Well... at least it's not Loonatics.

I was told back when my favorite movie that I've never seen came out that they played this brand-new CGI Warner Brothers cartoon featuring Wile E. Coyote & Roadrunner before the show.  Well now it's on the internet and I watched it, and... I guess I'm not sure how I feel about it.  I don't really have any ill-will to the transition from hand-drawn to 3D (I mean it's not a process that I particularly care for to begin with but it could be worse), I just think they could've picked a more interesting cartoon to make.  Take a look for yourself:

Coyote Falls
Uploaded by duck69. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

Okay!  You've seen it.  Glad you did?  Good.  Me too.  Our relationship will only grow because of it.  Let me break down my own personal opinion regarding this cartoon.

What I liked:  I think they did a great job of avoiding the stiffness that you see a lot of in CG.  These characters stretch and bend and come as close to their hand-drawn counterparts as I've seen.  I think the general mood of the short is pretty spot-on too... I mean I guess it'd be pretty hard to screw up a Wile. Coyote cartoon.

They got that swooshin' animation down!  Mmmm...

What I ... didn't like:  I mean I guess if you don't laugh at the Coyote being hit by a truck the first time you're probably not going to laugh the next fourteen times it happens (I counted).  Is that really a great idea to bring to the table for a new Wile E. Coyote cartoon?

WRITER:  "Ok, remember sixty years ago when we had that gag about the coyote getting hit by a truck?  Let's do that again, but...

DIRECTOR: "... I'm listening."

WRITER:  "But we do it 15 times in 2 minutes.  That's 30x more laughs!"

DIRECTOR: "..."

WRITER:  "... and we'll make it in THREE-DEEEE."

DIRECTOR: "Sold.  We'll call it Coyote Falls for some reason." 

Also, what better screams 3D ANIMATION better than opening on a particle effect?

Living up to the original's particle effect scripting.  Oh you cad, Chuck Jones!

I think what really bothers me about this cartoon is I have no sense of caring what happens to the Coyote.  I'm not trying to say that he was ever that relatable of a character and they ignored the depth of his intrigue or anything, he just never gets HURT.  He just takes one hit after the other after the other after the other after the other and never shows any sign of slowing down or even a scratch on his body.  I know he never technically got hurt in older iterations, but he'd at least have something to show for being blown up or being crushed by a boulder.

It's not like I want to see him get beheaded or anything, but give me a little payoff and a chance to breathe in-between all the bumper denting.  Here's what we get instead:

"Who else looks as bored as I do right now?" 

A sad-faced reaction shot and a black eye are all I'm asking for, folks.  I guess it's harder to render realistic-looking charred coyote fur than it is just to draw it in a cartoon.  Maybe they should've just stuck with that.

DISCLAIMER:  If I seem to hold Looney Tunes on a pedestal, it's generally because I try to ignore everything that happened with the brand after the early 60's when they moved production to DePatie-Freleng Enterprises and beyond.  That includes all the weird and cheap-looking Looney Tunes from the 70's, Space Jam, That Other Movie they did with Brendan Fraser, Loonatics, etc.  However, I do have a special place in my heart for the likes of Tiny Toons and Tazmania.

Loonatics.  Because we're out of ideas.

Yesterday I Fulfilled My Dream of Animating Meat

I'll upload the video once it's all done.

Work's been picking up again lately but I'll do my best to keep everything around these parts reasonably updated 'til things slow down again.

Also, I've started seeing this poster pop up around subways and bus stops around the city lately, and they wonder why it's hard to get people to respect animation as an art form...

"Toemeo... Blowmeo... Glowmeo... Growmeo... Gnomeo?  EUREKA!"

Okay, realistically is there any other way to come up with the idea for that movie other than mispronouncing the word "Romeo?"  Do we really need to word puns on one movie poster?  What does "a lawn way" even mean?  Is that how some people raise their pets?  Who was the clever little scamp who also figured out they could fit the shape of a gnome inside of that title's logo?  Their mother raised them well.  You can tell they paid more attention to the texture on the gnome's feet than they did on the whole concept of this movie.  

At least it will follow proudly in the footsteps of other such CGI fare.

Coming Soon: My Personal Favorite

Very soon I'm going to breakdown shot-by-shot one of my favorite animated scenes of all time.  I've been wanting to do it ever since I started this blog and I'm super excited to finally sit down & put my appreciation to writing.

I'm sorry I'm dwelling on this, but...

Today while rendering a project I decided to venture onto one of my favorite sites for entertainment news, The Onion's A.V. Club.  On it was posted an interview with Legend of the Guardian's director Zack Snyder, the very same of 300 & last year's The Watchmen.  I was curious to see if what he had to say about his new film would change my preemptive (and possibly irrationally negative) opinion of the movie which OPENS THIS FRIDAY YOU GUYS OMG.  Needless to say that as an animator, I wasn't swayed.  Let's start with some excerpts from the interview, shall we?

AV Club: You actually choreographed the fights with actors wearing owl suits, fighting each other. How’d that work?

Zack Snyder: Yeah. When we got to the fight scenes, one of the things was like—these owls are supposedly an ancient culture, and they have a martial tradition that we can’t just make up. It’s gonna look goofy if they’re just clawing at each other. .... We got my old stunt team from 300 and made them put these cardboard wings on and basically fight each other.

One thing about the art of animation is that you get to do whatever your mind can dream up, after all.  Unfortunately, the mind can be a tricky place and have a few too many ideas sometimes, so why not just dress a dude up and have owls fight like people?  You know what, I've actually seen this before in another animated film which may OR MAY NOT have been a terrible animated feature (skip to about 0:50):

...  Back to Zack!

ZS:  ... The animators then don’t have to pretend. It’s a real thing they have to work with. I think that comes through in the film. 

If there's one thing I hate doing as an animator, it's pretending.  UGH IF ONLY I DIDN'T HAVE TO PRETEND THOSE LETTERS ACROSS THE SCREEN IN THAT COMMERCIAL I WORKED ON TODAY LIFE WOULD BE SO MUCH BETTER. 
Later on in the interview, when talking about mixing owl physiology with that of a humans (yup)...

ZS: The thing about owls is that they do sort of have this facial disc, which is unlike any other bird. They kind of have a face, more than like a dog or a giraffe. They have this weird, alien face that you can actually make expressive. We really pushed without breaking. I didn’t want it to be a cartoon. I was like, “I don’t want to make a cartoon. That I can’t do.” 

Children do hate cartoons, after all.  This is one talking owl movie that's not for kids, see?  One thing that I think people don't understand about animation in this sense is that it NEEDS to be exaggerated.  The physics and the way things move shouldn't act as they do in reality, because then things appear stiff and dull.  Here's an example:  I recently watched Anastasia with my girlfriend, and while I didn't mind the movie itself I didn't really care for the main protagonists, Anastasia and Dmitri.  It wasn't because of their characters or lines, it was just that once the weird-looking villain or the comic-relief-bat Bartok appeared on-screen, the protagonists seemed rigid and inflexible by comparison.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any clips readily available on Youtube due to copyright blah blah blah, but I did find these stills online:

"My mouth can only move so much due to the limitations of my movement and desiiiign"

Bartok.

Did you scream when you saw that bat with the dislocated jawbone?!  Pretty scary huh?  

ZS:  So the faux-realistic look was a look I was comfortable with, because this environment feels real. These owls feel real to me. “Now I can make an adventure that feels compelling. The danger is real.”

Ok so just to make sure I understand this correctly, Zack Snyder wanted the danger to be real.  He wanted to evoke some suspense in his audience and give them something "that feels compelling."  I don't want to call a guy wrong, but let's point out a few inconsistencies with that statement above.

1.  You do remember you were making a movie about talking owls, right? 

2.  Unfortunately the danger is not real as you have just made a series of images that are projected on a screen with accompanying audio.  Even then, the only time that danger ever seemed real enough for audiences was in 1895.  According to the story, people leapt out of their seats to avoid being hit by the train.  No joke.

 

3. Okay that last one was a bit of a low blow Zack, I'm sorry.  I know you were going for "emotions" and had no intention of actually putting the audience in real harm's way.  In fact, I've felt my heart rate escalate and felt nervous while watching animation before.  Hell, I was straight up scared by this when I was a kid: 

Night on Bald Mountain, Fantasia (1940)

The images above say a lot of great things about that segment from Fantasia: you've got great mood, posing, I mean it just looks like some messed up spooky stuff when you look at it.  Is there anything to detract from them because they're not photo-realistic?  Does this bother anyone?  Don't you just kind of assume the reality of the imagery being shown and understand what fits and what doesn't in that setting?

4.  Back in my high school days I followed the online production diary (if you can call it that by 2000 internet standards) for a film that was to be released in the summer of 2001.  My excitement for it eclipsed anything else that had ever come before to theaters, I drooled over every still and video clip that was released for it.  I checked their website daily even though they updated it once every two months.  I saw it on opening weekend.  This is the film in question:

At that time, nothing had ever been made like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.  Everything seemed so real from the pores on the skin to the clothes to the environments to... well, that was the problem.  The people themselves never seemed real.  They gazed at their digital co-stars with dead eyes, and with all of the motion-capture done, these dolls of people moved eerily like us but weren't us.  It was off-putting.  I walked out of the theater confused and disappointed (the story was also just... terrible but I'm not going to get into that here).  It was a major flop for Squaresoft studios who had produced it and caused them to go bankrupt in the following years.  Eventually they merged with another company to form today's Square-Enix.  I'm not saying Zack Snyder's movie will fail for the same reasons as Final Fantasy, but his lack of imagination and confidence in animation as a whole isn't going to make the owls of Ga'hoole any easier to watch.   

5.  Seriously man it's a whole 90 minutes of fucking talking owls.  Remember when you dressed adult men up like owls and made them fight?

I guess what it all boils down to is that Zack Snyder doesn't think like an animator and that I should stop complaining... and I totally would by now if he wasn't directing a high-budget animated feature.  Personally, I think he shares the same mindset as most filmmakers in that animation is a different & lesser art than live-action film, and I don't judge him for that since that's a pretty popular notion.  You can catch hints of it in his interview, like in the excerpt below where he's discussing the visual effects:

ZS: For instance, say Soren [the film’s owl protagonist] flies into the hollow. I’d say, “If this was a real movie, I’d put the camera low and I’d dolly with him as he comes back.” So that’s the language I used to tell them how to do it, and it worked out really well. There was a point when they created this little bible—the rules, things I liked and didn’t like. Because there’s a lot of trendy things—you never know what the animators will try to whack into the movie.

If only it was a real movie.  Maybe next time, Zack... maybe next time.

Read the whole interview here!

STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING I HAVE AN AMAZING IDEA!

... let's all go watch a movie about fucking owls.

pictured above: owls.

Finally -- a movie that really corners the market for those who love owls and the color treatment of Lord of the Rings.  Let's all congratulate the team on making everything look awkwardly-realistic.  Kids fucking LOVE feather textures, people.  I remember when I was growing up watching Looney Tunes on Saturday mornings thinking to myself, "Y'know what?  I don't really believe Bugs Bunny could exist in our own physical reality.  THIS IS ALL FAKE!"  I really had to struggle with that disconnect in life until I was about 14-years-old.  Thank you, Space Jam.*
I apologize for the randomness of this rant but I just don't understand how this movie made it into theaters.  I should mention that I'm completely uneducated on the whole subject of Legend of the Guardians.  I'm assuming it came from children's literature since I can't imagine someone pitching this to a studio as an original idea ("Guys! Owls you guys!"), but at the same time who really cares?  If you had the power of sophisticated CGI to create any imagery you could possibly imagine, what would compell you to make it this?

... an owl wearing a helmet, everybody.

It's a movie about owls doing things that more interesting animals or creatures could be doing... like dragons or dinosaurs or hell, what they did back in my day.  I think I'm a better man for being ignorant towards this movie.  I mean, c'mon... the owls of ga'hoole?  So on top of spending $15 to watch a movie about owls, the movie poster alludes to the fact that I'll also have to put up with an hour-and-a-half's worth of some owl language that somebody made up peppered with owl-puns.

You know what I think of when I think of owls?  This.

At least in five years' time all the CGI will look like crap.


(because chances are it always does)




* for the record I was also too cynical in my youth to ever watch Space Jam in its entirety.  Le sigh.