Ed's Newsletter - December 2001

LIVING IN CHICAGO
I'll probably cry uncle when there's a foot of snow on the ground and
the blizzard winds off Lake Michigan are numbing my nose and burning
my eyes, but for now - three months into the experience - I'm a happy
camper with the Chicago weather. After living in California for twenty-five years, never experiencing real seasonal changes, I find the onset of an honest winter to be refreshing, like one of those Binaca blasts in the old 1970's commercials.. Last night, for instance, I put on my coat and gloves and went for a walk in my Lakeview neighborhood. Before I knew it, I had pushed three miles toward Wrigley Field into a cold mid-30's degree mist. I finally pulled into a cozy Moroccan restaurant on Clark Street above Belmont and let the steam from a glass of sweet mint tea warm me up. What's not to like?

COLUMBIA COLLEGE CLASSES COMING UP NEXT YEAR
Barry Young, head of animation training at Chicago's Columbia College, has asked me to teach a fifteen-week Acting for Animators class at the school, and I've agreed. We'll get underway on February 11th, meeting Fridays 9:30-12:30. Join me if you can!

BIG IDEA COMING UP, TOO
Keith Lango and the animator's at Chicago's Big Idea Productions hosted me for pizza a couple of weeks ago, and we've put it in the works to do an Acting for Animators class on site for the company sometime in January. Clearly, Big Idea is home to an immensely talented bunch of people, and I'm really looking forward to this.

ANIMATION 2002
As I mentioned last month, I'm heading for Animation 2002 in Teesside, England January 30th. It's going to be a ball hanging with the teams from Cosgrove-Hall, Aardman, Phil Tippett, Ken Beilenberg (PDI) and a bunch of others. I'm anxious to see my old friends again and to make some new ones. And, by the way, Teesside University animation teacher extraordinaire Siobhan Fenton and her husband, Ian, welcomed a new son a week ago. Everybody's healthy and happy. Congrats!

"ACTING FOR ANIMATORS" IN FOURTH PRINTING
Many thanks to all that have bought and read my book "Acting for Animators". (Heinemann 2001) The book is in its fourth printing already, and I am totally thrilled about it.

VAN GOGH AND GAUGIN: STUDIO OF THE SOUTH
"Van Gogh and Gaugin: The Studio of the South", on display at Chicago's Art Institute now through January 13th, is a theatrical and loving tribute to a tempestuous relationship between two of the world's great artists, and it is simply not to be missed. These men spent a short ninety days together in 1888, sharing models and lodging in a small yellow house in Arles, France, and the experience changed each of them and their art forever. Paintings from the period include many with sunflowers, symbols with complex emotional meaning. Their paintings are displayed here side by side, a perspective that makes clear immediately how different these two geniuses were, and how they were the same. Their time in Arles ended
after a huge fight erupted and Van Gogh severed a piece of his ear.
Horrified, Gaugin beat a hasty retreat from the town, and Van Gogh
went into the hospital. They never saw one another again, but they stayed in touch through letters and, more important, they continued to paint, each of them trying to distill what happened in Arles. Van Gogh lived a few years more and committed suicide. Gaugin outlived him by sixteen years. Both of Van Gogh's Starry Night paintings are included in the exhibit, together for the first time since 1905. The first was painted before Gaugin arrived in Arles and is very precise, the sky as painted from direct observation. He painted the second, more famous Starry Night while he was hospitalized. This is the one you have probably seen most, with the swirls of color in the sky. He did it that way because he was trying to paint like Gaugin, more spiritually and from imagination rather than from pure direct observation. But it was the very last painting in the exhibit that just about brought me to my knees. It is "Sunflowers on an Armchair"
(1901) by Gaugin and is clearly a tribute to Van Gogh. It was, significantly, the final painting of his life. The subject is a simple wooden chair, on which rests a bouquet of sun flowers. The show's curator, Douglas Druick, posted over this painting a quote by Van Gogh. "...and sunflowers mean also ... gratitude."

Van Gogh and Gaugin: The Studio of the South is a must-see.

CRAFT NOTES

"MONSTERS, INC"

The first thing that impressed me about "Monsters, Inc", the new Pixar hit, was how fully fleshed out are the characters. A key to establishing a sense of empathy in an audience is to create believable life on screen. That means that the characters have to have survival mechanisms, and the audience needs to be able to relate to them. In Brad Bird's "The Iron Giant", for example, the first time we see the Giant, he is trying to find food because he is hungry. He isn't just a big mechanical guy; he is a primal, hungry and fallible mechanical guy. We instantly feel that we know him. Similarly, in "Monsters, Inc", we quickly discover that the monsters must work for a living, collecting screams from children, and we find out that Mike Wazowski, Sulley's one-eyed scare assistant, is in love
with the receptionist, a lovely serpent-haired lady who also has only one eye. (Did you notice that Mike wears a giant contact lens on that eye, by the way? Very nice character element!) Work and love, two essential elements of life, are thus handed up to us within the first ten minutes of the film, and it is clear that this movie is going to work on an empathic level.

Acting-wise, the characters in "Monsters, Inc." are consistently excellent. The scene in the frozen tundra between Sulley and Mike Wazowski demonstrates particularly good and subtle acting, I think. The least satisfying character in the film for me was the little human girl, Boo; but then hey, the kid is just out of diapers. In fairness, there hasn't been much opportunity for her to develop a personality, and her unpredictable behavior is part of her charm. Sulley is a green and purple furry Jackie Gleason of a monster, a likable working class kind of guy who takes pride in being the Numero Uno scream collector. It would have been nice if he, like his sidekick Mike, had a romantic aspect. I don't know why the writers opted to make him asexual, but it appears to be a conceptual choice. Sulley is more like a Burt or Ernie Sesame Street character than any of the others in this film. By contrast, his nemesis, Randall Boggs, exudes an oily, if not overt, sexuality, and I think this makes him a slightly stronger character. You can imagine Randall hitting on babes in a bar, but Sulley presumably just goes home at the end of the day and takes a warm bath.

A SCENE IS A NEGOTIATION

A scene must contain conflict, an obstacle, in order to be theatrically satisfying. There are only three kinds of possible conflict: (1) Conflict between a character and himself; (2) conflict between two characters and (3) conflict with the situation. At least one of those must be there 100 percent of the time, and you can have more than one at a time. In "Monster, Inc.", they never dropped the ball, but they got maybe too much mileage mid-movie out of having conflict with the situation. After Boo has been in the scare factory for five minutes or so, the action gets into a pretty extended hide-and-seek format. Sully is in conflict with his situation. That is fine and good but after a while, I found myself longing for the introduction of more conflict. I shifted my focus at that point away from the characterizations and onto the technical aspects of the
movie, checking out backgrounds and mechanical stuff. Lord knows there were plenty of wonderful technical aspects to the film, so I wasn't bored, but it is maybe significant that character tension was not the thing holding my attention mid-movie. I was fascinated instead with the door-chase sequence, frankly amazed at the virtuosity of the animators who made it happen. I was dazzled by the bells and whistles in other words, not by empathy for the characters.

Henry J. Waternoose, the CEO of Monsters, Inc, is straight out of Central Casting, the perfect stuffy non-feeling factory boss. He reminded me of the factory boss in Chaplin's "Modern Times". I'm betting he's a Republican and sold his shares in Enron before the crash.

ACADEMY AWARD?
As everybody knows by now, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences has established a new category for animated films this year.
The race is between "Shrek" and "Monsters, Inc." Looking into the tealeaves, I'm predicting a win for "Shrek", not because the movie is more technically excellent than "Monsters, Inc.". It isn't. But because it contains more in-jokes, and Academy Awards are voted on by Hollywood insiders. All that backstabbing anti-Disney humor in "Shrek" is going to resonate with the voters, I suspect.

Probably, it doesn't matter which movie wins. We're fortunate to have two such brilliant films emerge within the same year. Between them, they set a new high standard for animation technical excellence, and the acting is getting better all the time. For my money, neither "Shrek" nor "Monsters, Inc." is as emotionally satisfying as was "The Iron Giant", but then maybe I expect too much by holding that film as gauge. Perfection is after all perfection.