The CG wars have begun. The Incredibles (left) © 2004 Disney Enterprises Inc./Pixar Animation Studios. The Polar Express (center) © 2004 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved. Ryan (right) courtesy of Copper Heart Ent. and the National Film Board of Canada.

Brad Bird. Robert Zemeckis. Chris Landreth…

Hi. I’m Ellen and I’m here to explain a few things. Like how it is, in a year with two important CG animated features from major directors, that a short subject by a relative newcomer is going to blow all things digital out of the water. I should explain that I am as damaged as the next guy, Lord knows I’ve got my own issues and that this is just my humble opinion but I’m getting off topic here because this article isn’t about me, it’s mostly about a guy named Chris…

On a grey Toronto afternoon, I sat down with that splash of color named Chris Landreth to talk about three films:

Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, which is currently wowing audiences with its bold action sequences and wowing animators with the audacity of its all human cast;

Robert Zemeckis’s The Polar Express, a less popular but still interesting mix of magic-realistic characters, exhilarating roller coaster rides, nightmarish images, Christmas schlock and a few genuine moments of real screen magic which audiences don’t seem to know quite what to do with;

And most importantly, Landreth’s own animated documentary Ryan, which uses a hyper realistic/surrealistic approach to focus on the life and career of NFB animator Ryan Larkin.

Since each of these films tackles the challenge of creating compelling virtual humans in distinctly different ways, I was interested to see what could be discovered by discussing them with someone who is thinking about animation in truly original ways.

We started our conversation with The Incredibles.

Now while I liked this film, I’m personally disappointed in its videogame structure and relative lack of character development, especially compared to what Bird achieved in Iron Giant.

Noting that, in his opinion, Iron Giant is the best Hollywood animated feature ever made, Landreth expressed his disagreement. “Compared to other Pixar films I’ve seen,” says Landreth, “The Incredibles is by far the most extensive in character development.”

And he also liked how The Incredibles found, within a mainstream context, a pretty clever way to express the characters’ psychology. Of course, anyone who has seen Ryan knows that this is a subject close to Landreth’s heart.

In Ryan, the characters’ psychological states are revealed with physical distortions inspired by the portraiture of such artists as Francis Bacon. Reversing the natural order of things, Landreth puts his peoples’ insides on the outside, ending up with characters who might literally wear their hearts on their sleeve.

By comparison, in The Incredibles there’s the notion of embodying the characters’ psychological states in their super powers. As an example, Landreth offers Elastigirl, who stretches all over the place. “I look at that as being an extension of the person who, in the classic sense of the dysfunctional family, stretches herself to accommodate, rescue or enable people,” says Landreth, “Or the teenage daughter who has real personality development issues and what can she do? She can disappear and put a barrier around herself. What a great manifestation of these people’s dysfunctionalities.”