Film, Photography, and Animation

Well, this certainly doesn’t quite look like anything we’ve seen before. And yet it also looks oddly familiar, like an amalgam of Sin City, A Scanner Darkly, V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, and big-name dystopian anime flicks (as far as any dystopian anime film can really be called “big-name”) like Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed. No matter what, the animation looks intriguing, conjuring up some of the best hard-contrast sci-fi noir images I can recall. And, as always, it’s nice to see animation being used in service of something other than kiddie flicks, even good ones.

Despite many failed predictions in this vein, I’m still convinced that one of these days an animated film geared toward adults (or at least older teenagers) will come along and make a big splash at the box office, totally reshaping notions about the target audience for animation. Sound implausible? Maybe. Or maybe I'm too late with this prognostication; maybe it’s already happened.

As I mentioned in my Superman Returns review, due to advances in CGI, big-budget directors have almost unlimited freedom to fuss and fret over their images—film is now as malleable as a director’s imagination allows it to be. Mise en scene, which used to be a product of the careful synchronization of physical objects with camera movement, is now, just as often, about simply deciding how much detail to cram into the background and how to make the CG camera whirl and spin with as much flash as possible—it’s no longer a question of what can be done so much as of what can be thought of.

The result is that much of modern filmmaking ends up emphasizing the painterly aspects of film rather than the photographic aspects. Films of medium to high budgets like Superman Returns, Sin City, Sky Captain, and Revenge of the Sith are all, essentially, feature length animated paintings. Without even being entirely aware of it, animation has taken over. Odd, maybe, but hardly surprising—after all, more perplexing things happen in this crazy world of movies all the time.