I think there’s enough difference between, say, The Three Stooges Go To The Moon and Godard’s Breathless that such a blanket condemnation would, indeed, be ridiculous. On the other hand, if I’ve seen Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Antz, The Incredibles, Shrek, etc., and disliked them all, is it really such a rush to judgement to say, yeah, I don’t like CGI?
I do keep giving them a shot–I love animation too much, and I want to like these movies–and I keep being disappointed. There’s a certain style, a certain attitude that comes through that just grates on me. As I said, much of it comes from the voice acting. I will say this – most modern non-CGI Disney movies leave me flat as well.
While there’s not enough variety among CGI movies to say that such a statement is equally ridiculous to your Stooges-Godard comparison, I feel there is sufficient variation to still say that it is, generally speaking, a ridiculous statement.
Certainly, you’re welcome to you opinion about each of these movies individually. But just among the ones you’ve listed, there is such a range of genres, styles, and quality that the only common theme linking them is that they were made on computers, and to single that out as the one element in all these movies that causes them to fail is the same as singling out the lack of color in the movie as the one element that makes both the Stooges and Jean-Luc Godard fail.
Can you define that attitude, and perhaps explain why it is necessarily wedded to computer graphics? For example, did you like The Iron Giant? If so, can you explain why that movie worked for you, but The Incredibles, written and directed by the same man, did not?
I hope this doesn’t come across as hostile, Kaspar, as that’s not my intent. It’s just rare to meet a self-described animation fan who doesn’t like anything by Pixar or Dreamworks,* and I’m interested in where you’re coming from with that opinion.
The over-expressiveness that is typical of most animation, computer or otherwise, nowadays is usually paired to a naturalistic voice acting style that, to me, is very jarring. Holly Hunter is a subtle actor; yet the facial expressions of her character in that movie came off as exaggerated. The two did not mesh well. Animation is a kind of hyper-reality – exaggeration is a necessity, and a good voice actor will be able match his performance to the eventual animation. However, in Finding Nemo, Albert Brooks, hilarious as Hank Scorpio, Jacques, Brad Goodman, and that fat camp guy on The Simpsons, came off as, well, Albert Brooks speaking lines while a fish swam around on the screen. I’m not an actor or a voice actor, but I know that voice acting is an art, with different methods and styles from live-action acting. On the occasions when the voice acting is appropriate – I thought Mike Meyers did a good job in Shrek, as did John Lithgow – they’re basically human cartoons anyway – it is surrounded by other uninspired performances and cutesy jokes.
There are exceptions – I think theater actors tend to do well in animation, as they are used to slightly over-the-top performances. For example, Jerry Orbach and Angela Lansbury in Beauty and the Beast.
I love the Iron Giant. But frankly, its two minor flaws were Jennifer Aniston and John Mahoney. Now, they were animated enough like their real selves for the distraction to be mitigated, but I think a better strategy would have been to have actors without famous voices to play the characters.
The CGI animation itself – well, what can I say? A lot of people reflexively hate anime, a lot of people reflexively hate the Bruce Timm/DC animation style, a lot of people hate a lot of styles of art. You can say that I’m self-limiting, but I bet you’re being a bit disingenuous if you’re implying that there’s no style or genre or specific characteristic of a medium that you reflexively cringe at, even if you’re open-mined enough to nonetheless give it a chance to win you over. I have given many CGI movies a chance, and I will continue to give them a chance.
Well, I’d probably be asking anyone who said they hated all anime the same questions I’m asking you. However, I don’t think you can reasonably compare that to someone not liking Bruce Timm’s DC animation, because there we’re talking about one artist working in one consistent genre/shared continuity. Disliking Bruce Timm as an animator is a far cry from disliking, say, all cell animation in general.
And again, CGI isn’t a style or genre of animation, it’s a method of animation. Pixar movies all tend to share a certain style, to be sure, as they’re the result of one studio over a relatively short span of time. But to say that The Incredibles share a style with Antz or Final Fantasy is simply not supportable, no more than saying classic Disney movies share a style with Warner Brother’s shorts.
No, they didn’t. Their powers were modeled after their roles in the family. The fact that 3 of the Incredibles have powers very similar to the FF is a coincidence. Also, the powers themselves are pretty generic, predating the FF by some time.
Dunno about that. The ending scene of The Incredibles is straight out of the FF’s debut encounter with The Moleman and was definitely a homage. Maybe the FF wasn’t a pure template, but I have to assume they were a significant influence.
I loooove CGI as an artform, and I rewatch all the Pixar movies time and time again. I even like Ice Age, though I didn’t go and see Robots. Dreamworks stuff is pretty dire, though.
Anyway, Kaspar, though I think your dismissal of CGI as a whole is probably misguided, your explanation certainly is a fair one. It seems like you don’t like the Pixar style, and, like many, don’t like the Dreamworks style much either.
Have you seen Jimmy Neutron? It has no real celebrity voices, and the characters and voices are fairly exaggerated. Even though when I first saw the trailers for it I dismissed it as awful, it’s actually really funny. I laughed all the way through it. Maybe you should check it out. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but you may enjoy it.
There is a big difference between an Inside Joke (a production reference that only a handful of people will get) and a Pop Culture Gag (a reference specifically designed to elicit a humorous response, pandering to as wide an audience as possible).
That list you linked to consists almost exclusively of the former and a scarce few of the latter. You couldn’t sit through 90 seconds of the dreck Shrek without an oh-so-clever self-referential pop culture gag. Pixar films actually use them quite sparingly (with Toy Story 2 being the most egregious offender).
Can’t remember any in TS2 off the top of my head, unless you mean the references to Barbies and Hot Wheels in the toy store, and at least those comments were appropriate for the environment/scene.
Another plus for Pixar is that they tend to avoid the “potty humor” that Dreamworks and other studios lavish over their stuff these days. The closest Pixar has ever gotten to a fart joke was the bit with the two seabirds in Finding Nemo, where one of them misinterprets popping bubbles for flatulence… an anti-fart-joke, IMO.
There are loads of Star Wars references, including story, character, visuals, and even sound effects. But they were still somehow more cleverly done than anything in Shrek.
Even that would be considered quite subtle by the standards of Dreamworks films, where a great percentage of the jokes ARE the pop culture reference. Wallace Shawn saying “Inconceivable!” would be, by their standards, almost subliminal. If you don’t know your pop culture, a third or more of the gags in “Shrek” are meaningless.
By comparison, the references in “The Incredibles” are nearly-unnoticable in jokes. It’s not a pop culture reference movie at all.
The Iron Giant was partially animated via computer. The giant himself, and I believe some of the military stuff, was computer animated, then printed out and traced by hand to match the rest of the movie.
IG’s minor flaw was its crappy advertising, which attracted no one and probably drove off a few fencesitters.
I understand that many, if not most, animated movies and TV shows nowadays are done via computer, which is why I originally referred to “3D” animation, but as the thread went on most people seemed to refer to that kind of animation as “CGI,” so I just went with the flow.
You know, though I agree that John Mahoney’s voice is really recognisable, I think he was a great choice for the General. I find his characterisation in Disney’s Atlantis to be much more distracting and annoying (in good company there, some bad casting choices for that film I think).
And as for Jennifer Aniston, her voice isn’t that distinctive to me, so I accept the character more readily. I think Harry Connick’s voice is much more recognisable and therefore more distracting, though I think his character is great so tend to overlook it pretty quickly.
As you can tell, I am an unashamed Iron Giant fan.
