The Experience Is the Story, says Tim Willits
Tom Willits, Creative Director at id Software, provides insight in his talk about the gaming industry.
Tom Willits, Creative Director at id Software, provides insight in his talk about the gaming industry.
Carolyn Soper is a Vice President of Disney Animation Studios, and has been working on the upcoming Disney feature Bolt. She walked AnimfxNZ attendees through the process of building a hamster named Rhino.
According to Henry LaBounta, Chief Visual Officer for EA Black Box, Game Art Direction has three main focus areas – the look of the game, the characters and animation, and the graphic design (menus, user interface, and fonts) – and most of the unsolved problems are with the characters and animation.
AnimfxNZ 2008 began with a song. A contingent of Maori gathered to perform a 'powhiri', or New Zealand traditional welcome. The foreign visitors and speakers lined up so the kaumatua could determine if they were friends or foes. Thankfully, there were no enemies among them, and the conference was able to proceed.
One cannot help feeling that there is something very special in the way Maria Elena Gutierrez has put together this festival: her cultivation of industry figures, her contacts with other festivals, and her warmth as a hostess. Or maybe it’s the chocolate.
Oh what a difference a couple weeks and a Pixar and a WATCHMEN trailer make. Because it's up to me, I've decided that the rules I set forth when starting this column have been thrown out the window. Buzz is buzz and it doesn't matter when the film comes out. It also makes it easier to make this column a weekly venture. I will try to refrain from buzzing about films that are not in production, because you never know about those films. So lets get to the films you can count on being featured on my most anticipated film list for both the Winter/Spring and Summer editions.
5) Crossing Over (TBD 2009)
This immigration story, starring Harrison Ford and Ashley Judd, was on my Most Anticipated Films of the Fall list. Now it's moved to 2009. That could be a sign of no confidence or a desire to give the film a chance by the studio. Check out the trailer and decide whether you feel it looks like a wannabe CRASH or a mind-opening look at a real problem.
Companion DVDs to feature films, which either launch the Tuesday before the film's theatrical release or day-and-date with the film on DVD, have become increasingly popular, allowing fans more adventures with often supporting characters. Now in conjunction with the KUNG FU PANDA DVD release, DreamWorks has given fans a 20+ minute short chronicling the origins of the Furious Five told to a class of kung fu students by kung fu mega-fan Po.
In the scenes with Po and the kids, the animation again is CG, but the backstory tales are in the same 2D animation style as the opening sequence of the feature. Each tale teaches the kids an important lesson of kung fu. Mantis' impatience leads him into a trap. Viper, as a young snake, shows her kung fu master father what a fangless little one can accomplish. Crane wasn't always viewed as a master, especially as a scrawny kid in kung fu school. As an orphan, Tigress struggles with those afraid of her anger. Monkey didn't start out as a hero either, but with help from Oogway he learns to put his painful past behind him.
Well, I’m torn. Shall I go to the presentation on “Hair shells and bi-quad transition rig on Shrek the Halls and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” or to the “Humanizing virtual agents: the role of speech technology in effective human-machine interaction?” Maybe if they made a rule that titles had to be short, like “Beards and boundaries” and “Talk to me, Mac,” I would feel less anxiety about making these choices.
Bond is back in the franchise's first straight sequel. This film picks up right where the last one left off with a dizzying car chase sequence. Those who did not see CASINO ROYALE might be lost from the start in this adrenaline-high action flick. Bond fans looking for a lighter installment will be disappointed, but those who fancy the edgier Bond films such as FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE or FOR YOUR EYES ONLY will really enjoy how the franchise is slowly developing the character.
At the end of CASINO, Bond (Daniel Craig) sought revenge on those that killed his beloved Vespa by gunning for secret organization bigwig Mr. White (Jesper Christensen, ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS). MI6 head M (Judi Dench, MRS. BROWN) is concerted that 007 is now blinded by rage and will go to any extreme to find those behind the conspiracy. Following leads, he trails environmental exec Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY), whom is involved in a shady deal with exiled Bolivian general Medrano (Joaquin Cosio).
Here at the VIEW Conference there is another vapor in the air besides water: a palpable sense of worry. You can see it on the faces of the digital hipsters listening attentively to representatives of Pixar and DreamWorks, consigning their show reels with all the courtesy and ceremony of a Japanese businessman presenting his business card.
In 2008 Nik and I were guests at the 15th International Trickfilm Festival in Stuttgart. We were invited to give a presentation of music for animation and Nik played on the big outdoor stage before SITA SINGS THE BLUES was screened as well as in the festival cafe.
I would encourage everyone to enter their film in this festival. Your work will be treated with respect and if you are lucky enough to be able to attend you will be treated to lovely hospitality by a friendly, hard working staff. You can also refer back to my article posted earlier this year for more details of our visit and some festival photos.
Just as an aside, the Stuttgart Festival staff throw one of the best parties at the Annecy Animation Festival which you can read about in my article about that festival.
If you're the kind of person who would like Halloween to be everyday then This Weekend's Film Festival is just right for you. But it will also provide thrills, chills and fun for everyone as we look at paranormal investigations on film. HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, which hit DVD this week, is the inspiration. We have mutants investigating mutants. Psychics awakening a haunted house. A desperate mother calling on paranormal experts for help. Scientists saving NYC from ghouls and one giant sugary treat. And we have the mother of all horror films. Prepare to laugh and cringe.
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY kicks things off. While having seen the original film, viewers will find a continuing story, but new comers will not be lost. A centuries' old pact between humans and magical creatures is about to be broken by the bitter Prince Nuada whom wants the creatures of the forest to rule once again. Working for the U.S. government, Hellboy, played wonderfully once again by Ron Perlman, and his paranormal investigation team set out to stop the renegade royal. Director Guillermo del Toro brings his truly original visual style to this adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic book series. Hellboy has a soft spot for human-looking pyrokenetic Liz (Selma Blair), but finds it increasingly hard to fight against other magical creatures when his existence goes public and he's ridiculed for his bright red appearance. As I said in my original review, "Like the first film, del Toro mixes these fantasy creations with jokester material and inner struggles. Hellboy might look like a hulking demon, but he has a soft spot for kittens and drinks in the shower when his girl won’t tell him what’s wrong with her." Within this spectacle of fantastic creatures and monsters, there is an interesting dilemma presented to Hellboy — why does he fight on behalf of those that want to hide him away?
One of the cleverest comedies to come out of the '80s, Ivan Reitman's mix of poltergeists and punchlines has become an iconic film of its era. Written by stars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the story has fun with the supernatural and those that would investigate it. Its trio of central scientists is not the typical image of world-saving heroes, but that's kind of the point.
Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray, STRIPES), Dr. Raymond Stantz (Aykroyd, DRAGNET) and Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, BABY BOOM) have been studying fringe science for years. Their controversial areas of expertise have resulted in them being kicked out of the university right as they make a major breakthrough in parapsychology. Out of work, the threesome decides to go into private business as ghostbusters, exterminators for spectral pests. It seems something big on the paranormal front is brewing in New York City. One of their first clients is the pretty orchestra performer named Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver, ALIEN), who experience strange phenomena in her high-rise apartment. Turns out the ancient god Gozer (Slavitza Jovan, TAPEHEADS) is about the return and wants to wipe out the city.
This is the scariest movie ever made. It still retains its power to creep me out after so many viewings. Why is this of all the horror films so haunting? It's the balance between the real world and the fantastic. Oscar-winning writer William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin paint a normal world that we recognize and then let the devil creep into the shadows and our private spaces.
The story begins in Iraq where the elderly Father Merrin (Max von Sydow, THE SEVENTH SEAL), encounters an ancient evil. The fear on his face makes us uneasy. Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM) is an actress working in Georgetown, where she lives with her daughter Regan (Linda Blair, AIRPORT 1975). When Regan gets ill, Chris takes her to all the best doctors, but they're stumped. Meanwhile, Father Karras (Jason Miller, 1984's TOY SOLDIERS) is struggling with a crisis of faith, due to the passing of his mother. When a freakish death occurs, Lt. Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb, 12 ANGRY MEN) calls on the priest for advice. At the same time, Chris is becoming increasing furious with her daughter's doctors who suggest that she might consider requesting an exorcism for Regan.
THE TENANT was Roman Polanski's follow-up to CHINATOWN. When it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival people stampeded the theater to see it. Falling post murder of his wife Sharon Tate and preceding his arrest for unlawful sexual knowledge of a minor, the film takes on more significance the more you know about the filmmaker. This is why I believe it gets so much praise from certain circles. It's a Polanski film; it must be good. It's similar to REPULSION and ROSEMARY'S BABY; it must mean something. So why did I get the feeling throughout that the emperor was not wearing any clothes?
Polanski plays Trelkovsky, an unassuming French citizen whom really feels his otherness via his Polish accent. There is an apartment shortage in Paris and he bargains with the owner of one building, a man by the name of Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas, BEING THERE), to rent the apartment of a woman who recently tried to commit suicide by jumping out the window of her room. Feeling guilty, Trelkovsky goes to visit the dying woman Simon in the hospital where she lies in bed bandaged head to toe. There he meets her friend Stella (Isabelle Adjani, 1979's NOSFERATU), who can't understand why she would have tried to kill herself. Over time, Trelkovsky becomes more and more paranoid that all the other tenants are trying to force him to commit suicide as well.
So the fall season is beginning to heat up. The hotly anticipated films are beginning to roll out including SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE on Nov. 12, QUANTUM OF SOLACE on Nov. 14, AUSTRALIA and MILK on Nov. 26, and then December will have movie fans sleeping at theaters. Six films make the buzz list this week, read all about them.
Getting Buzzed
6) The Tale of Despereaux (Dec. 19)
A new trailer for THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX is out. Based on the Newbery Medal-winning children's book, this Universal Pictures animated feature has promise, but will it be a good adaptation from another medium like HORTON HEARS A WHO! or a bad one like DOOGAL?
With an open ending to its successful start, one could have easily expected a sequel to DreamWork's MADAGASCAR. As sequels go, this one is equal to the original and in some parts better than the original. Taking tips from their SHREK franchise, DreamWorks nicely moves the story forward instead of trying to repeat what worked in the previous film. The story journeys in a logical direction, placing the four zoo animals in Africa where characters can be expanded upon and new characters can be introduced.
Alex the lion (Ben Stiller, TROPIC THUNDER), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock, I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer, TV's FRIENDS), and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith, THE MATRIX RELOADED) have enlisted the spy-like penguins to build a plane to get them from Madagascar to New York. Tagging along are the king of the lemurs Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen, BORAT) and his right-hand-man Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer, KINGS OF COMEDY). As we learn in an opening sequence, Alex ended up in New York when hunters stole him from his father Zuba (Bernie Mac, TV's THE BERNIE MAC SHOW). When the penguins' flight takes a nosedive, the foursome end up at Alex's birthplace in Africa, where he is reunited with his parents. Now the reemergence of the citified son of the tribe's leader gives the conniving Makunga (Alec Baldwin, TV's 30 ROCK) a chance to steal power.
One of the best films of the year, THE VISITOR, arrived on DVD about a month ago. Inspiring This Weekend's Film Festival theme of houseguests. Some guests come to stay for research purposes, as well as to hide out. Other guests break in, but are not asked to leave. Some guests are unwanted relatives that sleep with your boyfriends. Other guests are royalty on the run. This is an eclectic mix of films from a screwball comedy to a quiet Korean drama to a modern dramedy to a classic romantic comedy to, as I said before, one of the best films of 2008.
Starting off with a light touch, Howard Hawk's BALL OF FIRE is one of the most underrated of the classic screwball comedies. Making AFI's 100 Greatest Laughs list, the film still doesn't have the general acknowledgement that Hawk's BRINGING UP BABY has. Starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, the 1941 comedy is a clever take on the SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS fairy tale. Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, the plot follows eight stodgy professors working on an epic encyclopedia that discover their understanding of current slang is way out of date. Cooper's Prof. Potts goes out to find test subjects and ends up attracting gangster moll Katherine "Sugarpuss" O'Shea into his studies. When she shows up at their door, the aging bachelors (and one widower) can't refuse the alluring woman's request to stay. In actuality, she's using the poor saps to lay low from the cops. The pairing of Cooper and Stanwyck is magnetic. "Cooper’s awe-shucks style is perfect for the aged boy genius. Stanwyck radiates in her role, combining dangerous sexuality with a hint of depressed vulnerability," to quote my original review. Filled with constant laughs, the film's closing emotional punch sneaks up and sucker punches the viewer. Simply a gem of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
In her breakout role, Audrey Hepburn won an Oscar and became a movie icon. This bittersweet romantic comedy is the precursor to modern princess fantasies such as NOTTING HILL. Dalton Trumbo's Oscar-winning writing (which was originally awarded to his front Ian McLellan Hunter because he had been blacklisted) simmers with innocent sexuality, naturally constructed slapstick and a devastatingly real ending. Director William Wyler lures us in with the romance and hits the viewer with an emotional climax that's as tense as any thriller.
Princess Ann (Hepburn) is an effervescent young woman whose royal duties keep her on a torturously boring schedule. While visiting Rome, she wants to experience the city on the ground level, not through stuffy balls and public relation events. One night after receiving a sedative to control her outbursts of emotion, she sneaks out into the city to explore. When the drugs kick in, she dozes off on a bench where she is discovered by newspaper reporter Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD), whom doesn't want to take responsibility for her at first, but doesn't want to hand her over to the cops believing that she is drunk. In the morning, he discovers whom she really is, and devises a plan with his photographer friend Irving Radovich (Eddie Albert, TV's GREEN ACRES) to write an exclusive article on the princess's rogue behavior.
A HULL OF A MESS is the best of the wartime Popeye shorts because it remembers what made Popeye shorts so entertaining. Popeye and Bluto are pitted again each other in a race to see whom can build a battleship the quickest. The winner wins a contract to build a fleet of battleships. The muscular adversaries find ingenious and quite humorous ways to get the job done quicker, but it will take a bit of spinach assistance for Popeye to overcome Bluto's devious plans to sabotage his construction.
Director I. Sparber and animators Al Eugster and Joe Oriolo cast Popeye as a quip muttering, happy-go-lucky bloke who is a step ahead of Bluto at every turn until the villain cheats. This plotline is more in the vein of the earlier Popeye shorts where the sailor was the hero not a bumbling buffoon to his nephew or some random trash-talking anthropomorphic adversary. While it has a faster Looney Tunes timing than the earlier Fleischer Studios work, it contains the original spirit of the character.
The creation of cartoons has been a staple go-to plot for many cartoons. Popeye gets his turn to draw his own adventure in this 1943 short. In his production "Wages of Sin (Less 20%)," Popeye casts himself as a man venturing out to make his fortune, hoping to return and bring his beloved Olive Oyl to wherever he has landed. Then the evil mortgage holder Roger Blacklay wants Olive for himself and kidnaps the slender damsel in distress, sending Popeye out to rescue her.
The short begins with Popeye working on some ideas at his animation stand. When finished, he screens the film for Olive and his nephews. He accompanies the short with his own music and sound effects. It's a great bit of animation timing watching Popeye try to keep up with the action, juggling horns, piano, etc., etc. For Popeye's drawing style, the filmmakers put the traditional Popeye and Olive heads on stick figure bodies, filling in the backgrounds with simple crude-looking line drawings of trees and houses.
Not really a wartime Popeye cartoon, but a military-themed short. THE MIGHTY NAVY was made before the U.S. had entered World War II, casting Popeye as an inept crewman on a destroyer whose improvising creates a great amount of frustration for his superior officer. But when they are attacked by an enemy whose flag states "Enemy: Name Your Own," Popeye grabs his spinach and rises to the occasion.
In addition to establishing the basic plot of many of the subsequent wartime Popeye cartoons, THE MIGHTY NAVY changed the look of the pipe-chomping brawler, dressing him in Navy whites instead of his previous black outfit. While many gags are not as fresh as some in the earlier Popeye cartoons, this short presents a great use of musical timing and foreground-to-background animation. Some battleship gags reference previous Popeye adventures, giving a nice wink to fans, as well as a fresh unexpected joke. Another unique element is the ending, which commemorates Popeye's image being used as the official insignia of Navy bomber squadron. The ending closes the short with a sentimental beat instead of the typical joke. Minus any extreme racial stereotypes and featuring some of the funnier gags of the wartime shorts, this one has held up fairly well in terms of the later Popeye cartoons.
In this Popeye short, the smack-talking sailor joyously heads out to buy a bearskin coat for Olive's birthday. When he has a bad experience with the dishonest furrier Geezil, Popeye heads out into the woods to hunt down his own bear.
Like most fans, I like my Popeye cocky and muttering under his breath instead of the do-gooder he transformed into in later shorts. This short plays his character between the two extremes. The gags when Popeye has the bear cornered on the cliff are ingenious, making me laugh every time I see them. In addition, the final gag is a perfect closing note. It’s kind of funny though that a short with Olive's name in the title never features Popeye's slender beau.
From the title one can pretty much ascertain the basic plot of this Popeye short. Olive wins first prize in a sweepstakes. She searches the house furiously for the ticket and can't find it. When Popeye and her finally locate the missing ticket, it heads out the window on the wind, sending Popeye into a string of near disasters.
Out of all the Popeye shorts from 1941, this one retains the puns and asides that so wonderfully defined the earlier shorts. In the tail part of the depression era America, or even today, a lost lottery ticket gives a great rooting point for the audience. A great hook for stringing together what turns out to be simply a list of gags. But the film works not just because the gags are good, but because they are woven into a plot that means something and supplemented with funny dialogue and character moments. A great piece of writing comes when Popeye tries to grab the ticket of the backside of a young lady without being slapped. Popeye reads a paper and mutters, "Man bites dog outside frankfurter stand." Classic Popeye humor. There's also some solid animation. The timing is great in how the scenes flow seamlessly from one gag to the next. Though the closing line is dated, there is a funny charm in the dated joke all the same.