Old Vs New – Animatronics Vs CGI
The recent release of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Fox, a film created utilising the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, caused me to experience a wave of nostalgic excitement that I had not encountered for some considerable time and provided the catalyst for the article you will now read. It wasn’t so much that the prospect of the film itself excited me, in fact, unlike most others, I am not a huge Wes Anderson fan, but the process and technique used to animate the film provided me with feelings of excitement and wonder.
Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s classic is notable not only for it being directed by a filmmaker usually associated with quirky angst-ridden comedy dramas targeted towards an older audience but also for the technical devices used to bring Dahl’s book to the screen. In this age where the technical advancements afforded to filmmaking seem to know no bounds, where entire films can be shot using blue screen techniques and CGI (computer-generated imagery), it was a comforting and exciting feeling to see a film being released in 2009 that uses a form of animation that seemed, other than in low-budget, independent or student filmmaking, to be a relic of a forgotten past.
Currently there seems to be an obsession with things looking and seeming real. If a group of young teenagers today sat down and watched Paul Verhoeven’s dystopian satirical masterpiece Robocop, they would almost certainly laugh at the scenes involving the enormous droid ED-209 as the stop-motion techniques used to portray the murderous robot are, today, extremely obvious and apparent. These scenes of ED-209 are, for fans of the film, both memorable and terrifying. The crude and clearly unrealistic jerky movements of the model that was used in the film combined with its actions which involve quite literally shooting people to pieces are what gives the film and these scenes in particular, such power.
The alternative argument to my reverence for all things hand crafted could well be that if such scenes were to be made today using the technology that is currently available, the scenes themselves would appear far more realistic. I would argue that while the presence of puppets, fake blood and stop motion animation may appear to less accurately convey how, for instance, a person may actually die, the sheer physical presence of a screen monster or a hand crafted scene using stop-motion provides a living physical object, a reminder that something was created which can be touched as opposed to what only exists within the confines of a computer.
I am not totally discounting the merits of CGI animation. When used properly it can be breathtaking such as in Peter Jackson’s King Kong or one the early forays into the technique in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. What I object to is what appears to be the modern Hollywood trend of overkill and laziness. Just because a technology exists, it surely doesn’t mean that it should always be used irrespective of what a particular scene or moment requires. When I watch a modern horror movie such as the unbelievably bad and wholly unnecessary remake of The Hitcher, I found myself both turned off by the plainly awful script and performances but also by the ultra slick but also ultra gratuitous use of CGI violence. In one scene, one of the central characters is tied between two large trucks and subsequently ripped in half, guts flying everywhere and all made possible by CGI. Though this looked good, I was neither shocked or scared, I was simply left indifferent and unmoved as in making a scene so clinically realistic and flawless, any emotional investment is avoided.
Put simply, I love animatronics and stop-motion for the fact that they are so aesthetically crude and obviously false. One of the greatest horror films ever made is also something of a torch carrier for stop-motion, puppets, models and animatronics. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser combines dark and twisted s&m-style horror where the boundaries between pleasure and pain become extremely blurred. The resurrection of the Uncle Frank character from a pile of oozing noxious slime on attic floorboards to a 6 foot tall skinless man is only able to retain itself as such a frighteningly poignant memory for me because of the way it was physically created by the make up and effects department. For me, aesthetic crudeness is not necessarily a detrimental aspect in terms of animation. Instead I think it should be considered a positive quality. As Kirsty in Hellraiser is chased down a dark corridor of hell by a snarling monster it is possible to see, only very briefly, a technician pushing the monster on wheels. While an error like this simply would not happen in a modern Hollywood CGI-heavy horror movie, it’s presence in Hellraiser can remind audiences that Kirsty is physically sharing the frame with the monster. The monster may be a model made by hand and not be real but its presence is far more emotionally significant and less patronizing than if she were screaming in front of a blue screen.
Some of cinema’s most memorable and enduring moments have occurred using stop-motion, models and animatronics. Horror and science fiction films such as Hellraiser, Christine, The Thing, The Fly and Alien use these techniques and are still referred to today with reverence and awe. Their technical execution is not considered tacky or overly dated so Hollywood’s new generation of directors would do well to remember what’s been made in the past in the films of Ridley Scott, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg and consider returning to skilled crafts using their hands and materials rather than just a computer and a software programme. Hopefully Wes Anderson’s new film signals a return to the craft of filmmaking that does not rely entirely on computers. I hope so.
Words by Charlie Graham-Dixon