Ed's Newsletter - January 2001 "ACTING FOR ANIMATORS" (Heinemann, $18.95) is available at Amazon.Com for $15.16 plus postage. Here is the world's longest link, directly to the Amazon.page for the book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0325002290/ edhookstheatrica/102-0411243-7806530 LOOKING FORWARD TO ENGLAND FEBRUARY 1-3! I will be teaching and speaking at Animation 2001 in Middlesbrough which is in the NE of England. The event is sponsored by the University of Teeside, and I am excited about this opportunity to meet Ray Harryhausen who will also be there. I'm a fan! For information about Animation 2001, visit the web site at http://www.animationex.co.uk/ and contact event Director, Siobhan Fenton. Her e-mail is s.m.fenton@tees.ac.uk . THE NEXT ACTING FOR ANIMATORS WORKSHOP IN SAN FRANCISCO WILL BE JAN. 20th There is space available in the class which meets 10am - 5pm at my San Francisco studio. The tuition is $125. In this class, we cover the main principles of acting theory and discuss connections between thinking, emotion and physical action. I show clips from various live action films to illustrate principles, and we get some people up to do some fun improvisations. (Shifting power centers, master/slave status transactions). If you're in the Bay Area, I hope you can join me. For more info, drop a note to edhooks@edhooks.com. CRAFT NOTES "The Emporer's New Groove" Animators, even the best of them, can only work with what they are given, and in Disney's new film "The Emperor's New Groove", they were dealt a weak hand. In a nutshell, the strongest character in the movie is Yzma, voice-acted beautifully by Eartha Kitt. The weakest character is the theoretical lead, Kuzco, voice-acted satisfactorally by David Spade. The story itself is the cinematic equivalent of that old card game Fifty-Two Pick Up. Let's stick to acting considerations for a minute, this being an Acting for Animators newsletter. A basic premise of acting is that a character needs to play an action to overcome an obstacle in pursuit of an objective. If the character being animated lacks an objective, the animators are bound to have trouble. In "The Emperor's New Groove", Yzma has a clear objective: She wants to kill Kuzco and take over his throne. Kuzco, by contrast, has no objective beyond his own immediate physical pleasure and survival. He has no grander vision than to build a summer retreat on a nearby mountain top, a construction job that will dislocate the entire peasant population of the mountain. In a word, Kuzco is a jerk, a wuss, the kind of person you immediately want to have nothing whatever to do with. And he is the main character! In fact, at one point in the movie, when the the story is meandering, Kuzco stick his head into the screen and tells the audience, "Wait a minute, this is MY story!" Yes it is, and therein lies the problem for the animators. How would you define a Hero? To me, a hero is an ordinary person who must act to overcome an extraordinary villain or terrible situation. Alfred Hitchcock was masterful at establishing the hero. A hero is a guy who goes out to catch the subway to go to work and, next thing he knows, he's running from -- and chasing -- the bad guys across the face of Mount Rushmore. A hero is Hogarth Hughes in Brad Bird's classic, "The Iron Giant". A Villain is an ordinary person that has a fatal flaw. Cruela da vil, the Evil Queen in "Snow White" and Yzma are much alike in some ways and make marvelous villains. All of them are vain. While watching "The Emperor's New Groove", I broke into a big grin when Yzma was interruped during her sleep, sitting up to disclose that she had placed cucumber slices on her eyes. Or maybe they were potato slices. Whatever they were, they were intended to make her look younger, to remove the puffiness of age from her face, and it was a terrific character element. Yzma is a person who desparately needs power, to the degree that she will happily kill and risk her own life to get it. Vanity is her flaw. My heart goes out to the animators who worked on the character of Kuzco. They had to spend years in very unpleasant company, doing the best they could. They could only have him go from antic pose to antic pose, silly short-term self-serving moment to silly short-term self-serving moment. There was no opportunity for nuance or depth. Given what they had to work with, they did a wonderful job. The animation craftmanship is the definition of excellence. The pity is that such talent was not put to the service of a worthy story and a hero of consequence. Supporting characters in "The Emperor's New Groove" are successful. I particularly liked the dunder-headed second banana Kronk, voice-acted by Patrick Warburton. His scenes with Yzma are delightful and laugh-out-loud funny. You wish the two of them would have their own movie. The acting for Kronk is quite good. The trick to playing a character that is not smart is to remember that the character thinks he IS smart! There is nothing much funnier than a stupid person that thinks he is being clever, and this is the line that Warburton and the character's animators walk continuously. Very, very well done Word is that "The Emperor's New Groove" almost didn't get made at all. The movie began life as "Kingdom of the Sun" and collapsed of its own weight. Too many plot lines and not enough focus is what I hear. The producers were already $30 million into it, however, so they salvaged what they could, pumped in an additional $50 milliion, re-did the music and, voila! "The Emperor's New Groove". Disney is not alone in its effort to hang a big story on a weak lead. DreamWorks made the same mistake last year with "The Road to El Dorado", which featured un-empathetic, unlikeable, selfish, abrasive lead characters. One has to wonder how, with so much money at stake, development errors can be made at such an basic level. When you begin pre-production on a movie, you should have a worthwhile story to tell. Otherwise, why bother? Why spend all that money? Could it be that the contemporary Hollywood ethic simply does not see the necessity for a strong story? Could it be that execs like Michael Eisner figure if you throw enough animated bells and whistles at the screen and buy enough advertising, you can escape with no story to tell? I am certain that neither "The Emperor's New Groove" nor "The Road to El Dorado" will make as much money as they would if they had strong lead characters with clear objectives. The simple truth -- one that goes all the way back to ancient Greece -- is that you cannot build a house that will stand and be admired if you do not begin with a strong blueprint.