Sunday, June 20, 2010
BEING ALIVE: I'll leave talk about the narrative accomplishments of Toy Story 3 for elsewhere, but wanted to talk about how Pixar's technological enhancements are essential to making the film work. When the original Toy Story came out, I remember tons of reviews praising the animation work for the toy characters, but noting that human characters looked doughy and not terribly credible. Over time, Pixar dramatically improved how it's able to render humans, not by going for photorealism, but by going for a combination of real and stylized, first really displayed in Ratatouille, and subsequently in Up. Without those technological enhancements, TS3 doesn't work, because two of the most emotional sequences (both near the end of the film) don't involve the toys being "alive," and one doesn't involve the toys at all. If Pixar hadn't advanced so significantly in this area (which it really didn't need to, as many of its films don't feature human characters at all), I can't imagine the movie being as effective as it was.
True. Rewatching TS and TS2 before watching TS3 really emphasized that, and you're right---there were moments of Andy-related emotion in TS, such as where the family was getting ready to move and he couldn't find Buzz or Woody. But the ability to portray humans and their emotions has gone up so much, and was really needed here.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing that I really noticed was the detail of how they had Andy moving about his room, slouching on his chair, etc. Having a younger brother who has long had a roller chair like the one that Andy has in the movie, I was struck by just how right that whole thing was.
In other news: among the places that Pixar went to study for this movie: daycares, a landfill, and a recycling facility.
I am so in love with TS3. The tech was so great that I almost never thought about the tech at all.
ReplyDeleteNot on the main plot, but: Was "Day and Night" by far the most political Pixar short? I can't recall anything remotely as message-oriented in the past. I liked the message, so no biggie for me, but I was somewhat surprised.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the animation for Day and Night, but found the inclusion of the snippet of speech from self-help guru and constant PBS-pledge drive shill Wayne Dyer (looked it up, didn't recognize him on my own) hamfisted and offputting.
ReplyDeleteThe message was clear enough without the dialogue, and would have been more powerfully communicated (in my opinion) without clumsily hammering it home.
I do find this semi-rant regarding being upset at the 'objectification' of women throughout the piece to be pretty hilarious, though.
(I assume those bits were a semi-tribute to Tex Avery, though the art style was a bit more Chuck Jones-ish)
From watching Toy Story 3 yesterday morning, I got the distinct impression upon leaving the theater that the adults in the audience enjoyed it more than the kids (which seems to have been the case with every Pixar film since Cars, I think).
And TS3's perfect rating (and the perfect rating of the TS trilogy) at RottenTomatoes.com is over. Three critics (one of whom Roger Ebert has previously referenced as being a "troll" and two of whom don't seem to have any credentials beyond a website registration) dinged it.
ReplyDeleteI loved it, and the four-year-old loved it, but it certainly was less light and gaggy than the two previous installments. I particularly loved that they managed to have the same actor voice Andy in all three movies, given the time that has passed since the first one.
ReplyDeleteAs for Matt's original post, I would say that the achievement in portraying humans was less technical than artistic. By the time of Monsters, Inc., Pixar had figured out to make humans far more realistically than they needed or wanted to, and the trick with each film since has been where to locate the people on the human-cartoon scale. They dialed Boo way back so that she would fit with the monster world, but they gave the Incredibles, whose story was set closer to our own reality, pores and different textures of hair and a real physical weight so that you could feel how they had aged. At the same time, they were stylized, exaggerated versions of their comic book hero selves, so it was an ingenious mix of physical detail and abstracted gestalt. In Ratatouille and Wall-E, they backed up to more cartoony again, probably to let the rats and robots take center stage. They went even further in Up -- the characters were more cartoony adn less physical than they had ever been (the old guy was rectilinear and blocky, to contrast with the balloon-like kid and the balloons themselves, I'd guess). My point is that these were all decisions driven by artistic choice instead of technical ability.
I loved the movie, and certainly wouldn't ding it, but I could see three complaints [SPOILERS]: (1) Lotso was a little bit too similar to the Old Prospector as a character/villain; (2) the middle act dragged a little bit; (3) I had a hard time figuring out why Woody, who realized in TS2 how terrible it would be to be part of a museum collection where he wouldn't be played with, thought for most of TS3 that it would be just fine for his compadres to be left in the attic, essentially forgotten (I take it his answer would be that they were still Andy's, and serving Andy's needs, but that response seems weak).
ReplyDeleteBut, to be clear, these are minor quibbles, and I thought the movie was great.
The key difference between the attic and the museum is hope for a future. In the museum, it's "never to be played with again." In the attic, there's hope for a future of being played with by Andy or Andy's children.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the category of brilliant viral videos? The Lotso Huggin' Bear commercial.
Absolutely, but their ability to make those artistic choices was (in part) triggered by the technical advancement. They're inextricably linked. And Wall-E is even more complicated, because remember that the cartoons are who we "become" courtesy of Buy-N-Large--at one point, those humans were actually human, as the Fred Willard sequence reminds us.
ReplyDeleteI'd concur that there was a big step forward by the time of the Incredibles. When I first heard that they were doing the Incredibles, I was a bit concerned---not by whether Pixar would do a good job with the storyline, but how the human characters would look, given that they would be most, if not all, of the characters. Obviously, my concerns were for nought.
ReplyDeleteNo, I completely disagree. At Pixar, the technological advancement always comes years after the creative team makes the artistic choices that necessitate them. The artists draw things and model them in clay, then tell the technicians, "make this." Almost every Pixar movie has a moment (almost always described in the DVD commentary) where the director asks the technical team, "can you do this?"; the technical team says "it's not currently possible," and the director says "well, figure it out." The creative people at Pixar are animators, not engineers, and they do not bother to think about what is or isn't technically possible when they're being creative.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, in TS3, I don't think the technical "figure it out" moment had anything to do with the human characters. The human characters in TS3 appear to me to be using the same technology that Pixar developed for Monsters (and do not seem to be using even the hair or skin-texture advancements that they invented for The Incredibles). Everybody in the industry now can make people as realistic as (or more realistic than) the characters in TS3. The big scenes in TS3 from a technical perspective seem to be the ones in the garbage dump.
On a different note: Heh.
ReplyDeleteMatt is more than capable of defending his own position, but I took him to making a more basic (and uncontroversial) point -- not about the temporal relationship, but about the fact that they could not have done the emotional scenes had the Pixar technical folks been unable to render Andy (and the girl) pretty well (and that, at least as of TS1, they couldn't do this). It may be true that the Pixar technical folks have always been able to do what was asked of them, but presumably we can agree that, in theory, there are things they cannot do yet. If I understood him correctly, Matt was saying that TS3 benefits from the fact that rendering Andy well was not one of those things.
ReplyDelete(Even if this is something they've been able to do for a decade, which I assume is true, not having nearly Isaac's level knowledge re: Pixar.)
ReplyDeleteRelevant to this discussion is this article, which is an interview with Charles Solomon who is an animation historian who is putting out a book on TS3. Re: the technological advances:
ReplyDeleteJC: How does the "Toy Story" trilogy mirror the journey and evolution of Pixar itself?
CS: When you watch the three films, you can see the artists develop as animators and filmmakers. The human characters, who were relatively crude in the first film, have become more subtle, more expressive and more believable. When "Luxo Jr." first screened in 1986, many critics compared it to "Steamboat Willie" -- a technical breakthrough that promised wonderful things. "Toy Story 3" and the other recent Pixar films have fulfilled that promise, just as the great Disney features fulfilled the promise of "Steamboat Willie."
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JC: In your introduction, John Lasseter notes that thanks to current technology the Pixar artists were able to "cast" new characters in the latest film, such as a translucent rubber octopus, that simply would not have been possible when the first movie came out. Did the technological advances present any daunting problems?
CS: Maintaining the feel of the earlier films with more sophisticated software and more powerful computers was one of the biggest challenges the artists faced on "Toy Story 3." Many of the artists said they were trying to make the movie look the way John Lasseter would have made the first one look if he'd had the tools.
Russ captures what I was saying well--as an example--look at the stills from TS3 and the still from TS1 on this page. Some of the additional richness comes from other technical things (in particular enhancement on dynamic lighting), but you can see the difference between the rendering.
ReplyDeleteOf course there have been huge leaps in technology since 1995. What I'm disagreeing with is the statement that Pixar's "ability to make those artistic choices was (in part) triggered by the technical advancement." The technology did not trigger the creative choices. It's absolutely the other way around. (Which is what Charles Solomon has been arguing at least since Monsters.) Pixar has been dogged for its entire existence by the weirdly perjorative qualifier "computer," as in "computer animation studio," as if the stories were just an excuse to market the shiny technology. The fact is that Pixar is a place where they decide what they want to do, and then they make it. The technology doesn't "trigger" anything in the creative process, which is at a substantially advanced stage before any computer artist even begins to translate drawings and clay models into computer renderings.
ReplyDeletewhile I haven't seen TS3 yet, I heard an interesting piece some time ago on NPR (All Thing's Considered) about computer animators discovering a sort of "tipping point" in the reality scale that is optimal. I can't for the life of me remember the particular film that was under discussion, and I think it might not have been pixar produced, but the point was that you could go to 99% photorealism and that remaining 1% was enough off to make the image, in their words, creepy. The secret was to get to about 85% and then try for 100% human emotion.
ReplyDeleteThat's the Uncanny Valley, which we've discussed a few times on this site (though I can't find the original reference, which I think predated the episode of 30 Rock about Frank's work on Tracy's porno video game).
ReplyDeleteProbably Polar Express. It and Final Fantasy are the ones that really have uncanny valley problems.
ReplyDeleteExplain it to me in Star Wars.
ReplyDelete