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Teaser Trailer for 'Cars'; Info on 'Polar Express'
Michael Wyszomierski writes "The teaser trailer for the final Disney/Pixar film, Cars, is now available on Apple's Movie Trailers page. The film will open in theaters on November 4, 2005." And reader BoredStiff writes "The movie Polar Express will open Wednesday and could create a film genre somewhere between animation and live action. Made almost exclusively with a method called performance capture, which drops digitized human actors into a computer-animated world. The technique has been used in some video games and, to a limited extent, in earlier movies. Warner Bros. says The Polar Express is the first feature made solely with the process."
Right date, wrong year... Opening November 4th, 2005.
Sure. The original Toy Story was under a different deal. Then came Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and now The Incredibles and Cars to finish off a 5-picture deal signed after Toy Story. Through some contractual madness, Disney discovered that they didn't have to count Toy Story 2 towards the count, since apparently some clause said that in effect sequels don't count.
Look, this has been rediscovered again and again, every time someone's tried to do photorealistic CGI. It's hard. Producing humans that look and move correctly is really, really difficult, and unless it's spot on it just looks really dreadful.
Polar Express probably does it as well as I've ever seen it done; the result is that it;s just good enough to make it blindingly obvious how bad it is. There are figures on the screen that look at first glance like humans, but my hindbrain just screams when it sees them. They don't move right. Their expressions don't work right. They look creepy.
Pixar and Dreamworks got this right; the state of the art is just not up to this. Notice that all their characters are cartoonish? By deliberately not trying to make their characters realistic, they managed to avoid the entire problem, because my hindbrain doesn't expect them to look like real people. But Warner Bros. for Polar Express have jumped in with both feet...
I was the soundman/video engineer on an GSTA (giant screen theatre of america) event about 1-2 month ago where they were presenting, to giant screen theatre owners from around the world, various work in devellopement and work in progress. Several flick caught my attention (the 70mm IMAX version of Ghost In The Shell: Innocence being one! :) ) and Polar Express was part of those.
Polar Express is not only the first to be entirely made with digitized actors it is also the first feature lenght IMAX animation movie, the first feature lenght movie in IMAX 3D and the first movie funded by Tom Hanks himself. Tom Hanks was described as an avid Imax 3D supporter, he wants to push the technology and was actually the one who suggested Polar Express as a project, he was deeply involved in the process. The result does not look like a tech showdown at all, it looks like an incredibly good animation that plays with and use the 3D technology to enhance messages, emotion and aprehensions, not to showcase it. Nowhere in the extract they showed to the crowd did I had the impression they were just showing tech, actually as soon as the extract started I kinda forgot I was watching 3D, it just felt natural.
I'm really looking forward to the full release.