The Significance of Rango
When a hundred million ton ocean liner changes heading, the movement is hardly noticeable to the passengers partying in the ship’s ballroom. The animation industry’s flagship turned 90 degrees when Rango won the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and many of those partying will not realize the implications until they wake up with the mother of all hangovers.
The U.S. based animation studios do not make films for adults, and Rango signals an evolutionary shift. I am not a big fan of the mega-budget, assembly-line movies designed “for the entire family”, but the Hollywood studios continue making these films because they have become victims of their own success. They are locked into spending way too much money on a single feature film, and they have painted themselves into a competitive corner by not making films specifically for adults while continuing to make films for kids. It is a strategy flaw that is now going to cost them dearly because there is a large audience for adult animation. Significantly, Chico and Rita, which was also nominated this year, is also for adults. Bottom line: DreamWorks, Disney and Pixar are not prepared to serve the adult market, a self-inflicted situation that creates immense opportunities for new film makers.
The reason the studios are in this bind is that the animation industry did not go through the same transitions as did the live action industry in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. That was when Method trained actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean arrived on the scene and movies began burrowing more deeply into the human psyche. Animated feature films even today stand on Walt Disney’s shoulders, and he created animation as a silent film thing. Mickey Mouse arrived as a silent film star. Turn off the sound on this YouTube excerpt from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the silent film acting style is inescapable.
Turn the sound off on this clip from Toy Story and the acting style is still like that in silent films.
Recent features such as How to Train Your Dragon display attempts to capture a more nuanced acting style, but the producers and directors do not really trust it, and so performances tend to be neither fish nor fowl. The Carl and Ellie montage in Up successfully uses a more naturalistic performance style:
But when the story moves to Paradise Valley, we are back with silent films again:
Now look at this clip from Rango. Even when the action gets physically zany, the acting style remains consistently realistic.
As widely reported in the press, director Gore Verbinski had zero experience in animation when he directed Rango. He would have been unable to make a Pixar kind of movie even if he had wanted to. And so he made his movie the way that made the most sense to him. His entire production model was based on live-action and, as we can see, it works just fine. Rango is not a classic movie for a lot of reasons – too long, unnecessary prologue, sluggish resolution – but make no mistake: It is an extremely important film for the industry. The big Hollywood animation studios have done what they are going to do, and they are ill prepared for what is to come. Rango points the way.
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That plan does not sound crazy to me, Dave, not at all. Verbinski's work on "Rango" is instructive. I will be very interested in seeing your progress as you go along. Start by casting really good actors to do the live action reference. Talk to a local acting coach, someone who is familiar with the talent pool for actors. The key frame animation is part of the reason Verbinski got such good results. Johnny Depp and cast is the other part. Garbage in - Garbage out. Good luck!
Hey, Ed :) Great article, as always! Verbinski has opened my eyes with the way how he handled Rango's production. I have decided to use a very similiar method of capturing acting reference for my final year project at Teesside University. It's going to be a dialogue scene inspired by a book for an interactive medium. No mo-cap, pure keyframe animation on a stylized character. Sounds crazy, right?
Would you mind if I e-mailed you while I am developing the project and asked you for feedback a few times?
Time to listen to The Geek Show!
Dave
I agree with you. Pixar is now officially organized into a "grid" production system designed to have several features in production simultaneously, each of them progressing one-by-one along what amounts to an assembly line. In order to make something like that work, you have to have a steady and rhythmic flow of movies coming into production and an equal finished film exiting the other side. Like a automobile factory. This set up will eliminate to roll-of-the-dice averages the liklihood that the studio will reach for new creative heights. Disney bought Pixar, not the other way around, and Disney is not a movie studio any longer. It is a merchandising company. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I'm just saying. The playing field for creative new filmmakers is wide open. This is a remarkable point in industry evolution, IMO.
good call Ed,
Im getting more and more bored of Pixar films for that very reason. they are and wanna be stuck in fairytale land forever. not bad films mind you but more and more watch and forget material. even my young kids like rango better than cars2 or up.
In a recent Time interview Lesseter confirmed that. If I remember correctly he called it 'shrekification of animated films', something like 'shrek is everything that pixar is not' kind of thing. If the head of disney AND pixar is unwilling to move forward like hes unwilling to get over hawaii shirts we'll have to wait for a while and watch more directors get fired. This would be the perfect chance to keep disney on the kids fairytale side and pixar to explore more edgy stuff. doesnt seem to happen.
This seems to be the time for more independent directors to find a studio to produce their 'animated' CG film.
Now Shrek for me was the first step towards adult humor in a kids film package, Rango and even Tintin take it further towards life-action look and feel for older kids/adult audiences. can wait for more of this, a time when classic life action directors discover this medium, free of "lasseterfication" filters.
Heh. Mocapped performances are hybrid things, definitely not animation in the classic sense of the word. At FMX in Stuttgart this May, I will be moderating a panel of professionals about this subject. For the purposes of my Rango notes, though, mocap is not the real issue. The public perception is that Rango is an animated film. The significance of the movie is its adult nature and the fact that it did not come out of Pixar, DreamWorks or Disney. Personally, I do not consider mocapped characters to be animation. They are something like animation. They have animator input. <g>
Recent successes Rango and Despicable Me show that audiences are looking for something different. The acting style is an important part of it - story and visual design is another. An animation factory, no matter how successful, is still a factory and part of their success lies in producing the same material over and over. The reason there was a luke-warm response to Rio is that bad acting and voice talent (please, Tracy Jordan and George Lopez?), even beautifully animated, turn off audiences.
Rango is a better film because it's not just the same old slickly produced but uninteresting to watch animated fare. Too many recent tentpole animated features are just too boring.
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