ANIMATION’S HERD MENTALITY

MEMO to Hollywood animators: Skip the zoo and lock the barnyard door. Let the animals in the mighty jungle get some sleep and the next time you feel the urge to draw a forest animal, just take a hike instead.

After a steady diet of cute talking animal movies, isn’t it time to mix it up a bit? There was a herd mentality when the bovine adventure of “Home on the Range” was followed up by “Barnyard” and when “Madagascar” was followed by “The Wild.”

The loopy hazards of taking forest critters in and out of the forest were apparently compelling enough for two films this year, “Over the Hedge” and “Open Season.” “Flushed Away” is the new film about a European mouse with refined tastes and low-class friends; when you go see it, perhaps you’ll see a trailer for next spring’s “Ratatouille,” which is very different because it’s about a European rat with refined tastes and low-class friends.

With several notable exceptions (“Cars” and “The Incredibles” spring to mind) it seems like every blockbuster animation project must draft its characters from the animal kingdom. All of them talk, a lot of them sing.

None of this is news to George Miller, director of “Happy Feet,” which is the latest penguin movie to march into theaters.

“It’s true. Lions, zebras, all of that’s been covered. There’s been penguins out the wazoo, as I can attest personally. Ants, bugs in general. You’ve had dinosaurs. Fish even, with ‘Finding Nemo.’ I think next we have to go down to the microscopic level, the stories of bacteria and single-cell creatures.”

Uh, what about “Osmosis Jones”? Didn’t that Chris Rock vehicle already cover the petri dish turf? “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.”

Why the safari mentality? There are several reasons. No. 1: Kids love animals that talk -- it just cracks them up. No. 2: Toy companies are aware of reason No. 1 and studios these days are mightily attuned to toy company interests.

The less obvious reasons, though, are the more interesting. The push toward photorealism in animation works in favor of cuddly animals but against people -- there becomes something unsettling about realistic-looking computer-generated people. There’s also a component of human culture that make tales told with tails something special.

Miller says the history of animals revealing something about human nature in stories is in our blood. “I can’t think of any culture that doesn’t have stories or legends told through animals. You think Aesop’s fables, of course, but you see it again and again in other cultures. I think it’s a way to look at ourselves through another angle.”

At the same time, human characters in animated films are more likely to put off viewers. “The Polar Express” was successful, but there was an undeniable murmur among moviegoers and critics that the kids in the fable were just too, well, creepy.

The reason may be the way the human mind works. A good part of our occipital cortex is devoted to “reading” people’s faces, in particular their eyes. When we see a plainly unreal cartoon character -- say, Sleeping Beauty -- that’s not a problem. But less-stylized human characters that come closer to photorealism can trigger repulsion. In effect, we’re spooked because our brain tells us it’s a real person but there’s something wrong with it.

Masahiro Mori, a Japanese robotics theorist, has a study that captured the attention of many animators, which deals with this instinctive unease with the near-real. The study puts forward the idea that as something gets “close” to looking human -- like Mr. Incredible -- we have an empathy and as it gets very close to looking real, there’s an abrupt discomfort with it. When it reaches a point of believable realness, the reaction returns to positive.

All of this makes Leonard Maltin, the film critic and historian, wonder why the makers of “Monster House” and other films keep using motion-capture technology on real actors and then animate “over” them to create on-screen finished products that are overly eager for realism.

“I just don’t get it,” he said. “The message is that animators are apparently incapable of creating art that is interesting, and that’s simply not true. As for all the animal movies that seem to be blurring together, that’s simply for the reason that there is nothing as successful as success and in Hollywood there is nothing as successful as excess. If something works, Hollywood will milk it until it doesn’t.”

And, yes, that means more cow movies.

geoff.boucher@latimes.com