Ed's Newsletter - June 2003

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

CHRIS ROBINSON WRITES DEFINITIVE BOOK ON ESTONIAN ANIMATION
Okay, let's have a pop quiz: Where in the world is Estonia? No fair peeking. Give up? It's a country of 1.5 million located west of Russia, north of Latvia and bordering the Baltic Sea. It is also home to some very interesting animation, and Chris Robinson will explain it all for you in his new book "Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy" which is to be published imminently by Varrak Publishing. Robinson is the imminently capable Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and it turns out that he's a scholar of sorts, too. For sure, he is filling in a blank in animation history with this effort. It looks to me like a must-have on your shelf. For sure, they'll they selling it at Animation World Network (http://www.awn.com) and at the Ottawa Animation Festival (info@animationfestival.ca) itself, so you can start your search by checking at those two places. Sorry, I don't have a cover price on this one yet.

ED HOOKS' S UPCOMING SCHEDULE
June 19 - Graduation speaker, Art Institute of Illinois (Shaumberg)
June or July - Edmonton, Canada (working on it)
July 18 - August 7 -- San Francisco (I'm teaching some stage acting in SF and Mountain View and am available to teach Acting for Animators. If you want me to visit your shop, lemme know. )
August 13 - Sept. 13 (approx) -- Australia and Malaysia
October 5-11 - Denver, Colorado (public class plus more)
November 6-9 - Cineme, Chicago's first International Animation Film Festival (http://www.Cineme.org)
November 26-29 - South Wales - UK (SAND '03)

CRAFT NOTES
"Finding Nemo "

The first thing up on the screen was the trailer for DreamWork's upcoming "Sinbad, Legend of the Seven Seas". It appears to be another one of those animated movies set in a long-ago era ("The Arabian Nights") in which the characters talk like hip skateboarders. I'm not a big fan of this sort of cross-era dialogue. If they are going to make a movie about Sinbad, I would prefer that they make an effort not to be overly cool. But that's just me. The execs at DreamWorks know what they're doing, and the animation itself looked awesom in the trailer.

The next trailer to come up was for Pixar's "The Incredibles". The single scene previewed from this much anticipated Brad Bird ("The Iron Giant") film cracked up the Chicago audience that had come to see "Finding Nemo". Full tilt empathetic belly laughs filled the auditorium as the super-hero dad in the promotional clip tried in vain to fit his growing belly into his too-tight super-hero body suit. It is only a pity that this movie will evidently not be released until November 2004. That is a very long time to wait.

Then came a Pixar short, entitled -- I forget -- It was a cute piece that was made several years before "Toy Story" and boasted a list of production credits that included many famous artists, starting with John Lasseter himself. The entertainment value was mainly that it was made so long ago and still holds up. I was duly impressed at how far we have come with CG, but I'm not exactly sure why Pixar decided to include it with "Finding Nemo" to be honest. I'd just about as soon have seen the birds on the telephone wires again.

Finally we got to the main feature, "Finding Nemo", which was written and directed by Pixar mega-talent and studio mainstay Andrew Stanton. I'm a fan of Stanton's work generally. He has displayed a strong voice -- sometimes as a writer, occasionally as an actor, now as a director -- in some of my favorite animated movies. "Finding Nemo" is pretty much his show, top to bottom, and I think he did a good job, but this movie still falls a bit short of being a classic.

The movie features some wonderfully personable characters and has some laugh-out-loud moments, but it also has some of the same kind of plot structure problems I saw in "A Bug's Life". A lot of the development is in the secondary characters, and there was some vagueness in who is the hero and who is the villain.

The acting was excellent of course, which is par for Pixar and was to be expected. The animation technology on the screen simply can't be beat. The underwater action and use of color is amazing. Stanton's team at Pixar is composed of many animation geniuses though. Excellence from them does not surprise me any more any more than seeing another incredible painting from Van Gogh or Michelangelo would.

For me, the strongest and most entertaining character was Dory, the absent-minded fish voiced brilliantly by Ellen DeGeneres. Dory suffers from short-term memory loss, which I think is a brilliant and fruitful character device. She managed to good-naturedly screw things up continually, and I laughed out loud every time she did it. I swear I have known people like her.<g>

"Finding Nemo" doesn't really have a classical villain. (My definition: A villain is a regular person with a fatal flaw. Cruela da vil was a good example.). I think Stanton et al intended that the sharks be the villain(s), and there are a couple of funny scenes in which they try to break their fish-eating habit in a 12-step, quasi AA program. But that's what fish do. They eat other fish. This behavior is not a fatal flaw and does not make a villain. It is a cute bit, but it doesn't balance the plot, in my opinion.

Mind you, it is not absolutely imperative that a movie have an in-the-flesh villain. I would say it is desireable but not 100 percent essential. Tom Hanks, for example, didn't confront a villain in "Cast Away". He was in conflict with his situation, and that was sufficient. In Greek drama, Oedipus is in conflict with his situation. Hogarth in "The Iron Giant" does battle with Kent Mansley, a wonderful villain. Snow White had the Evil Queen. "Monsters, Incorporated" had a terrific villain in it. "Spirited Away" had Yubaba and her giant baby continually trying to thwart Chihiro. Michael Dudok deWit's marvelous animated Academy Award winning short "Father and Daughter" doesn't have an in-person villain.

(I'd be interested in hearing from my readers about this. I'd like to assemble a list of movies that don't have villains.)

But the villain issue aside, I didn't know whose story this is supposed to be. I presume it is Marlin's story. But if Marlin is the main character, is he also the hero? And if he is the hero, then what does he do that is so heroic? Overcome his fear of the ocean? Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say that is the answer. If so, we still have a plot/development problem in my opinion because, after he overcomes his fear of the ocean, he still is not the one that saves the day. Marlin does not save Nemo. Ultimately, Nemo is saved by the other fish in the dental office acquarium via a cock-eyed and highly improbable escape plan. This plot element reminded me somewhat of the way the secondary characters in "A Bug's Life" developed into heroes.

Let me amplify some: The basic idea of the movie is that Marlin, the father clown fish, tries to rescue his only son, Nemo, who has become trapped in a dentist-office aquarium in Sydney Australia. Before he can do that though, the other trapped fish in the aquarium come up with a plan for freeing Nemo. The big plan is that since all dental office water ultimately drains back into the ocean, it is only necessary to get Nemo into an outlet, and he'll be returned to the ocean. Yeah, okay. But what does this have to do with Marlin and his overcoming his fear of the ocean? In other words, I'm having trouble making the pieces of the plot puzzle fit together into a satisfying whole. I saw a lot of wonderful animation on the screen and colors vibrant enough to make a rainbow proud but, in a story sense, I had to sort of squint to make the movie work.

The part of the movie that made me the most emoitonal was at the end, after the action was over. Pixar and Andrew Stanton dedicated "Finding Nemo" to Glenn McQueen. Sigh.... I don't know if he worked on this personally, but seeing his name on the screen once again was touching and appropriate. I applaud Pixar execs for adding this touch, which I am sure very few moviegoers will appreciate. It was the right thing to do.

And there you have it. I wish I could give an unqualified rave to this flick, but I can't. I hope my friends at Pixar and Disney will still be talking to me after this because I intend my notes to be helpful. Speaking strictly as an acting teacher, I thought the acting in the movie was excellent, top to bottom. When Marlin or Nemo would weep, they tried not to, which is correct acting-wise. I laughed at the sharks as they fought against their natural impulse to eat fish, and Dory's attempts to remember what she forgot moments ago never failed to make me chuckle. Michael Chekhov's Psychological gesture was a moot point here because these were fish, not humans, and there was not a lot of room for psychological gesture. Facial animation was excellent, especially the eyes of the various characters. Use of atmosphere to affect character behavior was good. The characters were well thought out and cleverly rendered. And as is typical for Pixar, "Finding Nemo" is a story-first, merchandising-second movie effort, which I like. We don't have enough of those anymore.