Rule Change

Even if you don't care much about awards, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' clarification of animation eligibility is interesting.

image from HERE

The first is simple and obvious:

In the Animated Feature Film category, the rule governing running time for a motion picture to qualify was changed from at least 70 minutes to greater than 40 minutes, which is consistent with the running time requirements for feature films in all other categories.

This will affect two things.

First, it will make more films eligible for the nomination, thereby making it almost certain to have 5 nominees over the usual 3.   The two additional slots will allow for films which might otherwise get overlooked to benefit from the publicity of the nomination.

The Oscar nomination helped "Secret of Kells" box office in the US, and it only stands to reason that other smaller films would get a boost as well.  "My Dog Tulip" or "Idiots and Angels" were both worthy contenders that got the short shrift by the short list.

Second, it weighs in favor of independent films.  Dreamworks, Disney and the other big studios will  be releasing at least one 85 minute animated film every year.  They don't even consider any under 70 minutes.  Independent animators -40 minutes -that's a feasible  accomplishment. 

The other significant change regards motion capture:

An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture...in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time.

This is a statement of the obvious, in my opinion, and I'm glad someone with credentials has put this on the record.

It's not a value judgment on motion capture, but a clarification of what should be a widely known Funk & Wagnall's definition of animation.

The disqualification of a Robert Zemekis film or two will be more than offset by the newly eligible shorter feature.

Mr. Sorry

Yesterday I learned of the passing of my favorite college teacher, Jean Le Courbeiller.  He was, ostensibly, a science and mathematics teacher at a college which didn't even have a science section in the library (one could concentrate in "Mind, Nature and Values" if they wanted to try bucking the system).

I still recount his story of growing up on Isle de la Cite in the middle of the Seine.

One day, when he 8 or 9, he bicycled in the rain to his girlfriend's apartment.  There was often a man standing in lobby and today the man asked him about the rain. "It's raining, yes."  "Oh yes, it's raining."  "It's raining hard, isn't it?"  "Very."   The conversation was interrupted by the girl's mother who came yelling at him for coming out in such foul weather.

The man was asking about the rain because he was blind.  A few years later young Jean learned that the man was not just blind, but his young sweetheart's neighbor was James Joyce.

You can master language, and still lose something we all take for granted.

In one of his classes he remarked that Isaac Newton was the last man on earth who could possibly know all there was to know.  Newton, being the smartest man of his age, might well have known all the science and math and history and literature that [Western] Civilization contained at that moment.

Even in a field as limited as animation, I'm learning new things all the time.  Things other people already know.

I didn't know, for instance, that the Korean Academy of Film Arts produced a feature length collaborative project as a senior thesis.  Actually, I may have heard that and forgot -which goes to another point from Jean: learning is re-learning.

It's questionable to put students to work on such an endeavor.  The school is there to further the progress of the students, not the other way around.   There are benefits to the students, sure, but that doesn't ameliorate the lapse of ethics on the part of the school.

The Korean Cultural Society presented a screening of The Story of Mr. Sorry last night at the Tribeca Film Center.  This collaborative graduation effort kicks off a series of four free screenings of animated Korean features.

The film itself is interesting and hangs together very well for a work with five credited directors.  We're not privy to the actual hierarchy of artists, so I suspect there was one lead voice with vocal contributions from the others.



Watch The Story of Mr. Sorry Korean Movie Trailer in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The animation isn't particularly special. It's primarily the sophisticated cutouts we've become accustomed to seeing.

The design is sometimes nice.

The narrative, based on novel, is just slightly off in that Korean Cinema way to keep it from being completely fulfilling. It's as though they've digested American film, try to recreate it, but come up with something strangely similar but vastly different.

In his course "Four Ways of Doing Astronomy", I learned from Jean le Corbeiller that the Sumerians looked to the horizon for their astronomy. All their science, all their mathematics -like the 360 degrees in a circle -derived from calculating the relationship of the stars to the visible edge of the earth.

These days our astronomy is almost completely mathematical. There's little observation with the human eye. Data is collected through non-ocular telescopes, decoded and translated into information we can understand.

Neither method is better than the other.  They just respond to the differing needs of the cultures that support them. 

Back From Mars

Some of the acting is pretty bad. A lot of the dialogue flat and wooden. Sometimes the design and graphics border on grotesque.  But sometimes the design and graphics are sublimely beautiful and despite the sometimes weak moments of copy the script is structurally solid and incorporates enough not-too-bizarre outlandishness (like a swaggering Kinky Friedman as President) buoy any occasional banal banter.  The music is also first rate and perfectly balanced with the picture.

Geoff Marslett's "Mars" is an unconventional, rewarding and thoroughly likable film.

It will be playing at the ReRun Theater in DUMBO until Thursday.  The room itself is comparable to the film.  You step and think -oh, this is just some shitty room in the back of a bar -but it transforms into a warm, friendly place (a bit of Brecht with a full bar in the theater).  The projection is good -1080p and flawless screen -the seating comfortable, settling in quickly as a nice place.

Technique-wise it's a mix of animation with processed video.  The performers are chroma keyed and processed using a software the director wrote, the environments are animated and the mouths and eyes are essentially rotoscoped.

The comparisons to Bob Sabiston's work with Richard Linklatter (and especially Linklatter's "A Scanner Darkly") are natural.  Artist developed software applied to feature in Austin.  Simple headline.

There's a deeper connection, too.  The Linklatter films a mature expressions of an alternative possibility for single frame filmmaking.  They're grand scale experiments in technique.

Where those films sometimes fall short is one of the great problems with animation -empathy.   Animation has a hard time connecting on a character to character level.  The technique is so effective with children, in part, because children have a greater capacity to personally connect with inanimate (though animated) objects.  The more live experience we get, the more we are compelled to find personal connection on screen.

"Waking Life" concertedly pushes the viewer from this personal connection through it's episodic, non-linear narrative.  This intentional conceit -and the general novelty of the visuals -carried the picture without relying on the audience connecting with any of the faces on screen.

Lack of empathy was a real problem in "A Scanner Darkly".  I still feel this is amongst the most important animated films since "Snow White", but it still is saddled with that frame-by-frame verfremdungseffekt inherent in the technique.

The process in "Mars" thins the barrier between human and cartoon -so those layers of paint which cover the faces in "A Scanner Darkly" are more like rose colored glasses.

 
Like "A Scanner Darkly" -even moreso, and most importantly for filmmakers everywhere -this technique was the most efficient, cost effective way of telling this story in a compelling fashion.  By designing this world, the spaceships, the Martian landscapes, the robots and the real world all blended seamless with the characters.  In order to present that level of production with standard live action or full animation techniques would have required 100 times the production budget and maybe still fallen short of the results.


Why make a film in this manner?  It seems like there was no better to tell the story.

The quibbles I mentioned are minor nitpicks, most likely the results of production demands.  They're easily overlooked in such an enjoyable piece of work.

One thing does bother, though.  It's a love story, but we don't see the action of falling in love.  One of the reasons I find Brent Green's "Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then" so touching is that it shows the moments that made the two characters connect and the central theme of the film flowed from the results of those moments.  Here we're shown episodes of starbound lovers gradually moving closer together but never that time in between when we would see why they bonded.  Those episodes are nicely handled and compelling in themselves, that's why it would have been interesting to have been party to the mechanism and not simply the results.

Love stories all come back to "Romeo and Juliet".  Romeo and Juliet's families were killing one another, that's what was keeping them apart.  Pretty serious.  Too often we see romances on film where there are no real barriers to the couple getting together.   There were some barriers to be overcome in this relationship and I think the film would have benefited from exploring those a bit more.
 

Like Bill Plympton's features, Nina Paley's "Sita Sings the Blues", even Paul Fierlinger's long form work the mere existence of "Mars" is a feat for the process of animation.  Like those artists' work, this may not have the seemingly universal appeal of "Toy Story 3" or "Tangled" but it has the personal touch of an individual thinker.  It has something to tell us, anyone who cares about film, animation, art or just being human should make every effort to drop the $5 and find out what.

Diary

Marco de Blois just posted this on Facebook.

The trailer to Theodore Ushev's "Lipsett Diaries" written by Chris Robinson.



Holy cow, it looks beautiful.

The Head

Here's an interesting little film I just came across.



The film part ain't so hot, but the design is outstanding and the animation and music are pretty good.

Design by Matias Vigliano
Animation by Dante Zaballa
Sound by Ariel Gandolfo

See This! Somehow!

First order of business.

We've decided to start using our Twitter account. twitter.com/asteriskpix

Not exactly sure how yet, since animation is a pretty stationary profession. Probably just "breaking news" like when films screen or shows or broadcast. Maybe some winning one-liners from around the studio such "Stupid kid, there's no such thing as a penguin version of Candyland."

We figure it puts us in position for a profile the next time someone wants to do a media story on social networking.



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On Sunday, Kristin Worrall took me to see "Flooding with Love for the Kid" at Anthology Film Archives.

Apart from the sound effects she contributed -usually via email conversations "I need the sound of crawling in bat shit on the floor of a cave." -the entire piece was singlehandedly made by Zachary Oberzan. I guess the men and women who built the equipment and wrote the software helped in their own way too.

And the guys who constructed his 220 square foot apartment.

The film is an adaptation of "First Blood" -the novel which also spawned the Stallone "Rambo" series.

Nina Paley was amongst the first people to whom I recommended the film. The DIYness is analogous to "Sita Sings The Blues", although significantly less polished. She didn't hate it, in fact, she wrote a nice little blog post which reminded me that I wanted to do the same.

Here's a "making of" video:





So in my blogging laziness, the run at Anthology has ended.

Copies are available from Zach himself.

"I like to funny drawings", you say, "What does this guy taping around naked in his apartment have to do with me?!?" Legitimate question.

In the above "interview" -and obvious in the movie itself- he talks about how in his first short films he aimed for slickness. For professional perfection. Here, he says, he was having so much fun that perfection wasn't a goal. The joy is apparent.

In using minimal tools and resources, he make a connection to the character of Rambo who also had no resources beyond his own ingenuity. He created a language of filmmaking to match and elevate the content.

Its a brilliant example of what Richard Williams calls "sophisticated use of the basics".

************

Speaking of Nina, she stars in this short documentary on Intellectual Property. Bill Plympton is makes an appearance to briefly give another point of view.

The Revolution Will Be Animated from Marine Lormant Sebag on Vimeo.

I don't hold her militant position, but I do think that American Copyright law needs some serious reform.

These Anarchists Mainly Drink Beer

Once the E-Z post 9/11 credit dried up and very few were willing to drop a million plus on an ugly condo two stops from Manhattan, all the Bloomberg re-zoning East of the Hudson (and all of his horses and men, to boot) couldn't finish all the construction begun in the era of low interest rates.

Two years ago I counted seven (7) construction sites on my direct walk to the L train.  All 7 were confined to the three blocks between Borinquen and Metropolitan -formerly zoned as industrial.  If we were to expand our count by a single block East to Union Avenue, this span would have recorded an additional four or five building sites.

Today I noticed an "open house" at one nearest to the subway.  The construction remains in progress.  Only one site is actually housing residents, that opened several months ago and still seems at partial capacity.

The positive to this positive waste (no, not the Pyrrhic victory of desolation over greed) is the permanent reminder wheatpasted to a "post no bills" wall.

I hope these posters for "Persepolis" stay up forever.  It's going on two years since they first appeared.  The cat walk construction has protected them from the elements, so they remain pretty well preserved.

It happens the film also screened on cable last night.

The film holds up after two years.  No screening could compare to the impact of the first, when I watched it sitting next to two children of Iranian parents who's sisters, cousins, aunts, and mothers shared the story.  Out of that context it remains a powerful film -and one of the few instances when the animation design exceeds the illustration of the original comic book.

The animation itself is nothing special -on the level of well made TV special, but the gesture drawings are especially effective.  An illustrator can often do with one drawing what an animator needs dozens to convey.

Expectations

My Dog Tulip screened in Ottawa.  I was a little disappointed.  This was no Still Life With Animated Dogs or Drawn From Memory -Paul Fierlinger's masterpieces.  Where was the personal revelation?  Where was that halting voice?

It didn't help that a festival setting caters to quick and the flashy, and that I get particularly waterlogged after two or three days of non-stop screenings.

Film Forum hosted a special screening of the film last night.

The personal revelation may be dialed back in this film, and the narrator may not speak with Fierlinger's accent and his words may be purple but the voice is clearly his.

The format is in line with many of Fierlinger's films -first person narratives.

Going in, I was expecting this film to be something it wasn't.   On second viewing, it's a beautiful meditation on love and companionship.  I wonder what it will be the third time.

Let Me Write That Again

Expectations are important in film.

A film must set and meet (and hopefully exceed) expectations in the viewer.

Conversely, pre-conceived expectations in the viewer typically do disservice to the film.
 

Wes Anderson has been a leading figure in a Cinema of the Leisure Class.  His films from "Bottle Rocket" to "Darjeeling Limited" celebrate priviledged parties in a world with little consequences while showcasing the director's really cool record collection.  The result -films that are generally enjoyable, though not particularly likable.  Like the kid with easy good looks, quick wit, and a nice car who can never remember your name.

"Fantastic Mr. Fox" uses almost all of Anderson's tropes -characters staring blankly into camera, cool pop soundtrack (primarily Beach Boys here), smarter than you leads.  Missing is the overcranked slow motion shots -thankfully, (once is cute, twice is pushing it, three times is just garbage).

The technique, a Rankin Bass style stop motion, recalls the backyard home movies budding filmmakers create with their action figures and dolls.  The glossy film school gimmicks of "Rushmore" are in the distance.

What does this all add up to?  "Fantastic Mr. Fox" is a remarkable achievement.  The peculiarities of the technique reign in the director's indulgences.  The director's "auteur" vision opens previously uncharted territory for films that use animation.

I've heard some animators complain about Wes Anderson rarely visiting the shooting set.  I suspect these are either amateurs or pixel pushing cubicle monkeys with little experience working with creative animators.  Animators don't need a director looking over their shoulders eight hours a day, they need a person to tell them what needs to be done and give them the space to do it.

And, really, the proof is in the results.  The animation, under the supervision of Mark Gustafson (who, if I recall correctly, was a big cog in the Will Vinton machine) is exceptional.  Compare to the overwrought flourishes of "Coraline" which moves around so much but says so little, the idiosyncracies of the animation in "Fantastic Mr. Fox" are not simply hurky-jerky but statements of purpose.  The animation reveals truths about the characters.

Let me write that again.  In "Fantastic Mr. Fox", the animation reveals truths about the characters.

When the foxes eat, they sit down properly, tuck in their napkins then voraciously devour their food leaving a mess of flotsam and crumbs.  It's funny.  It's simple, goofy animation.  It's a pure gesture that reminds us -they're wild animals.

If he releases another film like this Wes Anderson may vie with Richard Linklater for the best director of animated films working today.

Meatball

The first thing I consider when discuss film and other arts: do I like it?

That's the starting point. Plenty of questions follow, leading with "why?" or "why not?"

On "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs", the immediate answer to "why?" is because I have a personal connection. The book was an important part of my early development, shared time with my father and mother. Further, I've had the great fortune of working with Ron Barrett, the illustrator, and know him as a generous and gifted person who deserves enormous success.

So I want the movie to do well. That's a start.

Past that personal connection, there's the material itself. Art resonates either intellectually or emotionally. Emotionally is easier. Intellectually is more rewarding. For me, the picture appeals to both.

Without going into the character development which makes "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs", the film, connect on an emotional level -I'd like to make a note on the character design and animation.

Pixar is the gold standard for 3D character animation, yet I've always felt their films lacked something in the animation department. Like "the illusion of life" transformed from one lesson amongst many to a universal obsession. The animation in "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs" may not have the sheen of "Toy Story 2" or "Up" but it has something greater -character.

There's a great shot of the main character running down a hallway. His limbs flail and barely touch the ground. He moves like a muppet, like a well controlled marionette. To me, it's very satisfying animation. Without mimicking reality, without aping the broad stage acting of later Disney productions -the animation team did something interesting and original that works.

The design (like all big budget design these days) is 1950s inspired. It's become a thoroughly tired cliché in animation. The puppet-like nature of the characters and the richness of the background design make them work. They become cartoons, in a good sense.

The end titles illustrate the visual bankruptcy that "neo-retro" has become. The deftness and light of the CG creations is vulgar and cheap in the 2D end sequence. One less "D" but completely overwrought.

Lord's Day

I trust you're checking the weather reports and brief news bits before Mass this Sunday, and that's how you've wound up here.

After service ask your preacher if it would count towards your attendance record if you skipped next week to watch "The Light of the World", the feature film epic from Jack T. Chick (best known for his comic book style tracts).

"The Light of the World" is referred to as an "80 minute film without live action."



It's 80 minutes of pan and scan, fire and brimstone. While the theology behind the script is ill-read and possibly dangerous, the artwork is great. Great in the way superhero comics are "great", or Frazzetta. But "better" than Marvel action men, in my opinion.

Nicholas Cage Eats Just Like Everybody Else

Remember this?

This is where I met "Spyro Gyro". Enlarge and look closely at the parking meter, you'll see one of these.

New York City Film Permit

A few weeks back "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" trashed Times Square, last night they brought the wrecking crew to my neighborhood.

Nicholas Cage Eats Just Like Everybody Else.

Several blocks were closed off. It looks like they were shooting on the JMZ platform at Marcy Avenue.

Filming happened at night, so they had to make their own sun.

One of several banks of lights on cranes

The shoot even took over the church for a holding room/cafeteria.

Holy Communion