Ntuple Indemnity

Most of what I wanted to say about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow didn’t make it into the Gateway piece under my name, some of which was going into more detail than I could fit in the space I was given, others of which were removed or rewritten in the editorial process. (Regular blog-readers accustomed to my writing style should be able to pick out what’s what.)

Most of it has to do with its relation to other films that come before it, seminal works that almost necessitate a mention in a proper appraisal of Sky Captain lest the analysis feel woefully incomplete. I’ve already mentioned its tribute to the Star Wars Trilogy, which I watched in its entirety on DVD yesterday. (More on that in another post.) This is the kind of thing I want to discuss, but I would like to emphasize not so much like references themselves but rather the use thereof.

I’m not going to dwell on specific things that were excised from my original review or comment on some of the changes themselves, due to matters of staff policy and good taste, with one exception. I make this exception because it is of critical import. In the last line of the published review, I call Sky Captain “a special effects showpiece where Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro have taken the place of older techniques.” What I originally did was call it a modern Harryhausen where said movie editing software has taken the place of Claymation.

Maybe it was changed to be more accessible to the kind of layperson who has never watched a film produced before the date of his own birth, but given Ray Harryhausen’s distinctive contributions to animation in mixed-media cinema, my one-sentence capsule of Sky Captain was fully intended to be a very specific reference to the man behind Jason and the Argonauts. I am not going to whine about the omission itself, but allow me to explain something that I think is key to grasping the spirit of Kerry Conran’s killer robot movie.

See, Sky Captain‘s detractors – current, would-be and otherwise – have and will continue to focus their efforts largely around the syllogism that it is by its very nature a special effects film, special effects are bad for you, and therefore the movie is also bad for you. Take David Sterrit’s review in The Christian Science Monitor, for instance:

But, uh, what’s wrong with real images of reality, captured with a movie camera? It’s one thing to use computer-generated imagery as a way of “drawing” things a camera couldn’t photograph – the cartoon characters of the Shrek movies, say. It’s another thing to use computer wizardry as a way of bypassing real things in the real world.

“Look how industrious and ingenious we are!” coo wired-up moviemakers as they mimic things so convincingly on their high-definition screens. In fact they’re a lazy and disingenuous lot, so in love with their own daydreams that they see no need to do something radical – like going outside and filming things that might take them by surprise.

Yes, Sky Captain is unquestionably an effects piece where the live action supplements the animation, not the other way around. Yes, some people will absolutely despise it for being what it is. In some cases (but not all), their reasoning will quite openly reveal a prejudice against animation, and computer animation in particular – or, as in the review I just cited, a thinly-veiled pro-realist prejudice against all visual forms of mimesis. You will hear familiar yarns about how the special effects take undue precedence over the human element – which, when applied to many of the summer-season tentpoles nowadays, is a valid assessment. I still don’t know what everybody sees in X-Men or The Matrix Reloaded, and I despised that other comic book film that opened with a zeppelin. To varying degrees, those three movies (and many others) had light and noise at the forefront, and suffered for the lack of an underlying narrative propulsion.

The difference is that for some reason, in Sky Captain it’s okay. The characters are broad archetypes (“Sky Captain,” for a convenient and obvious example), the plot is in the pulp tradition of hopping from one set piece to the next through a series of escalating conflicts, and the killer robots are the stars of the show. Conran gets away with this because the art design is a pastiche of Golden Age wonders, and the way the shots are composed and edited drives the story at the micro level – not from scene to scene, but from shot to shot. In film, shot flow is as much a part of what we call “story” as what we know as “plot,” which is story on the macro scale.

But Sky Captain still remains an effects movie, and realists need not apply. If you want contemporary character-driven cinema where technical trickery plays no role, go experience the joyous delights of Garden State, though I dare you to keep waving the “realist” flag when you encounter the scene at the ark.

And that brings us to Ray Harryhausen, whom we look upon today as one of the men so thoroughly canonized as the stop-motion legend that he is, he has become no less than a saint of the church of animation. He came from a special effects background and made special effects movies, but ones so legendary that his expression of what we call “movie magic” is still revered today. Heck, the world of Monsters, Inc. even names a sushi restaurant after the guy.

If we can appreciate Harryhausen for his feature films where live actors battle fantastic monsters of all shapes and sizes, I see no reason to discredit Kerry Conran for doing the exact same thing with leading-edge computer animation in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Looking at the social response to motion pictures, which is itself a comprehensive field of study, it still baffles me that computer animation gets such a bad rap for doing exactly what stop-motion figures and matte paintings once did with relative impunity. In Sky Captain‘s case, it’s even very much the same kind of film. It is flatly impossible for anyone who is familiar with the original 1933 King Kong to miss the similarities between Skull Island and the quasi-prehistoric wonderland that Sky Captain and Polly Perkins stumble into late in Conran’s piece.

And while on the subject of stumbling into wonderlands, let’s talk about The World of Tomorrow‘s closest connection to the World of Today, the rickety suspension bridge that hangs between our world and the fantasy world. It comes in the form of a movie with which you may be familiar.

After the opening scene in the Hindenburg III, we are introduced to reporter Polly Perkins as she receives a tip from one Walter Jennings (Trevor Baxter), who claims knowledge as to who is next in the line of scientists that have mysteriously disappeared. They arrange to meet for a film at Radio City Music Hall. Given that the entire film was shot over bluescreen and the backgrounds were later inserted, I wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow was ever told while shooting the scene exactly what scene from which movie would be playing.

That movie is The Wizard of Oz, and it provides one of the simplest, yet most outstanding applications of Sky Captain‘s compositing process. In this scene, Jennings reveals his hidden secrets to an attentive Polly and passes her two metallic vials for safekeeping, objects sought by the enemy throughout the movie. The two are shot directly from the side in profile, framing the picture – while between them, Glinda the Good Witch floats onscreen in that pink bubble of hers. That, of course, is the scene where Dorothy has just dropped into Munchkinland, and Glinda appears to first tell our heroine of the Land of Oz, then bestow upon her a whole other pair of objects coveted by the enemy: the ruby slippers. It’s a superimposition of the beginning of the journey in both stories, what Joseph Campbell calls “the crossing of the threshold.”

Come for killer robots. Stay for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the end credits.

I leave you with required reading this week: a superb Apple feature on the technical aspects of how Sky Captain was made, which should erase any doubt about just what kind of movie to expect, for those of you who have yet to see it.

I’m not going to get anything done this week.

I know this because I just came back from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and I can say with absolute certainty that the five hundred words I’m doing for The Gateway are not going to be sufficient. Were it not for the fact that I almost have a responsibility to enacting a meticulous scene-by-scene deconstruction of the Star Wars Trilogy DVDs when they come out later this week, I could be writing about Sky Captain for weeks. (Well, that and how I have yet to get around to explaining exactly why it is that I have been telling everybody to see Garden State lately.)

Let’s put an embargo on the specifics of my opinions about Sky Captain itself – you can read that in print later this week, and I have no intention of treading on the GSJS’ freelancing policy. I do, however, want to make you aware of one little detail before you go see the movie this weekend, which you really should, because it was one of the coolest moments in a movie full of really cool moments. When Sky Captain docks with the mobile landing platform in the clouds, his plane touches down on docking platform 327.

If I actually make good on my threat to deconstruct Star Wars scene by scene – and it’s not like I’ve never done it before – you can expect to hear the number 327 a lot. It appears several times in both trilogies, but most significantly as the number of the Death Star docking bay into which the Millennium Falcon is pulled by a tractor beam. The appearance that is perhaps even more relevant to Sky Captain, however, is that the Falcon is cleared for the exact same platform number yet again when it docks with another flying base, that being Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back.

If what I just said made you squeal in delight, Sky Captain is for you.

This is the Main Street Electrical Parade.

This is the rain on that parade.

This whole thing reminds me of the old hackneyed quote, “You can’t fire me, I quit.” The benefit to all is that in two years, Michael Eisner will be out of Disney’s top seat. Unfortunately, it will be on his terms. Now, I for one could care less about Disney’s hotel business, their handling of ABC or opening Disneylands all over this planet and a few others to come, but what I am interested in is the effect this will have on what defines the Magic Kingdom at its core, feature animation.

By the time Eisner is gone, two or three of WDFA’s first all-CG features will be out of the pipeline, and if they turn out well, he may be riding his way out of his tenure on a wave of success. But the last thing these films need is more micromanagement and mismarketing, and if Eisner plans to step up his involvement in his last two years at the company, this could be a problem. The CG projects are already a double-edged sword by themselves, because as much as one would like these films to bust the blocks, it could very well justify the death knell of traditional animation at the Mouse House in the eyes of the suits.

Interestingly, 2006 is when Pixar’s first movie outside of their Disney contract, Ratatouille, is targeted for release – and it has yet to find a distributor. A distribution deal with Disney may well be possible, and Eisner’s successor – be it his hand-picked recommendation Robert Iger or not – will be off to a rocking start.

For now, let’s sit back and see what Roy and Stanley are going to do about all this.

It’s that time of the year again. I refer not to my birthday, which I am commemorating throughout the week by watching all five Pixar features back-to-back, but that mid-year mark in late August when the summer movie season is effectively over, and we are halfway from one Oscar season to the next. You can always tell when it hits, because if you go to the cinema in late July and August, all you see are uninspiring trailers for the dud-dumping that goes on in September and early October, one of the two perennial droughts where studios release the films they are not particularly proud to back (the other being late January to early April). Now that the release date lineup for the next few months is falling into place and we are finally seeing trailers for potential contenders, it is high time to finally get excited about movies again. As was the case last year, columnist David Poland is the Oscar heavyweight in the prediction game with his 30 Weeks to Oscar chart, and OscarWatch.com’s Kris Tapley is a pundit to watch.

This is another back-heavy year in the making, because so far, the year has offered practically nothing in the way of Oscar contenders. Remarkably, the three best films I saw this year were all sequels – Kill Bill, Vol. 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Spider-Man 2. I’m not sure if this speaks to the increasing quality of sequels, which is only the case with Spider-Man given that Kill Bill was one movie sliced in half and Azkaban was based on an established marvel of a literary follow-up, or the generally lacklustre performance of original pieces this summer, but what is certain is that none of them are in contention. The only film released this year that may clinch a Best Picture nomination is The Passion of the Christ, and that depends on the extent to which the November-December crop meets expectations. It stands virtually no chance of winning.

Rather than delivering my own predictions about awarding films that are weeks or months away from hitting theatres, I will offer a brief guide to the remaining 2004 releases that I am most anticipating, the ones that I think have the most potential to be permanent five-star additions to my personal hall of fame. These are the ones I will see on the opening weekend, if not the opening day. There are six of them; in order of release, they are:

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (9/17) – This was originally slated for a June release right in the path of Spider-Man 2, and was wisely bumped to September, where it is the only film on the schedule that even remotely piques my interest. I’m unabashedly a sucker for movies that take a genre and explore it to the farthest corners, and Kerry Conran’s special effects extravaganza looks to do just that with the same pulp sci-fi serials of yore that inspired George Lucas. The only thing I am a little concerned about is that everything I’ve seen of the film looks a little soft and feathery, so hopefully the blending between live actors and animated backgrounds is more seamless in the final product. Sequels aside, this year has yet to see a great effects-driven popcorn movie, and Sky Captain may be the one to step up to the plate. The advance screening at Comic-Con reportedly brought down the house. Killer robots, flying aces and 1930s costumes? Just my type.

The Incredibles (11/5) – I have long made it clear, and by “long” I mean since I saw the footage attached to Finding Nemo fifteen months ago, that if at the beginning of the year I was told I could only go to the cinema once until 2005, this superhero blockbuster in the making would unquestionably be the one I chose to watch. Pixar, more than any production studio in history, commands total brand loyalty from this here writer. The studio is five for five when it comes to knocking projects out of the park (or in the case of Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo, well into the stratosphere). Directed by Brad Bird, who worked on The Simpsons and is best known for his wondrous but largely unnoticed The Iron Giant, early word on The Incredibles is that Pixar might have outdone itself again. As a perk, as if it needed any, it will likely sport the first teaser trailers for both Revenge of the Sith and Cars, the biggest blips on my 2005 radar.

Alexander (11/5) – The Incredibles gets opening-day priority, but I will likely also be watching Oliver Stone’s latest on the 5-7 November weekend. It’s been a full nine years since the last truly classic historical hero epic, Braveheart. (I’m ignoring The Lord of the Rings here because while I consider Middle-Earth a part of our history, most do not; Gladiator, while a lot of fun, was itself an entirely fictional piece in a historical setting.) Alexander may be the breakthrough picture that reminds us that the legendary period costume dramas about larger-than-life historical figures never rested on spectacularly bloody battles and casts of thousands, but on a thorough interpretation of what made these people tick, what guided their actions and decisions, and what consequences they had to face. See Lawrence of Arabia for details.

Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles (11/26) – I’m a huge admirer of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s previous collaboration with Audrey Tautou, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, and still find it to be one of the most imaginative and endearing comedies in recent memory. Un Long Dimanche (to be released here under the title A Very Long Engagement, I hear) is something completely different, a war bride drama based on a World War I novel, something that on the surface might sound like a familiar premise to those of you who saw last year’s Cold Mountain. This is shaping up to be a must-see, and the chief concern is whether and when the local arthouse screens will pick it up.

The Aviator (12/17) – Martin Scorsese’s second film starring Leonardo DiCaprio (the first being the disappointing Gangs of New York), a biographical picture about aviator and film director Howard Hughes, is considered to be this year’s favourite for Best Picture. Judging from the footage and the pedigree of the people involved, I cannot disagree. The problem is that word on the street indicates it is behind schedule and may be delayed to 2005. DiCaprio convinced me in Catch Me If You Can that paired with the right director, he is a delightful actor to watch. As long as this movie avoids the trap of being two-thirds classic, one-third nosedive as was the case with Gangs, it’s almost guaranteed to be a high-quality masterwork.

The Phantom of the Opera (12/24) – As I have professed on many an occasion, it is important to me on a very personal level that this film be good. But let’s be optimistic for a second: other than the fact that Joel Schumacher’s been a marked man among movie buffs since Batman and Robin, Phantom has yet to raise any early warning alarms, and is actually shaping up to be what I imagined. And this is a case where just being what I imagined is more than sufficient to place it in the pantheon of everlasting classics, as was the case with The Lord of the Rings, the last adaptation I cared about this much. I know I am not alone when it comes to being sentimentally attached to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s finest work, and this is one chandelier nobody wants to see crash to the floor.

In addition to these six, there are a number of upcoming movies that I will probably see, though I do not consider them exciting priorities. As an animation aficionado I cannot miss Shark Tale or The Polar Express, and while I am highly sceptical about both of them in different ways, I will at least see them out of curiosity. I’m hearing good things about Ray, the impeccably timely biography of the late Ray Charles starring Jamie Foxx, who allegedly underwent a procedure that rendered him temporarily blind in order to fit into the role. Being busy over the past few weeks I also have to catch up on the late-summer releases that have garnered some acclaim, among them The Bourne Supremacy, Collateral and Napoleon Dynamite. Garden State has not hit theatres here yet but is set to expand on Friday. Once those are out of the way, I may compose a more comprehensive recap of this year’s summer stable.

Ain’t-It-Cool News has a lot of production art from the post-Chicken Little Walt Disney Feature Animation pipeline – American Dog, A Day With Wilbur Robinson and Rapunzel Unbraided. I heard about these upcoming projects two weeks ago by way of a recent article on one of my daily stops, Jim Hill Media, which was highly critical of the new WDFA policy that prohibits animators from working on a production until it had an approved screenplay, contrary to how animation actually works.

American Dog is from Chris Sanders of the delightful but perhaps slightly overrated Lilo & Stitch, and the preliminary art boasts a charming, edgy aesthetic. Of course, what makes animation great is not the individual frames but how they connect to one another to tell a visual story, so let’s cross our fingers that it all comes together. A Day With Wilbur Robinson, slated for 2006, is an adaptation of William Joyce’s children’s book of the same title, which I have never read, but have heard is fantastic. The story reel, the animation equivalent of the storyboarding and pre-visualization that goes into live-action, is reportedly phenomenal.

The art for 2007’s Rapunzel Unbraided is enchantingly beautiful, but the content itself is a big question mark; I know very little about the film at this stage, but it looks like Disney is trying to pull it closer to the Shrek end of the spectrum like they once tried with the never-made Frog Prince. To which I say, go ahead and make it satirical (The Princess Bride, anyone?) but please, for the love of Mickey Mouse, don’t try to make it all hip and contemporary. PDI’s approach is already showing signs of overstaying its welcome; no need to imitate it further. The Disney reputation was built on timelessness, not the cheap temporal appeal that has reduced many a feature from great to good. Case in point: regardless of whether or not you like the music of Phil Collins, he has absolutely no place in Brother Bear, and I am quite serious when I say that his inclusion takes away from the movie.

I really do hope Disney digs itself out of its hole with these three projects. Hopefully they are as daring and creative as they look, and escape the executive-level mismanagement that has led the Disney brand down a path of decay. Unfortunately, scoring box-office hits with these upcoming features will have the side effect of further convincing Michael Eisner and his cronies that traditional animation is dead, and we may have a long wait ahead of us until Disney returns to its roots.

There are few things the movie industry needs more than a kick in the pants to remind studio execs that 3D computer animation does not a better film make. Or, considering the success of the outstandingly funny Chicken Run and next year’s anticipated hit The Wallace & Gromit Movie: Curse of the Wererabbit, 2D traditional film does not equal a bomb. So maybe the dollar figures say, “Yes it does,” but that is an oversimplification. What we really need are distributors who recognize a great film when they see one and know how to promote it properly, unlike how Warner Brothers completely dropped the ball with The Iron Giant, which will hopefully see a revival as its upcoming DVD re-release rides the hype around The Incredibles. We don’t need people releasing Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s seminal masterpiece and the biggest box-office hit in Japanese history, dubbed over in English when foreign films have demonstrated a record of doing better when released properly – that is to say, subtitled. We don’t need more grounds for marketing conspiracy theories like the ones surrounding Home on the Range.

SaveDisney.com‘s feature, “Killing Traditional Animation”, says it better than I do.

While on the subject of Disney films, I want to say a few words about a book that mentions some of them in passing: Dan Brown’s mega-hit novel The Da Vinci Code.

Normally I don’t review the novels I read, and there are a number of reasons for this. Foremost is that if I afforded each and every one of them the analysis I wish I could, I would never get through my extensive reading list. Then there’s the matter of personal pride, in the sense that I do not wish to reveal the full extent of how much I haven’t read. Following that is the fact that I spend most of my time reading established classics instead of current releases, and in most cases have nothing to add to the volume of discourse that already exists around them.

Once in a blue moon, though, I get a little curious about just what it is that has propped up authors like this Dan Brown fellow into the #1 slot of The New York Times for such an extended period of time. Besides, it is always good to get an indication of what it is that the public is consuming at large.

So my question is this: is it just The Da Vinci Code, or is the prose in all contemporary pop literature so juvenile?

I’m not saying Da Vinci is bad – far from it. The plotting is tight, the puzzles are clever, the premises are a conglomeration of outlandish but intriguing theories that run contrary to all conventional wisdom, and are proud of it. It’s just badly written. The two protagonists that carry us through the mystery, symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu, are not characters so much as they are physical manifestations of their respective -ologies. At times, we see every tired prosaic cliché worthy of a loud and sonorous groan – among them, childhood flashbacks and italicized internal monologue up the wazoo. It’s like the entire thing was written with the prospective movie rights in mind, because if anything, The Da Vinci Code feels like a detailed screenplay treatment.

The apologists undoubtedly say, well, plot-driven thrillers don’t need characters, tone and style, or thematic resonance, and only the most pretentiously snobby Ulysses-wielding literati would presume to demand such literary luxuries. Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald and Ian Fleming beg to differ. To name a few.

Full marks for plot construction, though – well, aside from an obvious villain with a concealed identity and a few puzzles that should not have posed our heroes as much trouble as they did. I won’t deny that this is a book that kept me turning the pages to find out what happens next. It’s easy to see why The Da Vinci Code has attracted so much discourse: whether by accident or design, Brown often diverges into passages where he dumps a lot of detailed information geared towards supporting his ideas about revisionism in theological history, and presents them with a non-fictional authority that sends people straight to their search engines in an attempt to separate what is real from what is not.

The downside is that when you do this in front of people who know their stuff, they see right through some of the more frivolous contortions of truth. I’m not referring to the theological debates about the Council of Nicea and the deification of Jesus Christ, but the small things, the details that make the book seem really clever in the eyes of a layman. Observe how in one instance, Brown claims that the Romans referred to the wonders of anagrams as ars magna, the Great Art. Nice try, Mr. Brown. Ars magna is a clever anagram of “anagrams”, but the English word itself was derived from the Greek word anagrammatismos, which lacks the same connection. Such a claim is like saying the Eastwoods dubbed their son Clint deliberately because they could rearrange his name to spell “Old West Action”.

This is also where the Disney connection comes in. Brown has obviously been reading a lot about the surreptitious symbols and malicious metaphors in Walt Disney’s secret destructive agenda, or something to that effect – without much regard for who does what in the development of an animated feature. He claims how Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty is concealed under the name “Rose” as an extension of Disney’s purported agenda to spread the truth about the Holy Grail and goddess worship that lies at the centre of the novel – neglecting to mention, of course, that the name is taken directly from Briar-Rose, Sleeping Beauty’s name in the original text of the Grimm fairy tale. Then he leaps forward to make a connection to the modern era of The Little Mermaid, over which Walt had no direct say, being dead and all. Sometimes it is hard to tell if Brown is intentionally mistaking memetics for conspiracies.

In spite of these misgivings, I do think The Da Vinci Code is worth a read, if only to catch up on the controversial things it has to say. But this may be a case where the movie, currently attached to Ron Howard, may very easily eclipse the book.

On the subject of bestselling literature: J.K. Rowling delivered a reading of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Edinburgh this weekend, and followed it with a question-and-answer session about a number of things, The Half-Blood Prince among them. The book itself is halfway to completion, and Rowling draws attention to some unanswered questions to consider. Very interesting indeed:

There are two questions that I have never been asked but that I should have been asked, if you know what I mean. If you want to speculate on anything, you should speculate on these two things, which will point you in the right direction.

The first question that I have never been asked – it has probably been asked in a chatroom but no one has ever asked me – is, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” Not, “Why did Harry live?” but, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” The killing curse rebounded, so he should have died. Why didn’t he? At the end of Goblet of Fire he says that one or more of the steps that he took enabled him to survive. You should be wondering what he did to make sure that he did not die – I will put it that way. I don’t think that it is guessable. It may be – someone could guess it – but you should be asking yourself that question, particularly now that you know about the prophecy. I’d better stop there or I will really incriminate myself.

The other question that I am surprised no one has asked me since Phoenix came out – I thought that people would – is why Dumbledore did not kill or try to kill Voldemort in the scene in the ministry. I know that I am giving a lot away to people who have not read the book. Although Dumbledore gives a kind of reason to Voldemort, it is not the real reason. When I mentioned that question to my husband – I told Neil that I was going to mention it to you – he said that it was because Voldemort knows that there are two more books to come. As you can see, we are on the same literary wavelength. [Laughter]. That is not the answer; Dumbledore knows something slightly more profound than that. If you want to wonder about anything, I would advise you to concentrate on those two questions. That might take you a little bit further.

Now there’s an author of bestselling literature who knows a thing or two about presenting elaborate mysteries under the cloak of witty wordplay and a dramatis personae worth volumes of character analysis.