How to Express Yourself (in 10 Trillion Pixels)

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.