Thursday, April 2, 2009
WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS
I'm a little iffy all round about this movie.
The jokes were hilarious granted, but the visual look of the movie conflicted with my expectations of the film. A lot of the rigs looked like stereotyped charicatures of famous people, but unfortunately with them being fictional characters, the joke of the charicature style was lost. I found I was a little creaped out by the extreme amount of detail that had gone into skin textures of the humans, like dreamworks was trying to prove a point to the world.
As far as the characters go, without Bob, Dr. Cockroach Ph D, and the President, the movie would have been made up completely of very boring characters. Ontop of that, apart from Ginormica and The Missing Link, everyone else were complete 2 dimentional characters. Bob was "although hilarious" very stupid throughout the entire film, he was remained the same right till the very end, every other character was the same "unchanging". Link didn't even NEED to be interesting and yet they showed a rather sad and exposed side to his usual macho visage when he realises he's not as tough as he thought he was. Perhaps these character stereotypes are becoming THAT stereotyped that you don't even need to give them depth anymore. I noticed this with the antagonist, Gallaxhar, At the beggining he was evil for no reason and I was thinking "here we go, generic evil character no. 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999" but then dreamworks surprised me with his wonderful and perhas even deliberately vague and constantly interrupted monologue explaining why he was evil to make fun of the stereotype. I think Dreamworks took us for a ride with this movie, threw in a bunch of stereotypes, some big names to make the fans happy, put in some good laughs, AND some cheap ones "close encounters of the 3rd kind parody, merging with a stolen joke from Space Chimps", and make it a 3D experience.
The movie was hilarious, but the story had the emotion and depth of a rich 13 year old emo's song lyrics.
and now I've got that out of my system, I wanna talk about the animation.
Yeah, it was alright, but I don't think they thought about it enough. Susan is supposed to be HUGE. You'd think with your body becoming larger, the earth would seem ultimately smaller, thus giving you the illusion that there is less gravity. A scene with her being chased by a giant robot through the city, you watch her jump from roof top to roof top, and she seems to jump like a normal person. my understanding is that the bigger something is, the slower it "seems" to fall from a distance. Galileo was probably rolling over in his grave when they were animating this scene. The story has close to no depth but they have a perfect opportunity to make up for that with some well thought out animation and they put together what looks like a normal person running through a miniature city "which may have been deliberate but I doubt it".
Something that seems to be a pattern in dreamworks movies, animals and monsters etc always seem to be rigged and animated much more entertainingly that humans. They squash and stretch more, and they move more convincingly. "eg, mega-susan moved like a normal human being and yet Insectosaurus was moving like a snail, despite sharing the same trait of being massive characters"
All in all very hit and miss. BUT being a biased fan of comedy I'll still probably enjoy it over and over again despite its downfalls.
Or have I missed the point somewhere?
8 comments:
Hey Mitch
Nice work. I liked reading your review.
Dreamworks definitely is not following the same path on 'story' as Disney~Pixar. I agree with you that the observed aim was 'entertainment'. And with entertainment, box-office success rather than critical acclaim being the measure. I think it achieved the aim of being entertaining.
It probably will be a box office "success", which once again will show the importance and power of marketing and advertising over the quality of the product (the animation, or in some places shiny turds). Micaheal Dudok de Wit it isn't.
To me, it was like watching a morning of very funny Saturday morning cartoon skits. I particularly has a huge laugh whenever the President was on screen, and the part with communicating with music to the alien robot probe did twang my gold guitar string. :D
The observation you make about the way Ginormica moved is spot on, I think. Go, go Mitch's animation vision!
I would debate, however, that it was unintentional animation. My foundation for this argument is not solid, however. I would hate to think that with the investment in an undertaking such as a feature film the lead animators and animation director would miss the fact that the star character was not moving convincingly. I take the view that they over thought it, made a conscious decision that Ginormica would look like a person, an actor (usually in a monster suit in the 1950s) moving through a model city, as a hat tip to the early years of special effects. In doing so, they stepped outside of delivering convincing weight, timing and spacing to a very large character.
And then... there was the way she walked... did you notice? After she had been dumped by her fiance in her home town and she was walking down the isolated road toward the gas station where she sat on the roof. No longer in a model city but walking out in the wide open spaces, where contrast in size is lost. That walk was so unconvincing for my eyes. Sure she had her head bowed but the walk was an unconvincing cycle, in terms of movement, to tell us how devastated she was supposed to feel. And there was really no x (?) axis rotation on the root control in her hips that stuck like sand in my eye... she is a beautiful, giant, woman, her hips would swing, nothing could stop them, the down point of the step didn't have enough weight to sell or lift the hip into the passing position.
I think WE have to get the clip and frame-by-frame it.
So maybe the animators working on Ginormica did not get things right?
Ian did tell us as students, we would never be able to watch an animated feature the same way as the great unwashed, ever again.
The animation on the President in the war room - a direct wink to Stanley Kubrik's 'Dr. Strangelove' that your crop of animators would know well - was very good.
The arcs in particular were beautifully pushed. His poses, timing and spacing are worth reviewing as clips appear on video share sites, or on the release of the DVD.
The animation principles applied to the President's movements, in particular the sweeping arcs, are reminscent of "Bowler Hat Guy" from 'Meet the Robinsons'.
I found watching that character not only entertaining but satisfying as an animator.
Thanks for making a post about our field trip.
I'm looking forward to the "Mary and Max" field trip this week.
mitch, it was funny and people enjoyed it that is all that matters. they were making a tribute to the genre and you cant stray from the cliche storyline when you are making a homage.
The thing is they did it differently by adding some of the freshest humour i have seen in ages.
sure some of the animation wasnt perfect, but i can live with that, i do enjoy watching Daria after all.
TO DAN and perhaps even frank
Fair enough dan, this movie is paying homage. But am I the only one tiring of dreamworks' homage's....
The Prince of Egypt
Road To ElDorado
SinBad
"All homage to old adventure stories that had already been told before"
Shrek 1,2,3 "homage to fairy tales"
Kung Fu Panda "Homage to fung fu flicks"
SharkTale was a product of jumping on the "finding nemo" band wagon
the only time dreamworks doesn't "pay homage" is when they team up with aardman films, have jerry seinfeld write the script, or the original if its the based in madagascar, to which madagascar 2 was paying homage to :( Or make a movie about little animals going "over the hedge"
I stil stand by my argument, dreamworks' animation studio extension cannot rely on "up-to-date" humour forever. why strive for mediocrity for a cheap buck?
Also I'm not convinced about the city scene. If I was dreamworks paying homage to old monster films, I would see THIS scene in particular as a good reason to throw in the illustion tacky production value,
"show some wires, cut out buildings in the background, make the monster look like it was made out of a box with pipe cleaners poking out of it... well not to this extreme, but I'd be focusing more on the visual production side of this scene to show the "homage" perhaps even dodgy oldschool godzilla fight music playing in the background" but instead we have a VERY convincing scene filled with graphical eye candy but it all goes to waste with "deliberate" animation to "pay homage to the way people would move if they were pretending to be giant on a cheap set of a monster movie in the 50's" As animators we're trained to pick up on this... but to the majority of on-lookers, your average joe and jane looking for a good movie to show the kids, the scene is looking a bit strange. They can't put their finger on it, but because of the animation, the scene feels like its missing something. Dreamworks obviously has humour up its sleeve, and they know how to use the right humour at the right time, so why would they risk deliberately crapping up a scene for some inside joke, why was this "joke" so subtle and bearly noticable to the public, if it was indeed a joke at all.
either way, I still feel like dreamworks made a bad move with this scene.
Just because you're paying something homage, it doesn't mean your doing it justice.
Hey Mitch
Yesterday, Jason Lynch (feature film animator) gave a talk and in it he mentioned the importance of story.
Last year Ian Lacey (industry animator) explained to students that every action is in itself a story.
Pixar are renowned for the crafting of their stories, as were the Brothers Grimm (but they adapted folk tales = your point again), and the masters of story creation: animation students who are late to class ;) . We can only aspire to be good story creators (especially in Terry's narrative theory class) and sometimes we don't achieve that.
BUT we can be good storyTELLERS!
What I'm getting at here is that it is unlikely that as animators we will become script writers for the story of a whole feature film, for example.
However, as animators we will always be asked to animate say, for example 100 frames of an action, like a bean jumping off a can.
The crafty bit, the part where we get to do our thung as animators is in how the story is told.
So if we focus down on to the animation of Monsters vs Aliens, the story telling, I think about why did I laugh out loud with the President? but was unimpressed with some Ginormica sequences. It was in the story telling, the crafting of the animation.
A good gag is well told, it's in the timing and anticipation. Hey! Those things are animation principles.
I can certainly understand your points about the film, you being a potentially very good story teller, the next step passed observing positives and negatives in narrative and the delivery of the story (the animation, is to work out why bits of the story were appealing or why other sequences were not appealing and learn from them to apply to one's own work.
Thanks for posting the review and for getting your teeth into the discussion.
I'll stop typing now because I saw a puff of steam on the horizon that I suspect was Dan Goodman's brain deflating.
i really do think too much time is being spent arguing about whether this film is stupid and not enough time BEING SPENT ON THOSE CHARACTER RIGS YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE DONE A MONTH AGO!!!
and for the record, as far as this "homage" goes it is a bloody good one.
ps. get on with those character rigs because i am getting mad.
i would also like to attempt to shoot this argument out of the water again by saying that the reason why ginormica and that huge insect dude moved so differently was probably a creative decision to help rienforce their characters.
we were supposed to look upon the girl as an ordinary human being hence she had to move like a human being, whereas that giant insect was obviously meant to have the intellectual capacity of a graphic design student, hence he moved slower with that constant retarded look on his face.
as you say frank STORY TELLING THROUGH ACTING!!!!!!!!!
and mitch dont you even think about a long winded reply coz you have too much character rigging to do!!!!
Dan you and Mitch have made some really good observations in this discussion. "Nice eyes!" as we say around the studio. In other words, good observation, thinking and articulating what you are seeing.
Mitch, get those character rigs done, your team is relying on you to produce some more work.
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