ChristopherDAC
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2004
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- 3,729
- Real Name
- AE5VI
I consider Sin City, Sky Captain, and other similar projects to be animated films, similar to the Fleischer Gulliver's Travels or Bakshi's Lord of the Rings which made heavy use of rotoscoped character-animation against drawn backgrounds. Since I happen to believe that animation is a perfectly valid alternative to direct photography in making a motion picture, I don't regard this as some kind of "cheat" approach, or a substandard technique.
Surely the fact is well known that animation can provide a superior film on a limited budget! As an example, Perfect Blue was originally supposed to be a mediocre live-action Japanese psychological thriller, which would have attracted fairly little attention; thanks to an earthquake, however, funding dried up, and it was handed over to Kon Satoshi to animate -- the result being something of an "instant classic".
The question of what a director does with the materials available to him is completely separate from what those materials are. I think, for instance, that few people would argue that Revenge of the Sith is a better movie than A New Hope, despite the vastly more sopisticated techniques George Lucas used in making the newer film.
I have noticed, more and more in the past few years, that directors seem more and more unable to tell a story through visuals other than in a sort of pseudo-cinema-verite way, showing [and often narrating] every little bit of action to the viewer. Even such an obvious item as Louis' throwing the bottle of Vichy Water into the waste basket at the end of Casablanca would never occur to them. This has nothing to do with whether the motion picture was shot on location at Mount Aetna, or created on a Dell laptop in a waiting room in Burbank.
Surely the fact is well known that animation can provide a superior film on a limited budget! As an example, Perfect Blue was originally supposed to be a mediocre live-action Japanese psychological thriller, which would have attracted fairly little attention; thanks to an earthquake, however, funding dried up, and it was handed over to Kon Satoshi to animate -- the result being something of an "instant classic".
The question of what a director does with the materials available to him is completely separate from what those materials are. I think, for instance, that few people would argue that Revenge of the Sith is a better movie than A New Hope, despite the vastly more sopisticated techniques George Lucas used in making the newer film.
I have noticed, more and more in the past few years, that directors seem more and more unable to tell a story through visuals other than in a sort of pseudo-cinema-verite way, showing [and often narrating] every little bit of action to the viewer. Even such an obvious item as Louis' throwing the bottle of Vichy Water into the waste basket at the end of Casablanca would never occur to them. This has nothing to do with whether the motion picture was shot on location at Mount Aetna, or created on a Dell laptop in a waiting room in Burbank.
