What was broken about animation that now we think we have to do it with sophisticated computer programs? What was incomplete about reality that we feel we have to mine it digitally?
In the case of animation, the supreme irony is that computer-generated images are now being modified to try to enhance their expressiveness, not to look more “real,” but to look more like cartoons. Expressiveness is implicit in hand-drawn animation, and is, in fact, its main asset. The recent computer-animated blockbuster The Polar Express cost $100 million. High tech sensors were used to model the facial expressions of Tom Hanks, the actor who voiced one of the main characters. Now why go through all that effort and expense, all that time and trouble, when it would have been cheaper and easier and more effective just to have taken all the sensors off Hanks’s face, pointed a camera at it, and let him act?
But I guess when Hollywood is concerned, the wheel just wasn’t good enough – too round and rolly.
The predictable answer to my question is that computer graphics are needed to create the unique world of The Polar Express. Except it isn’t. If our goal is to make a world seem real, why use purposefully cartoon-like computer graphics to do it? Why not use live-action if you want to make it seem real, or traditional animation if you don’t? And if the argument is that traditional animation is too expensive, look at the figures for the film at issue. $100 million could hire a whole lot of animators for a whole lot of time.
It makes neither financial nor artistic sense to use computer animation in this way unless the real goal is to cache the biometric data of enough actors and their expressions that each can be recoded until any variety of characters can be created virtually, thus doing away with “real” actors entirely. It wouldn’t surprise me if this were actually so: movie executives have a surprisingly good habit of missing the point entirely in their incessant desire to turn out “product.”And with the limited number of film formulas the major studios have allowed themselves recently, and the movie-going public’s acceptance of this uniformity, the executives may well succeed.
A simpler explanation is that people go to the movies partly because of the special effects, and if a movie is all special effects, well, that has to be better, right? And partially, I’m sure, the movie executives have figured out that Toy Story and its clones have been incredibly successful, so the solution must be to pixellate. This ignores the fact that a good measure of the success of the Toy Story flicks and Shreck is the good writing, not the style of animation. They might have been successful without the writing, but they wouldn’t also have been good.
And just as there still is a niche market for poems and short stories and paintings and sculptures, so there may be room for academic and/or non-profit sponsorship of traditional animation. Like the rest of these outmoded arts, it will still exist, on life support and mostly comatose, but technically still alive.
It’s not enough that Derrida had to pass, but now Susan Sontag is dead too.
It may just be that the argument over Creationism vs. Evolution is largely semantic. That makes it no less real, of course.
If Evolutionists are right (and I think the probably are), nature herself is actually vastly intelligent, more so than human beings are able at this stage of the game to fully understand. And this may be just what is at issue: the Creationists wish to see a god whose intelligence they can understand and who conveniently reinforces their interpretation of “biblically revealed truth.”
Their Intelligent Designer is capped by two leather covers of the NRSV or KJV, nicely situated in neat rows of vaguely Shakespearean prose. And while they’ll claim otherwise, that their God is unlimited in His knowledge and scope, omnipotent and omnipresent, their notion of god in practice is considerably more limited – to the point of being moribund. He is limited to a paltry few rules of behavior and being (say ten with the odd covenant thrown in for good measure), and is dead or dying in that these rules shall never be allowed to change or be revealed to have been wrong to begin with.
The true ire of the Creationists at what scientists are trying to show is not that it denies god, but rather that it suggests a god whose nature they cannot control with their dogmas and traditional sets of interpretations. They are angry about the minor truths that the theory of evolution reveals because it threatens their monopoly on ideas about the nature of “their” deity.
I suggest as a remedy that they read the book of Job more carefully – most critically that they read beyond the part where Job’s troubles are recounted to the part where god talks directly to him, and Job, humbled, for once, shuts up and listens.
from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland
I’m always surprised when the analysts employed by commercial media outlets are confounded and amazed at the perennially stagnant holiday shopping season, especially when they’re called upon to pontificate about the lackluster sales numbers for America’s discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Target. All their befuddlement really shows is to which demographic these analysts don’t belong – namely, the one actually shopping at America’s discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Target.
I look around me and see exactly why we’re not spending as much as America’s profit takers want us to: we don’t have any more to spend. No matter where corporate profits on the whole are headed right now, the fact remains that real world wages for the middle class haven’t increased appreciably in over 20 years. At the same time, prices for such things as housing, fuel, food, utilities, and insurance continue to outpace overall inflation, and those are all things real middle class people still have to buy. Sure, we get a lot of cheap stuff from China these days, but when your health insurance premiums every month are more than your mortgage, even those bargains from China start looking pretty dear.
And I’m just addressing the middle class (what little of it is left) here: the poor can’t even afford Wal-Mart’s everyday low prices.
For as much bad as Henry Ford brought into the world through mechanized production, support for institutionalized fascism, and rampant consumerism, he got one thing dead right: he made sure that his employees could afford the cars they built. With its no-holds-barred, profit-above-ethics, balls-to-the-wall-marketing, contemporary Capitalism has lost sight of this ethic. If Wal-Mart could get away with paying its employees two bucks an hour, you can bet it would do exactly that – and then it would have the gall to tell those employees how great it is to be part of the team. Ford’s workers ensured Ford customers, and that proved a successful formula. Even if you’re the most efficiently run corporate machine that ever hummed through the fiscal landscape, you’re still destined to break down if nobody can afford what you sell.
Another aspect of this is inherent to Capitalism in the twisted way it’s played in the early 21st Century U.S. Success in a market-driven Capitalist system like ours is not really based on turning a profit. Since market investors actually make their money buying and selling the value of stock, not collecting dividends, our system requires continually increasing profitability. So it’s no wonder retail analysts get their panties in a wad when people buy the same amount for Christmas from year-to-year. If the consumer does not spend more from year-to-year, the investor classes have a hard time turning a mega-profit on the annual increase in corporate profit.
This manner of measuring success isn’t really business so much as it’s metastasis. If human cells acted like this and showed continual, uncontrolled growth, we’d call it cancer. If a market does it, we call it a good year. This measure of success over the long term not only exploits (and sometimes destroys, when layoffs run up a stock price) workers, it demolishes ecosystems by using an ever-increasing amount of resources, and forces advertisers to become ever-more invasive and aggressive. But for this holiday season, it just proves how little we regard what Jesus actually said, that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.