Aside from the looking at the differences between Japanese animé style animation in films such as Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle and the western styles of Disney and Warner Brothers. What struck me about this lecture was the ideas of technological determinism.
Should we use the latest technology just because it's available? Or should we make a clearer judgement on what is right for the job rather what's the latest thing. A good example of this I think is Avatar. Yes the film looked fantastic, but did it really have to be shot entirely using motion capture suits and then created in the computer? Did this really make for a better film? After all the idea of digital characters isn't really all that new, the first major one being the terrible mistake of Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace. And it was done much better in the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy with Smeagol/Gollom.
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| Here we see Gollom as he was in the first film. This character shows the importance that no matter how good the technology you have to create a character is, the most important thing is the actor and performance behind it. |
Let's focus on Jar Jar for a minute. If you watch the making of on the DVD of the Phantom Menace, you'll see that originally, Jar Jar was going to be mostly an actor in the suit with the head being computer animated. Now according to Lucas they went with a full computer generated character because it was cheaper than trying to match some one body movements to the animated head. But Lucas also says that what would be "...really cool if the whole thing was animated...". You can tell a large part of the decision to make this a full CGI character was the idea of making it a statement piece, sort of saying look we can create an entire player in the production out of nothing! Technology was therefore a major factor in the method choice.
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| Computer Generated Image vs. Live Action Suit |
But the road doesn't go one-way....
Technology can not just be a defining factor for the way we produce fictional media, fictional media can also be a determining factor for the direction of technology. Look at PIXAR, originally the PIXAR image computer was created as a tool for high end graphical visualisation for medical and other applications. It was the latest graphical technology of it's time. It lead to the creation of such shorts as The Adventures Of Andre & Wally B, Luxo Jnr. and Red's Dream. And yes you could use the company of only starting to use computer because at the time computers were the new thing, the latest tech. In reality I think for Lasseter it wasn't about using the latest thing just for the hell of it, it was about pushing animation forward, adding motion blur, more detailed environments and essentially getting closer to reality.
With the invention of Photography, art was given freedom to become far more open, expressive and less realistic than it had been before. It was no longer about recreating reality it became focused on philosophy and meaning and something greater than reality. Now with animation and the development of computer generated images, we already have photography as well as moving images, so reality is covered. And animation has always had a certain kind of abstract approach to realism from the way Bambi recreated landscapes through the parallax view, layers of animation with simply blanks in-between. So where does that leave animation? It seem now it focused on attaining the same kind of realism we get from film and the photograph.
It's come full circle.
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