.

To wit: Sinbad is defined as a hero because, when his back is against the wall, he restrains himself for the moment from being a bastard. That, folks, is not heroism. Sinbad was dragged against his will to do something decent and good. A hero must choose to do it. A hero is a regular person who must overcome a huge obstacle to achieve a good of some kind.

DreamWorks made this same kind of mistake with "Spirt: Stallion of the Cimmaron", though that was a much better movie. As with "Sinbad", it is an extraordinarily beautiful flick to watch. The animation is jaw-dropping wonderful. The western vistas combined with the Hans Zimmer score left me breathless. I'm going to purchase the DVD just so I can once again enjoy the beauty of those wild stallions running and leaping. Wow!

Bottom line problem for "Spirit": We were looking at humans from a horse's POV, and the horse was rendered smarter than humans. A single scene encapsulates the main flaw. Remember when Spirit was
harnessed to help pull the locomotive across the mountain? He figured out that the train was bound for his homeland and decided that it was his job to thwart this kind of progress. Single-horsedly, he wrecked the train and foiled the humans. At one point, he actually played possum, pretending to be dead just long enough that the idiot humans would drag him away from the restraining harness. Give me a break! I am as willing as the next fellow to suspend my disbelief, but I was groaning when I saw this sequence.

Compare "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" to "Finding Nemo". In "Finding Nemo", the fish were also endowed with human-like intelligence, but we accepted it because their intelligence was measured in relationship to other sea creatures. In "Lion King", the animals were endowed with human-like intelligence, too, and it worked because it was in relation to other animals. The folks that conceived of "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" made a basic mistake when they put the horse in head-to-head on-screen competition with the humans and then had the horse win. It is not credible. Shakespeare advised in "Hamlet" (act III, scene 2) that we actors hold the mirror up to nature, a dictum that Walt Disney personally always followed. "Spirit" violated that rule, and so the movie consequently demanded too much of the audience. It is one thing to playfully violate the laws of physics in animation ("Ice Age", "Roadrunner", Warner Bros. animation....), but it is another thing altogether to try to sell an evolutionary paradigm that is not credible going in.

The relationship between Spirit and Rain, the gentle paint mare, worked great. The relationship between Spirit and Little Creek, the Lakota Indian, worked great mainly because the Indian was ultimately in charge of things. The relationship between Spirit and The Colonel didn't work at all, and that was what you needed in order to sell the picture. It's not the fault of lead animator Fabio Lignini. He did a wonderful job. The problem is in the basic concept. And, once again, this movie is mistaking heroism for something else. Trailers I saw suggest that Spirit is a hero and yet the horse mainly reacts to what is thrust upon him. He spends half the movie with a noose around his neck, trying to escape. He behaves in a heroic fashion only when he saves Rain from the raging river. The rest of the time, he is into self-preservation, the same as Sinbad is in his movie.

Self-preservation is not heroism.