More Realistic, Less Believable

A funny thing happened on the way to the multiplex: Animation and live action started imitating each other, to the detriment of the former. Major live-action features--from “The Matrix” to “Cats & Dogs”--have grown more cartoonish: Talking animals, exaggerated movements and the defiance of gravity were once the exclusive preserve of animation.

Conversely, animated films, especially computer-animated films, have become increasingly earthbound, presenting realistic characters in naturalistic settings. The plastic-looking “humans” that populate the recently released “Final Fantasy” are only the latest and most extreme example of the trend.

Audiences look in vain for the qualities that led Aldous Huxley to praise the Felix the Cat cartoons of the ‘20s in the essay “Where Are the Movies Moving”: “What cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic. On the screen, miracles are easily performed, the most incongruous ideas can be arbitrarily associated, the limitations of time and space can be largely ignored.” Huxley delighted in the casual surrealism of Felix building a motor scooter out of the musical notes he produced with a guitar.

Dr. Aki Ross, the heroine of Sony’s “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” doesn’t build anything out of musical notes; neither does Milo in the current Disney release “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” nor did Tulio and Miguel in last year’s “The Road to El Dorado” from DreamWorks. And none of them comes alive on the screen the way Felix did; they feel like pallid imitations of humans rather than fully realized animated characters.

“Animation has a history of trying to replicate realism, going back to 1915, when live-action footage of Dave Fleischer in a clown suit was traced for the first ‘Out of the Inkwell’ cartoon,” says Eric Goldberg, who directed the “Rhapsody in Blue” segment of Disney’s “Fantasia 2000.” “But the push toward realism hasn’t always worked that well. A lot of critics pointed out that the dwarfs and the animals were much more satisfying creations than the humans in ‘Snow White,’ and felt the film was an uncomfortable marriage between faux realism and pure fantasy.”

“Faux realism” sums up the characters in “Final Fantasy.” Dr. Ross may have 60,000 hairs on her head, but she and her co-stars don’t convey a convincing sense of weight when they move; their lips don’t really form words when they speak; and their gestures don’t reflect thoughts and emotions. “Final Fantasy” pushes computer graphics, or CG, further than anything previously attempted, but the results are often unconvincing. Despite all the time, money and computer power expended on the film, Bugs Bunny’s walk is more believable; audiences feel the Beast’s emotions more deeply in “Beauty and the Beast”; and “Toy Story’s” Woody and Buzz seem more human.

“The quest for visual realism started as a technical challenge, with the implicit assumption that if computer graphics could mimic reality, it could be used to create anything,” explains Scott Johnston, who oversaw the wildebeest stampede in “The Lion King” before establishing Fleeting Image Animation, which works with both computer and traditional animation. “Much of traditional animation has followed a similar path in recent years, with more realistic backgrounds, camera moves and character designs.”

Animators are tired of being limited to mere reality. The use of CG has enabled animation directors to employ more sophisticated cinematography, allowing the camera to move in three dimensions. But it’s also pressured animators to draw more realistic characters and settings to match those camera moves. Filmmakers seem to be losing sight of the fact that animation, whether drawn or computer-generated, can depict anything--realistic or not.

“There are people who’ll walk into an art museum, look at a Cezanne and say, ‘Isn’t that an interesting way of conceiving a bowl of fruit and painting it,”’ Goldberg says. “And there are people who’ll stand in front of a photorealist painting of a bowl of fruit and say, ‘It looks so real I can almost taste it.’ CG is the perfect medium for that audience, because you can make something look so real you can almost taste it. But that doesn’t necessarily make it art or give it an artist’s viewpoint of what a bowl of fruit is.”

That you-can-almost-taste-it realism has made computers an effective tool for special effects. For decades, stop-motion animators struggled to match the movements of three-dimensional puppets to footage of live actors. The technique was used for the dinosaurs, aliens and mythological beasts that jerked and stumbled their way through decades of cheesy sci-fi movies.

To be sure, stop-motion produced some striking effects, from the ape in the original “King Kong” to the Imperial Walkers that invaded the ice planet Hoth in “The Empire Strikes Back,” but it was a difficult, time-consuming process.

The “Jurassic Park” films have showcased CG, offering some of the most believable dinosaurs ever put on film. “Jurassic Park III” raises the bar still higher. These dinosaurs are big, impressive animals (besides the CG variety, there are Stan Winston’s shop-created animatronic, live-action dinosaurs). But somehow, something seems missing. When Luke hobbled one of the Imperial Walkers, hundreds of tons of metal seemed to fall into the snow. When a tyrannosaurus and a spinosaurus tangle in “Jurassic Park III,” the viewer doesn’t get a sense of tons of flesh and bone crashing together.

“For me, the main issue is realism versus believability,” Johnston says. “In live-action, the two are equated--the more realistic something appears, the more believable it is. In animation, believability has little to do with realism. Completely unrealistic animation can be believable when created by talented artists. In fact, animation is often more universally appealing because it’s less real.

“Believable-but-nonrealistic classic animation has a timeless quality that technology-bound realism lacks. ‘Final Fantasy’ will look immature and dated in the near future; ‘Pinocchio’ doesn’t, 60 years after it was released.”

Pushing Medium in Cartoonier Direction

In many ways, it’s easier to caricature movements and expressions to produce convincing acting and weight in traditional animation. Audiences are accustomed to seeing exaggerated drawings, and the two-dimensional nature of the medium places it in a world that’s very different from everyday life. Because CG is three-dimensional and therefore more lifelike, it demands a more live-action approach to filmmaking, one in which broadly caricatured motions may feel out of place.

David Silverman, who worked as a producer-director on “The Simpsons” before co-directing the upcoming Disney/Pixar release “Monsters, Inc.,” explains, “In CG, you get something of a live flavor in the directing and acting and cutting because you approach the material in a way that recalls a live-action shoot. You can basically go ‘on location’ in the CG environment and figure out your shots and layouts, move the camera around as you would on a live-action set and figure out how you’re going to shoot it, before you set about animating.”

The most successful CG features have pushed the medium in a cartoonier direction that has proved more believable than realism. The most entertaining sequences in DreamWorks’ hit “Shrek” involve the curmudgeonly ogre and his wisecracking donkey, rather than the more realistic Princess Fiona. Although DreamWorks executives have stated they deliberately pulled back to make Fiona less real, many critics complained about her weird, waxworks appearance.

Disney/Pixar’s wildly successful “Toy Story” films offer a model that meets Johnston’s test of believability, rather than realism. John Lasseter, who directed the two “Toy Story” movies, notes, “We sometimes use a film grammar derived from live action, rather than straight 2-D animation, because of the three-dimensional images. But they are animated films. We’re not trying to reproduce reality.

“Even though the ‘Toy Story’ films are set in a place that’s kind of like the world we live in, it is a caricatured world. We never wanted the audience to think that it was meant to be a live-action film.”

The consensus among artists is that the story should dictate the degree of realism in the designs and animation, and that studios should be developing ideas that play to the strengths of medium. They point to films such as Takashi Nakamura’s “Catnapped,” in which the cat world of Banipal Witt looks like “Yellow Submarine” redesigned as a feline amusement park, and to the understated fantasy of Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”

“If you can tell a story better in animation than you can in live action, tell it in animation, even if it’s about real people,” Silverman says. “But I’m not sure that animation was the best way to tell the stories in many of the features of the last six years. If it’s a realistic story about a realistic subject and they take a realistic approach, I wonder why they don’t tell it in live action. What does animation bring to the story, other than the novelty value of telling it in animation for the first time?”

The trend toward realistic animation may be shifting. In August, Warner Bros. will release the live-action/animation combination “Osmosis Jones,” a spoof of “Fantastic Voyage” and police-action films, set inside Bill Murray’s body. “Monsters, Inc.” is a fanciful comedy from Pixar that debuts in November. And within the animation industry, expectations are high for “Lilo and Stitch,” a character-driven comedy-adventure due out from Disney next year that is both warmer and cartoonier than the studio’s recent animated features.

Dylan Kohler, who worked at Disney and DreamWorks before joining Anthropics, a CG company specializing in Web and wireless applications, sums up the feeling within the animation industry when he says, “This lazy slide into realism is just one symptom of the disease that’s led me away from studio animation. The studios don’t know animation well enough and/or don’t trust it. I’ve dealt with enough bad stories, spineless and lazy use of tools, great talent wasted on prettifying empty projects.

“Animation may yet capture its rightful place in our culture. But that’ll take strong, sincere voices using the form on its own terms ... creating the illusion of life, not the recording or depiction of real life.”