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A Review, Followed by a Revelation
Jan. 2nd, 2010 11:59 pmI haven’t been able to get into Livejournal for days, due to internet issues. Way to support my resolution, Universe.
Anyway, Saturday morning I took myself downtown to see some movies, starting with The Young Victoria. The the critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes warned that the movie, while lush-looking, was somewhat anemic and distancing when it came to the storyline. I prepared myself for that disappointment, but ( I was very pleasantly surprised )
After The Young Victoria I headed a block to the other theater to see The Princess and the Frog. Coincidentally, I again solidly disagree with the critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes; while it mostly found glowing praise in reviews, I found the movie to be exceedingly tedious, populated by irritating characters, frenetic comic relief, and very tired clichés.
Admitting that hurt a lot. I love – I mean, love - the hand-drawn format. Because as far as the CGI animation has come, it still hasn’t managed to get dramatic human protagonists (and sometimes certain realistic dramatic animals) entirely right. If you want a classical fairytale – one that has a beautiful female lead – you have to return to the hand-drawn format.
I should pause here and say that while I do sort of have an issue with all humans in CGI movies, I am speaking more to classical romantic protagonists; leading men and leading ladies, characters that are supposed to be beautiful or handsome, dignified and not particularly comedic. Comic characters thrive on a high degree of stylization, but beautiful human characters require a much stricter series of aesthetic choices, choices that bring them close to the proportions of real human faces, and perhaps too close to avoid the Uncanny Valley once they are rendered in CGI’s artificial three-dimensional plane.
Of course, hand-drawn images exaggerate facial proportions hugely, but they’re also far enough away from portraying actual human beings that we don’t encounter the Uncanny Valley at all. We can recognize the exaggerated elements of 2D beauty, and, when we’re not confronted with CGI’s not-quite-right hair, not-quite-right skin texture, not-quite-right shading of the planes of the face, not-quite-right muscle –
Holy shit.
I think I might have just pinned it down. CGI rendered human characters don’t have microexpressions. Mostly we hear about microexpressions as they relate to telltale signs that a person is lying, but microexpressions convey a lot of other subtle, subconscious information about a person’s emotional state. We expect realistic CGI faces to have microexpressions, and when they don’t (in combination with not-quite-right hair, skin, etc.), we slip into CGI’s Uncanny Valley and disconnect from the character.
However, when art gets far enough away from a real human being, you subconsciously stop expecting microexpressions (and correct rendering of the human face in a real-world environment). You’re able to tolerate a high degree of stylized exaggeration. Put another way, hand-drawn animation can have beautiful characters because we don’t expect microexpressions, but CGI does not because it is incapable of meeting real-world standards of beauty in an artificial three-dimensional reality.
I wonder if this means that CGI animation is literally incapable of rendering human beauty, and as such, if we’ll never see a serious CGI animated fairytale. I use “serious” rather loosely here, because of course there haven’t been many “serious” animated fairytales. But some of them have had enough seriousness – enough pathos – to be deeply satisfying emotional experiences.
My, this has drifted from The Princess and the Frog, hasn’t it?
This entry has gotten long enough, and this week was uneventful, so I’ll do a more focused review of The Princess and the Frog on a different day.
Anyway, Saturday morning I took myself downtown to see some movies, starting with The Young Victoria. The the critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes warned that the movie, while lush-looking, was somewhat anemic and distancing when it came to the storyline. I prepared myself for that disappointment, but ( I was very pleasantly surprised )
After The Young Victoria I headed a block to the other theater to see The Princess and the Frog. Coincidentally, I again solidly disagree with the critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes; while it mostly found glowing praise in reviews, I found the movie to be exceedingly tedious, populated by irritating characters, frenetic comic relief, and very tired clichés.
Admitting that hurt a lot. I love – I mean, love - the hand-drawn format. Because as far as the CGI animation has come, it still hasn’t managed to get dramatic human protagonists (and sometimes certain realistic dramatic animals) entirely right. If you want a classical fairytale – one that has a beautiful female lead – you have to return to the hand-drawn format.
I should pause here and say that while I do sort of have an issue with all humans in CGI movies, I am speaking more to classical romantic protagonists; leading men and leading ladies, characters that are supposed to be beautiful or handsome, dignified and not particularly comedic. Comic characters thrive on a high degree of stylization, but beautiful human characters require a much stricter series of aesthetic choices, choices that bring them close to the proportions of real human faces, and perhaps too close to avoid the Uncanny Valley once they are rendered in CGI’s artificial three-dimensional plane.
Of course, hand-drawn images exaggerate facial proportions hugely, but they’re also far enough away from portraying actual human beings that we don’t encounter the Uncanny Valley at all. We can recognize the exaggerated elements of 2D beauty, and, when we’re not confronted with CGI’s not-quite-right hair, not-quite-right skin texture, not-quite-right shading of the planes of the face, not-quite-right muscle –
Holy shit.
I think I might have just pinned it down. CGI rendered human characters don’t have microexpressions. Mostly we hear about microexpressions as they relate to telltale signs that a person is lying, but microexpressions convey a lot of other subtle, subconscious information about a person’s emotional state. We expect realistic CGI faces to have microexpressions, and when they don’t (in combination with not-quite-right hair, skin, etc.), we slip into CGI’s Uncanny Valley and disconnect from the character.
However, when art gets far enough away from a real human being, you subconsciously stop expecting microexpressions (and correct rendering of the human face in a real-world environment). You’re able to tolerate a high degree of stylized exaggeration. Put another way, hand-drawn animation can have beautiful characters because we don’t expect microexpressions, but CGI does not because it is incapable of meeting real-world standards of beauty in an artificial three-dimensional reality.
I wonder if this means that CGI animation is literally incapable of rendering human beauty, and as such, if we’ll never see a serious CGI animated fairytale. I use “serious” rather loosely here, because of course there haven’t been many “serious” animated fairytales. But some of them have had enough seriousness – enough pathos – to be deeply satisfying emotional experiences.
My, this has drifted from The Princess and the Frog, hasn’t it?
This entry has gotten long enough, and this week was uneventful, so I’ll do a more focused review of The Princess and the Frog on a different day.
