Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. Copyright Disney.
Wall Street Princess:
There’s a new story regarding The Princess and the Frog on The Wall Street Journal’s website. Writer Ethan Smith gives an abbreviated history of Disney’s abandonment and subsequent return to traditional hand-drawn animation. This reversion to the core art form upon which Disney was built was championed by the two men who inadvertently killed it -- John Lasseter and Ed Catmull of Pixar Animation Studios. Following the tremendous success of Pixar computer animated films (and others from rival studio DreamWorks SKG), Disney brass mothballed its traditional animation operation and transitioned to digital. Lasseter for one found this to be a tremendously short-sighted decision:
"’I've never understood why the studios were saying people don't want to see hand-drawn animation,’ Mr. Lasseter said at a fan convention earlier this year. ‘What people don't want to watch is a bad movie.’”
Oddly, Smith says that “Princess” directors John Musker and Ron Clements were not available to be interviewed. This is peculiar since both men just had an extended discussion with Latino Review.
For more, check out the full Wall Street Journal piece.
Carol makes the rounds:
Canadian paper The National Post spoke with director Robert Zemeckis about his forthcoming CG-animated A Christmas Carol. Zemeckis’ last three films (The Polar Express, Beowulf, and now “Carol”) all use a technique known as Motion (or Performance) Capture. With this technology, actors wear sensor-covered unitards and their performances are captured by computers via elaborate, specially-designed cameras. This isn’t animation in the traditional sense since the actor and the performance capture computers do most of the heavy lifting. Zemeckis has drawn a fair amount of criticism for his use of the technique not because it’s a “cheat”, but because the results are often -- to invoke a technical term -- “creepy-looking”. In the piece, Zemeckis answers his detractors in a rather round-about way:
"You know what? Let me go down the list of actors I've worked with on this. Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Tom Hanks, Bob Hoskins, Jim Carrey, Robin Wright - all these magnificent actors. They love this because they get to act all day long and they get to act as though they're doing black-box theatre, so they have to have the imagination and the confidence to create a character without any physical trappings. That's really what it is. They have rudimentary props. No costumes, no makeup, no wigs."
All of that may be true, but happy actors do not a good film make. Not necessarily, anyway.
Meanwhile, actor Jim Carrey spoke to the Los Angeles Times about portraying the iconic Ebenezer Scrooge and how he thinks the Dickens tale is relevant to today’s audiences:
“‘I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we're going through,’ says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. ‘Every construct we've built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can't protect us against personal greed.’"
Heavy.
The Hollywood Reporter has already reviewed the film. Here are a couple of choice quotes:
“But as the spirits escort Scrooge through his sorry life, Zemeckis gradually makes this ‘Christmas Carol’ his own. But as he does, with his intense reliance and belief in movie technology, this auteur shuns the beating heart of Dickens' story.
“Dickens' ‘A Christmas Carol’ is about emotions. It's about how emotions can get stunted and tramped down, how they can be revived and how empathy and affection can bring joy to the human soul. One will find none of that here.
“Zemeckis' ‘A Christmas Carol’ is, in its essence, a product reel, a showy, exuberant demonstration of the glories of motion capture, computer animation and 3D technology. On that level, it's a wow. On any emotional level, it's as cold as Marley's Ghost.”
“So deck the halls with praise for the crew -- cinematographer Robert Presley, designer Doug Chiang, animation supervisor Jenn Emberly, visual effects supervisor George Murphy and Alan Silvestri for his robust score. But a rousing humbug to those who confuse the media for the message.”
Roger Rabbit sequel gets its writers:
Speaking of Zemeckis, the motion capture-obsessed director recently revealed to MTV that writers have been hired for the oft-delayed sequel to 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Watch Zemeckis spill the beans in the video embedded below. (Pay no mind to the annoying commercial which precedes the interview.)
Docter speaks with “The Wrap”:
Website The Wrap spoke with Pixar director Pete Docter about his latest film UP (and its chances at the forthcoming Oscars. Docter’s been with Pixar since 1990 and is one of that company’s “brain trust” of directors, the cabal of talented filmmakers who view and critique one another’s work. This practice, arguably, plays a huge role in Pixar’s nearly unbroken streak of animation excellence. Here Docter comments on the typical evolution of a Pixar film:
“The truth is that every one of our movies is lousy at some point. It’s just that we allow ourselves time to fix it. And we have this co-op of directors who are all doing their own thing, but who [come] together at certain times to analyze and assist with everyone. On ‘Up’, for example, about every four months we would show the film to John Lasseter and Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton, and then we’d go upstairs and talk about what was wrong with it.
“You want as many people as possible to not only boost you up, but also poke at the soft spots: ‘Hey, you’ve got some dry rot over here, let’s get the wood putty.’ You end up with a big heaping pile of notes, some contradictory, and as the director I’m left to decide what points I agree with and which solutions seem good.”
For the rest of the article, point your browser here.
American Dad signs on for sixth:
Fox’s American Dad will return next year for a sixth season. This means that all three of the Seth MacFarlane-produced animated series (Family Guy, The Cleveland Show, and “Dad”) will be back in the fall.
Source: IGN.
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