Persepolis (2008)

Persepolis just lost for the best animated feature. I didn't see the film that won (Ratatouille) so I'll have to blog about Persepolis instead.

I'm a huge fan of Marjane Sarapi's books--both the Persepolis duo and her others. However, I was skeptical at how it would translate into an animated film. Despite often being clumped together under the same subculture, Animation and Comics are two extremely different media. Both benefit from a rich visual vocabulary. However, while the great strength of animation is the range of dynamic motion, the strength of comics is the stillness that invites the reader to add her own motion and sense of time.

You can probably see where this is going. Many of the best features of the book come through in the film--the story is just as engaging and the graphical style is just as dramatic. However, the best scenes in the film are those that are 100% still. Is isn't that the motion is bad (though Ross might disagree), it just doesn't stand out as a strength of the film. In contrast, the comic book uses the strengths of comics beautifully.

Still, you should see it. For that matter, you should read it as well. If for no other reason, it will expose you to how graphic novels can be used to enhance storytelling.

My Kid Could Paint That (2007)

R:  There have been a lot of noteworthy movies in the last semester.  Among all of the sturm und drang, there's a good chance that you didn't hear about “My Kid Could Paint That.”  The gist is that a girl from Binghamton, aged 3 or 4, became a hot thing in the Binghamton art world.  Well, not just in the Binghamton art world -- she popped up in the New York Times, and on 60 Minutes.  

The film comes in two parts.  As you might guess, the first half is the rise of Marla Olmstead, the painting wunderkind.  In one of the few bits of illuminating commentary in the movie, the journalist from the local newspaper who originally broke the story points out that the story went on too long to just be a human-interest piece, and had to “turn.”  And that's the second half of the movie -- the media turning on Marla and her family, and a series of accusations that Marla's dad (also a painter) is actually producing the paintings.  Or finishing them.  Or something.

As the movie drags on, the filmmaker becomes more and more prominent.  As I recall, he started filming the family before the story “turned,” and as it becomes more interesting I'd say it gets away from him.  The family trusts him long after he's stopped trusting them; much navel gazing follows.  In the end, I think the project was too big for him.

Clearly, I didn't like this movie.  I'm writing about it because it provoked as much conversation as any that we saw this semester.  There are the obvious (and clumsily handled) questions about what it can mean for abstract art to be “good” if it can be produced by a toddler.  Like the director, I'll leave that aside and focus on the issue of doubt.

Let's go back to the accusation that Marla isn't actually doing the painting.  This is not an unreasonable accusation -- her paintings are, indeed, more finished than one would expect from a small child.  They are remarkable for the same reason that they are suspect.  Indeed, “suspect” is probably a better word than “accusation,” because I don't recall anybody making a damning case against her having done the painting.  So how can one dispel those suspicions?  The method that 60 Minutes settles on (and the director, in a moment of inspiration, decides to...  continue...) is to try to video tape an entire painting, from start to finish.  The problem, not a surprising one, is that Marla reacts to the camera.  She's shy, and doesn't produce anything “for the camera” that looks as good as the paintings produced without the camera.  There's a lot of hemming and hawing about this, and in the end the Olmsteads are not able to satisfy “the public”, or at least the director.

The problem is that I don't think this is a test that Marla could pass.  As I mentioned above, she's shy and four, and I'm skeptical of the notion that any artists(even one that was grown-up and an attention whore) would be the same in front of a camera as they are working alone.  And so as outsiders we're in an awkward position: a question has been raised (”did she paint them!?”) that we, as outsiders are unable to answer.  And as social animals, we jump to the default conclusion -- she's cheating!

I'm more familiar with this feeling than I'd like to be.  Each term, I run a program that sifts through 800 undergraduate lab reports looking for plagiarism.  I then have to sift through the results and see which cases look like cheating, and which look like coincidences.  Once I get into the “find the cheaters!” mode, everything starts to look suspicious, and it can be very hard to step back and admit that some of the ambiguous cases are, well, ambiguous -- and not worth pursuing.  “It's unclear” is not a satisfying answer, but it's sometimes the correct answer.

Oscar Nominated Shorts -- Animated (2007)

R: This year is the first time (at least that we've noticed) that The Michigan has done special screenings of the various short films that have been nominated for Oscars. This means that I get to watch new animation twice in the span of a couple weeks. Sweet. The "Short Animation" category is one of the ones that I think still has some integrity, since there's so little money at stake. Of course, this also means that I get upset when the films are bad. Without further adieu...

THE NOMINEES!

Lifted: I thought this was pretty clever, fun, and such. It's unsurprising that Pixar put it together.

The Danish Poet: I would describe this film as "cozy." It's wonderful. And unusual, in that the narration may be the best part. While I don't believe that it was the best animated film made this year, it was certainly the best nominated, and Kate and I were both thrilled that it won.

The Little Match Girl: Note that the category is not entirely clean. If Disney makes a short, for example, they seem to get nominated, no questions ask. Some films are merely bad. There are lots of ways that animation can be bad -- the characters can be flat, the animation can be generic, the story can be dull, etc. This is all of that and more -- this film is actually obscene. They have not only applied the "Disney Magic" (which seems to involve using a team of about 100 "animators" to produce 10 minutes of film), they pulled the teeth out of the story. What bastards.

Maestro: Kind of cute. I'll notice that the nomination of a Hungarian makes the Oscars officially more "international" than the third round of the Animation Show.

No Time for Nuts: No, the rat-thing doesn't get the nut.

AND THE NON-MINEES!

One Rat Short: The animation in this is, technically, absolutely stunning, though I thought the story fell kind of flat.

The Passenger: Yawn.

Guide Dog: Double yawn.

Wraith of Cobble Hill: Yaw- wait, this one is pretty good. The main character, a young hooligan, comes across quite clearly, and is an interesting fellow. This is a student film, and it shows in a few places. There were several things that I think were supposed to be clear to the viewer, basic geographic things, that didn't come across, or at least weren't clear when they were supposed to be. All the same, it had some emotional depth, which is nice. The thing that bugged me about this was that while I'd say it's very promising, it didn't seem developed enough to belong on the short list for the freaking Oscar. Who picks the short list anyway?

A Gentleman's Duel: Wow. I might have thought this was funny when I was 11. Or 10. Maybe. But probably not. What garbage!

FINAL THOUGHTS!

Lets try to make sense of this, then. Disney gets a spot, Pixar gets a spot, that other big CG studio will cough something up -- oh, and the NFB gets to submit something. Monkeys will then put together a list of other short films, chosen at random (soon, they'll be replaced by YouTube). One of those is chosen, again basically at random (don't try to tell me that Maestro is better than The Wraith of Cobble Hill), and the Academy then votes -- that last round of voting is the one that is more or less reasonable. Not perfect, but I think it's one of the few categories where watching the nominees is an easier way to figure out who will win than following the buzz. Or the money.

The Animation Show 3 (2006?)

R: As many of you know, I'm antsy for animation. I actually spent a year in Russia studying animation criticism (insofar as that field exists), and, since my graduate student lifestyle doesn't permit pilgrimages to Annecy, The Animation Show is one of the highlights of my year. Now that you know what a long-winded post you're in for, let's look at this year's selections.

Rabbit: I thought this was an intersesting way to open the show. My initial reaction was "cute, if only they'd bothered to animate it." In the end, I have to agree that the reference to the moving arms and legs that might appear in childrens books complimented the feel of the film. Not my favorite, but I can at least respect it.

City Paradise: A major problem in modern animation is that the computer makes it easy to (a) generate complicated images and (b) move them in very crude ways. The thing that the computer cannot do is, well, animate -- the intricate process by which actual movements are created, and coalesce into a performance, well, it takes a lot of hard work. And talent. While this film contains some mildly interesting images, the animation is terrible. Now, we could argue about whether this in some sense constitutes a new kind of video art which isn't animation, but has its own merit -- but then we'd have to admit that, taken on its own terms, this film just isn't effective. Oh well.

Everything Will be OK: This, I have to say, is a marked improvement over Don Hertzfeldt's contribution last year. One of the things that animation can do convincingly is present a character's view of the world. I think this is a fantastically difficult thing to do with live-action film, at least to do convincingly. The closest a live film comes to doing this, that I can think of, is Tarkovsky with Mirror, but the result there is notoriously obscure. In animation in general (and in this film in particular), the result is much more transparent. Hertzfeldt is able to deftly switch back and forth between the more objective presentation of the narrator and Bill's subjective experience, and the transitions are darn near seamless. Whether the film deserves all of the lavish praise its received is a separate question -- I'd say no, but it's definitely one of the best films they're showing this year.

Collision: My initial reaction to this was "wow, it'd be way better as a web page." Abstract animation is a huge world of possibilities, and this explores... pretty much none of them. Boo. A quick perusal of Hattler's webpage reveals liberal use of the word "visuals," which is a word more appropriate to anime fan-boys than artists. Double boo.

Nine: This, at least, was well-animated. I felt that it was missing something, though. I had long arguments with my professors in Russia about whether a film had to have an "idea." My feeling was that this was a crude, reductionist way to look at a work of art. Their feeling was that a work of art without a, well, without a point, was empty. Guess who convinced whom. While the animator here created effectively created both a world and individual characters within it, I think it had the emotional depth of Jurassic Park, from which I believe it stole several shots. It's too bad. On the other hand, Don Hertzfeldt got his start with (admittedly) brilliant gags, and look how he turned out.

No Room for Gerold: Now this, I loved. Not much to say besides that.

Davey and Son of Goliath: My first reaction to this was that it was actually produced by the guy who does "Moral Orel," but I was wrong -- it just looks like it. Let me back up for a second. I like Adult Swim. But one shouldn't confuse the shows produced for Adult Swim with animation. They're more like, well, like comic books. There was a time when animation felt very short, both because the typical film was 10 minutes long, and because things tended to happen more "suddenly" then they did in live action. I think that action movies and commercials have sort of reversed this -- the 10 minute films of way back when would feel very slow today, precisely because they consist of shots that are long enough that you can see something move. But I digress. I thought this was neither clever nor well-animated. I give it a double "boo."

Guide Dog: Conventional wisdom has it that Bill Plympton is totally the best thing ever. The truth is that Your Face is pretty good, and it's all downhill from there. You can take much of my rant about shots that are 0.7 seconds long where nothing moves and insert it here. Though I'll admit that the dog is kind of cute.

Eaux Forte: Absolutely gorgeous. This is one that I want to rewatch, since I don't think I got it all the first time. On the other hand, that suggests that there's something to get, doesn't it?

Versus: Freakin' hilarious. This is one of the most enjoyable pieces in the program -- shame that there aren't any details about it in the program. Consider this evidence that I do like funny animation!

Overtime: This was, I think, my favorite film in the show. Roughly, a puppeteer (~Jim Henson) dies and his puppets (which all look the same, and look like stripped-down versions of Kermit) take over his house. And, well, his body, ala Weekend at Bernie's. So this works on a fairly obvious level -- puppet and puppeteer are reversed, and a good time is had by all. The film is more than clever, though, it also has some depth. These puppets were both created and controlled by their puppet master, and they convey the mix of affection and anger toward him that one might expect. In short, they act, as the characters do in really good animation.

Dreams and Desires: I really enjoy watching Joanna Quinn draw -- the style here is rather different than that in When the Day Breaks, which was in the previous Animation Show, but it's still recognizably her. It's not really fair to compare this to When the Day Breaks, which stands on its own, whereas this is (I think) properly part of a series of shorts, but I'd be remiss if I didn't take this chance to at least plug it, since it's absolutely brilliant. Dreams and Desires is good too.

Game Over: I thought this was a nice way to end the show -- not profound, but certainly a lot of fun.