2009: A major tipping point for movies

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 483, Jan. 17, 2010

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2009: A MAJOR TIPPING POINT
FOR MOTION PICTURES

When Time magazine's top three movies
all are animated, films are changing

By John Greenwald

Last year, 2009, was a tipping point in the history of motion pictures.

A tipping point is an accumulation of small increments that add up to an important change. And that's what happened with movie animation in 2009. Animation became a major part of the film industry, last year. Just look at the top three films in Time magazine's top 10 for 2009. They are all animated:

1) "The Princess and the Frog," Disney's return to hand-drawn, 2-D animation;

2) "Up," Pixar's familiar computer-generated animation; and

3) "Fantastic Mr. Fox," director Wes Anderson's anti-American dream "kids" story, told in stop-action animation.

Creativity and technology merged. But there's more.

My definition of animation goes beyond "cartoony" versions of children's stories. It includes any manipulation of cinematic images. Animation can range from photographing a landscape through a shaking bowl of colored water to complicated, computerized special effects, from a kid's flip book to the epitome of digital manipulation -- writer-director James Cameron's ground-breaking, 3-D sci-fi adventure, "Avatar."

Curiously, while "Avatar" didn't make Time's 10 best for 2009, it did appear on its list of the decade's top 10, at number 10. Time's movie critic, Richard Corliss, explained the anomaly this way: "It's hard to have a decade's perspective on a picture I saw twice, just two weeks ago, and didn't feel strongly about on first viewing. But if 'Avatar' has the liberating impact on movie technology that I suspect it will, it richly deserves the last spot on this list. ... [F]or a sensational, seductive movie immersion, 'Avatar' has it all over James Cameron's last blockbuster. This one really is titanic."

As best as I can tell, 2009 was a record year for animation of one kind or another. Fully animated pictures released last year -- besides "The Princess and the Frog," "Up" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" -- included "Monsters Vs. Aliens," "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," "Planet 51," "9," "Astro Boy," "Ponyo" and "Coraline." There are a few more, but you get the point.

Then there are the hybrids, films using differing live-action, animation and digital techniques. Among them are "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," which was mainly digitalized, cute chipmunks mixed in with live-action photography. Ditto for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," "Star Trek," "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian," "Sherlock Holmes," "2012" and "District 9," among others.

"A Christmas Carol" used a technique known as motion capture: Actors are filmed in a way their images and movements can be digitally enhanced, manipulated and exaggerated to create unique fantasy characters. "Coraline" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" used stop-action animation, in which flexible figures are manipulated frame by frame to generate the impression of movement.

Clint Eastwood has been known to brag when a film of his hasn't used digital effects. His "Invictus" was live action, except for the rugby matches played before 50,000 fans in various stadiums. No producer can afford that many extras today. So, Eastwood merged live action with digital effects to create exciting, often enthralling scenes of those rugby matches.

That all these animation techniques -- culminating in "Avatar" -- were used in a single year and in so many pictures -- that's the tipping point. Animation, especially as I've broadly defined it, has become a permanent and wide-ranging, part of filmmakers' vocabularies. Fewer and fewer major Hollywood pictures will confined to a half-dozen stars running around Manhattan or Los Angeles in search of love or running from heartache.

Writers, producers and directors will ditch those clichéd stories in favor of more adventurous feats of imagination. Yes, audiences still want to have their emotions connect with the characters on the screen; they want to be made to laugh and cry with them.

However, now our eyes can pop and our jaws can drop, especially as we're enveloped in wondrous 3-D worlds. The way fine art moved from versions of realism, to impressionism, to expressionism, to cubism, to abstractionism and beyond, movies equally can jump to new visual and storytelling modes.

We'll still have the romances, comedies and dramas we're used to, but perhaps not as many, especially the bad ones. As animation sets free filmmakers' creativity and invention, I hope to see a much wider range of movies, not just the dialogue-bound, illustrated novels, live-action comic books, and boring sequels and series that films have become.

At "Avatar's" release, James Cameron said anything a filmmaker imagines now can be realized on screen, provided there's enough money and time. As technology becomes cheaper, and as these films become better and even more popular, I expect we'll be seeing more of them. Already we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of child-friendly movies, thanks to the pioneering digital efforts of Pixar and other studios. With the success of Disney's hand-drawn, animated "Princess and the Frog," I look forward to even more such pictures.

I've always had a special affection for animated movies. Once you put actors in front of a camera lens, you've limited your creative choices, but now we're at that point where filmmakers have a free range of choices. May they be up to the challenge.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.  

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Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved