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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."
Adapted from Chris Van Allsburg's slim but richly illustrated children's book of the same name, The Polar Express was 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.
I am appalled at how this article trivializes the wonder that the original book The Polar Express creates. I just want to say that calling the book "slim" might be true of the physical thickness of the book but the story and pictures contained within are fantastic. As a child I was riveted by this story and at one time seriously believed that this magic train could whisk me away to see the inner workings of all the Christmas fairytales you hear as a child.
My mother has passed the tradition of reading this book down to my youngest cousin (1st grader) and they are planning on taking my cousin to see this movie soon after it comes out.
I am really looking forward to seeing the movie myself and seeing how closely Zemeckis mimics my own mind's interpretation and expansion of the story and pictures. It *is* possible to recreate a story on the big screen from a novel and have it hold the same feeling that it did in print. I am crossing my fingers that the special effects and large budget don't take away from the real story that sits behind all the new-aged fanciness.
I really hope it doesn't ruin a great story.
I was under the impression that Pixar had fulfilled their contract for a set number of movies with Disney with the completion of "The Incredibles" could someone clarify?
First, I can't think of a more mundane and generic title. Continung this trend, the next Pixar film should be called Shoes - or maybe Toothbrushes. It's a moving story about a friendship between a floss dispenser and a tube of whitening toothpaste, and it also promotes dental hygiene!
Second - this is going to be hard - I love Pixar, and find their films to be great entertainment. But their schtick is starting to wear a little thin. We've done bugs, toys, monsters, and fish, and they've talked about doing robots. Now we're moving into consumer products. I'm curious how much longer this trend can continue, and whether or not they'll start slipping into that most humdrum of habits - the serial. Is it time for Toy Story 3 yet?
Pixar is brimming with incredible talent. That's why it will be such a shame if the public tires of seeing it applied to rather cliche genres. This is fantasy - we need new fantasy environments. Really alternate-reality stuff that veers between comic and wondrous. In the end, that's the highest calling of uber-powerful CGI art: to allow us to envision a previously unimaginable world. I think Pixar is, oddly enough, missing the boat in that regard.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
This is a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley, and there's a good discussion about it here. It's the same thing as Finaly Fantasy: Spirits Within, where the backgrounds were fantastic, the people were "best.... humans.... ever!" and they still looked weird.
Yeah, but I know a lot of video games that won't touch the shit with a 40ft pole. Animators hate the thought of being reduced to the equivalent of highway-side trash collectors, trying to pretty the mocap solely by removing the trash.
Plus it prevents them from adding their own stylistic personality to characters. Look at Naughty Dog's games -- there's no way you could get that kind of genuine expression, both facially and with body language, from a perf-cap.
Of course, I have no idea how good the tech has gotten lately, I guess we'll see. Still there's just no way to replace a talented animator. All you can hope for is a more efficient way to generate gobs of average-looking content.
"performance capture" is just a euphemism for "motion capture" which has gotten a pretty bad rap among animators. Of course the animation style is wooden and lacking emotion! An animators job is to not just duplicate a motion, but capture the essence of that motion and then make it appealing. An animator, unlike an actor in a body suit, is in control and aware of every single part of the body in motion, and animation needs that control and focus in order to succeed in creating a living character in a computer or on paper.
The studios would love to make you believe that motion capture is removing an unnecessary in-between from creating the character in the computer to making him live by capturing an exact motion, but I feel that motion capture is just a cheap imitation of animation.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I used to work for Disney, and actually they are striking out into the CGI field on their own, after the recent falling-out with Pixar. They have done some of this in the past (Dinosaur), but look for "Chicken Little" coming out in something like Q2 of 2005. Also, Disney's normal animation department is still going, and I keep hearing rumors that the next big animated film will be a Princess movie again... though I can't think of any princess with a good story they haven't done already yet...
William George
one has to wonder what Disney is doing.
Simple. Layoffs. Firings. Sequels. Crap. Raising prices. Destroying their 80-years-of-excellence animation division. 24 hours a day of garbage on television. Allowing Disneyland to turn into a toilet. Unsuccessfully trying to compete with anime, losing HUGE, like eight touchdowns huge, then frantically pouring mountains of cash into licensing deals so they can keep their name in theaters, then fucking up every anime product they have or just sitting on billion-dollar licenses for years and years and years and years for no reason.
In other words, the basic middle management results: clusterfuck
Then they started making movies about theme park rides and complaining that they can't make money with Monday Night Football. During this time they were paying about 197 lawyers to avoid paying royalties to Marvel and the Winnie the Pooh licensors. Now how much money do you suppose Disney has made on Winnie the Pooh? Billions? Tens of Billions?
maybe they're abandoning animation altogether so they can put out more "Old Yellar" movies.
They're abandoning animation altogether so they can save money. Big corporations are not interested in products. They are interested in brands.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
What might ruin that great story for you, aside from special effects and profit-maximizing changes, is the nature of books themselves... your experience is unique. Translating one person's experience or interpretation of a book into a film is a dangerous act; you run the risk of alienating fans that didn't have the same experience. You also influence the experience of future readers by giving them a glimpse into your own vision of the story.
When I read Stephen King's The Stand a few years ago, there was a foreword where he said that he wasn't sure he'd ever make a movie version of the story. He cited "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as evidence of the damage a movie can do to a book. As fantastic as the movie is, it isn't the same (and does not hold the same kind of value) as the original text. If you see the movie and then read the book (as I did) you will never be able to get Jack Nicholson's performance out of your head as you read the character. Unfortunately for me, I also saw the movie adaptation of The Stand before reading the book.
I felt this way about LOTR, but was happy to see that it matched up with my expectations pretty well. Plus, it depicted what I had failed to visualize - Ents. I just couldn't figure out what they would look like.
Gollum was completely different. They did use motion capture to get him, but not exclusively. Sometimes the motion capture was only tweaked minimally by the animators, other times it was thrown away and used only as a guide, other times it wasn't even captured at all (like when Gollum is climbing down near the beggining of Two Towers) and he was completely hand animated. His face wasn't captured at all either, it was completely hand animated based on Serkiss's filmed performance. In Polar Express they seem to be using straigh untweaked motion capture for the body and faces of the characters, and at least from what I've seen in the trailers the results are the same I saw on the Final Fantasy movie, characters that just seem like moving mannequins, lacking the (in Disney's words) illusion of life. I guess it's the same that Disney found out when they were making Snow White, they were using some rotoscoping (filming an actor and then trace on top of it), and found that when they stayed too close to the filmed performance, the resulting animation was boring and lifeless.
Not only did they try adapting the graphical style, they recreated each picture from the book exactly in various frames throughout the movie. I am sure someone extremely attached to the original book may be able to pick this up. If they don't, I suspect they will find it an extremely drawing movie without really knowing why. The director said this was done out of respect for Van Allsburg original work. So yeah, damn straight they just adapted the graphical style. That was the whole point.