incredible
I saw The Incredibles the other day, and I don’t think I need to tell you that Pixar has another hit on its hands. It’s everything you’ve come to expect from Steve Job’s little animation house: well written, brilliantly rendered, and hugely entertaining. The hilarious superhero fashion maven Edna Mode, voiced by writer/director Brad Bird, manages to completely steal the show. How can someone so voraciously fabulous be packaged into such a small frame?
Have I ever mentioned how much I love computer generated imagery? How it used to be a huge hobby of mine? How I still keep up with the latest innovations in the field? Well, here we go.
Every time Pixar releases another smash hit the old debate crops up again. Is traditional animation dead? A quick glance at Japan reveals that the answer is a definite no. Traditional 2D animation can be beautiful and inspiring, but lately it seems inspiration has been in short supply around the water coolers of the 2D studios. Pixar’s greatest strength has always been its meticulous attention to great story. It certainly helps that they just happen to pick stories that naturally lend themselves to 3D animation, but the technology is always employed in service of the story, never the other way around. It’s not that recent 2D bombs like Treasure Planet, Spirit: Legend of the Cimarron, and Titan AE weren’t beautiful to watch, because they were. All eyecandy aside, however, the story driving the frames just wasn’t that good. The historically groundbreaking animation behind Walt Disney’s classic Snow White would have been an exercise in futility without Disney’s equally beautiful take on the fairy tale itself.
Advanced computer imagery alone does not a good movie make. Witness the impending train wreck of The Polar Express (pun SO intended). The movie is animated in a style meant to evoke the feeling of the original children’s book. In other words, realistic but not quite realistic. Anyone familiar with the Uncanny Valley problem knows that this is a recipe for disaster. When any artificial character begins to look too realistic, but not quite realistic enough, the human mind automatically begins to pick up on the ghoulish flaws, resulting in a highly negative reaction on the part of the audience. Check out the suitably frightening almost-realistic baby in one of Pixar’s old shorts, Tin Toy, for instance. Pixar was wise to make the characters of Incredibles cartoonish and exaggerated. In a sense it makes the characters even more human and easy to empathize with. A viewing of Polar Express’s trailer shows how all the motion capture modeling in the world can create a bunch of stilted wooden dolls.
It’s all technology versus artistry, and artistry always wins.
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