Colorful Animation Expressions

The Colors of Sleepy Hollow (Part II/II): Dramatic Lighting

2011-11-27T18:38:00.001+01:00

Note: Hans Perk has just completed posting the drafts for this segment (Prod. No. 2062) und Sanek has already started doing the mosaics.

A lot of the first half of the Ichabod segment was based on the color relations of pink/magenta and green/turquoise. Since this was the comedy half, the lighting was secondary and we were looking mostly at object colors with only occasionally a shadow to indicate special lighting (dawn or candle light).

However, as the story progresses towards Halloween and night time, it becomes more dramatic and colored lighting is emphasized.

Dark and gloomy sets are nothing new or extraordinary for Halloween scenes. So it’s more the subtle (and not-so-subtle) use of (painted) colored light that is interesting here.

In the very beginning, we entered the village through the cemetery which is not only dark but enhanced by a blue shimmer from the left. Nothing in the story suggests that this is a night-time image yet for pure atmosphere this shot is accepted within the sequence of pan shots that establish the environment. It simply foreshadows the creepy second half of the segment.

Then later on, while Ichabod and Katrina have been dancing, a storm has come to the night sky.
As if influenced by the outside lighting, the atmosphere inside the barn changes from diffuse high key (without cast shadows) to harsher low key lighting as Brom performs his Halloween stories.

The final change in lighting takes place when the wind blows out the candles near the window. Now, the fireplace seems to be the only source of light and the scared townspeople cast strong shadows on the wall. Brom and the props he uses are carefully enhanced by a yellow/orange glow. Of course, these expensive special effects are very economically used; just enough to make us feel the mood and only in a few shots. The background looks generally darker and more brownish red than before. Black shadows are added only when needed for dramatic effect.

When at the climax of Brom’s scare tactics Ichabod (who is so scared of the prospects of riding through the “hollow” that he isn’t aware of his peppering the egg) spits fire the scene fades to black and we see him on his way back to the village.

If ever there was a dark and gloomy way home, it led through that dark forest. A kind of establishing shot shortly before the new sequence starts.
Stage lighting
So far all the colored light originated from within the barn (candles, fireplace, spitting fire). The forest on the other hand is lit much more expressionistic and mainly based on blue and green which is fairly common for night-time depictions of forests.

What I like about these backgrounds is how blue and green light is used to illuminate tree trunks to add a layer of contrast that couldn’t be achieved by staying within the values of blue alone. One could argue that the blue light is caused by the moon but the inclusion of it in the early graveyard shot does not support this notion. And besides, where does the green light come from then? The leafs flying by are dark brown, so they subtly stand out in front of the trees even if they are not very different in value.

The visual illusion reminiscent of Snow White is unmasked by a slight change of moonlight.

In more atmospheric moments (above) the pictures are composed around value contrasts with more subtle shades of blue next to each other. Moments of tension (below) on the other hand are emphasized by clearer contrasts of hues.

When Ichabod is most scared an additional hue shows up: purple/magenta.

At first this is only for a very brief moment in time, shortly before Ichabod reaches the cemetery.

right: what a great pose!

After a tension releasing comical interlude around fake scares and a stubborn steed, both Ichabod and his horse are scared by something they see offscreen. Their “take” is enhanced by getting green in the face bottom-up. This is by no means an original effect, but it is rather well executed contrasting the color in the subsequent reverse shot of the menace.

Like in so many Disney films, magenta/purple is added to give a setup a more outlandish appeal. As usual the villain is wearing a purple cape. In addition to that the expressionist use of changing a background’s color onscreen from “normal” to red/purple is used to emphasize the menace.

Note how the front headstones don’t change color in order to make the purple of the background stronger by contrast.

green lit characters against a purple background turning up later in the villain song of The Princess and the Frog.

Now the lighting is purely espressionistic only reflecting the dramatic tension. Seen out of context, it looks like someone is turning on and dimming colored stage lamps within an artificial forest. Again this reflected live-action films of the day much more than we might be aware of today, since most of the lavish Technicolor extravaganzas were shot on soundstages in elaborately constructed sets. Night time scenes in particular.

The effect of double exposing backgrounds in different colors is only used very economically. Wherever it was possible, the same effect is achieved by single backgrounds that are not seen in their entirety under the camera.

Here (below) for example, the purple part is emphasized as the camera moves away from the image coinciding with the character blocking out the blue part of the background. In motion it looks as if the lighting turns to purple while the horseman is approaching.

The very long pan below (actually a series of pans) looks realistic with the exception of the exact spot where the horseman catches up with Ichabod and tries to behead him. Since we are panning so fast, it looks as if the color changed for that moment and is back to blue and grey right afterwards when Ichabod is saved by tumbling downhill.

Then as Ichabod is finally reaching the forest's end and is closer to the bridge, the purple light is almost gone from the scene.

Below are two different examples of getting the silhouettes across clearly in fast moving scenes. While the horseman cannot be shown lighter than the background without losing the pitch black that is an integral part of the menace, a stark magenta glow illuminates just enough of the silhouette to be convincing and dramatic. Ichabod on the other hand is light against the dark forest and dark against the backlight of the night sky.

the green doesn't turn red in this final clash which is more comical than dramatic.

The fiery light emitted by the orange pumpkin is not only suggesting the horseman might be Brom but also brackets the Halloween part visually.

In the end we’re back with the more tender pastel versions of violet and turquoise. Even the orange pumpkin that stood between Ichabod and Katrina und is connected to Brom looks softer in the morning light.

Note how different this romantic depiction of the bridge is from the village we have seen in the beginning of the segment. So while the backgrounds of the comedy half of the picture were much more stylized, the scary second part relies on the common romantic 19th century illustration style associated with gothic horror stories.

For once the bad guy (looking like a blueprint for Gaston from Beauty and the Beast) gets the sassy girl and the good guy a large widow with several kids strangely resembling him. Both women are clad in chaste blue, by the way. Also the color palettes of the church window and the one of Ichabod’s room are very similar. Ichabod’s face is in the light, though, while Brom’s is backlit. Colorwise we're finally back again in the idyllic town of the beginning, the autumn colors have vanished however and the overall tone has changed from warm to cool and soft.

Encore
There are a few color keys and inspirational sketches by Mary Blair and her collaborators online. It's interesting that they hardly reflect the production color palettes. But since I don't know anything about the film's production process I just paste them here for you to look at.

Inbetween

2011-11-03T16:45:00.000+01:00

After painting more or less only digitally for some time, I have recently become interested in painting with real brushes and colors again. There's still a lot to learn for me, but since I haven't posted any of my own work for more than half a year, here are two presentable efforts:

preliminary sketch in blue pencil

acrylic on canvas board

The inspiration here was Joan Crawford in her Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) outfit. I say inspiration because I didn't really get hold of her characteristics.

watercolor on acrylic paper

This is a test piece for a children's story I'm about to illustrate. I haven't yet decided whether I should give it a try in traditional watercolor or go for the safe digital technique.

The Colors of Sleepy Hollow (Part I/II)

2011-10-30T01:00:00.002+02:00

As most of you may have learned from Google, color stylist Mary Blair would have been 100 years old a few days ago. She is most famous for her work on the “small world” ride and on Disney’s 50s features Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Her personal style however seems to have been more closely adapted in the preceding package features of the 1940s.

With Halloween only two days away, I’d like to commemorate Mary Blair’s centennial with an analysis of the color styling of Disney’s retelling of “Sleepy Hollow” in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949).

Since there were usually as many as four artists credited for “color and styling”, it’s not always clear who did what sequence. In the case of Mary Blair, a lot of her concept art has been published. As always, I do not attempt to attribute any decision to one individual artist but solely like to analyze what is in the film (or the low quality DVD*, in this case).

Autumn leaves
Autumn colors are used as accents rather than overwhelming whole forests like a tourist magazine would have them. This is once again a good reminder that the impact of a color is mostly based on the relation to its neighboring colors.

Introductory pan as recreated by Hans Bacher

left: strongest leave colors (introductory pan, above); right: muted autumn colors (closer pan, below) with violett hills and tree trunks.

Warm autumn lighting is emphasized by long shadows and a green meadow that leans towards olive and thus is a lot closer to yellow than to blue.

Coming into the village, there is still a large amount of purple present but on the whole the autumn leaves look more candy colored like in a John Hench Golden Book painting.

Later on, the desaturated green trees are clearly outnumbered. Although this image seems to be fairly colorful, a large portion of the image is covered by earthly browntones subtly contrasted by grey stones.

Likewise, the brown treetop in the picture above comes off as colorful only because the tree trunk is painted in a bluish grey.

But these two pictures mainly show us the difference in appearance of antagonists Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones. While Ichabod wears cool magenta and green tones, Brom’s clothes and complexion are more on the warm side although based on the same hues.

Magenta and Green
Although among painters it is common to call red and green complementary colors, physically speaking green and magenta are opposite on the color wheel and therefore complementary colors that provide a strong contrast. They also work well together considered that mixed traditionally both violet and green contain blue and are therefore already closely related. This particular color contrast (and art deco pastel colors in general) was rather popular around 1950 as can be seen in many illustrations and color films of the era.

Many of the minor characters are also either green or magenta and usually shown against muted blue.

It goes without saying that when the middle lady in fact wears a blue dress (positioned in color wheel order), the background is either grey or brown or both to make the soft colors come off clearly.

Ichabod himself is many times seen against even more muted backgrounds (cold and warm).

Then Katrina Van Tassle is introduced in radiant magenta/pink against a dark and very desaturated background. We see her full figure accompanied by the most flamboyantly red leaves yet.

She smells a red rose and we see her father dressed in cool purple/magenta which has also become a villain convention in many Disney films. But here the father is only rich.

While Katrina is followed by a bunch of lover minions (again colorless tree trunks), Ichabod and share a picnic and actually more than that: judging their relationship by their clothes’ colors, one would assume that they somehow belong together.

It may be that the opposites attract and Katrina certainly is a good opposite as the inverted images below show, but as we all know, Ichabod will not end up getting Katrina.

The whole scene seem to be dominated by Katrina's colors with the wall being muted mauve rather than the blue it used to be. Later on, at the ball the whole room will be dominated by muted green/earthly yellow, as Ichabod is about to dominate the scene.

For a short moment, Ichabod’s red shirt appears when he courts the voluptuous damsel. Later on, when Katrina seems to like him, his complexion is considerably darker than hers like in standard Hollywood romance movies. But compared to Brom, he is still a little pale-faced.

The whole house is decorated in magenta and turquoise, balanced only by brown furniture which is either on the green or on the magenta side. If Katrina wouldn’t look so curvaceous and sassy, these last two frames could as well be mistaken for a scene from Cinderella, in fact the studio’s subsequent feature.

Ichabod dreaming about Katrina (his bright shirt is visible in the end)...

...and about her father's money.

Ichabod has always dreamed of the Van Tassles’ wealth in yellow and blue, so it is only natural that he prepares himself to woo Katrina in front of a mirror with a yellow and blue frame.

In his dreams, Ichabod imagines himself in Van Tassle's clothes of purple and gold. At least colorwise, he would make a better suitor for Katrina, even if the heavy, saturated colors make him look old and sleazy like Mr. Winky from the "Wind in the Willows" segment.

Mr. Winky

In the ballroom with green furniture, Brom who is wearing a brownish purple suit and the all pink Katrina contrast well with the background. Ichabod on the other hand is dark enough to stand out.

The dancers are all either green/turquoise or violet/magenta/purple that leans towards pumpkin color.

First, it's opposites...

...then close matches...

... dancing together...

...and back again.

Now Ichabod almost blends in with the scenery and only the pumpkin stands between him and Katrina (foreshadowing not only Brom's scary Halloween story but also the headless Hessian horseman who might or might not be Brom in disguise who actually ends up getting the girl). But for now, Ichabod is the main attraction and surrounded exclusively by soft pastel colors.

The second part of this analysis will focus on the following scary portion of the film, so stay tuned.

By the way, even the depicted food is red/purple and green more often than not.

* this looks like a standard transfer of a release print. Not too vibrant, but at least not digitally overcooked.

Links

2011-09-23T14:07:00.002+02:00

Reflections on Light and Color

Italy is always worth a trip, especially during fall when the beautiful landscapes glow in autumnal colors. For those interested in computer animation there is another reason to go to Torino (Turin) in October:

The Computer Animation Festival VIEWFest (21st to 23rd October 2011) and

VIEW Conference, "the premiere international event in Italy on Computer Graphics, Digital Cinema, 3D Animation, Gaming, VFX and Interactive Techniques" (25th to 28th October 2011).

There are a number of interesting speakers at VIEW Conference including Randy Thom, one of those sound designers who helped shape our expectations of what fantastical worlds in movies sound like (Wild at Heart, The Empire Strikes Back, Mars Attacks, Coraline).

But for readers of this blog, the most interesting event might be Sharon Calahan's workshop:

Sharon Calahan: Ediza Afternoon, 30x24, Oil on Linen

Pixar's Director of Photography/Lighting Sharon Calahan
Reflections on Light and Color
This workshop is intended as discussion about using light and color to create memorable images that support the story. Sharon will talk about her favorite images and why they captivate.

Sharon Calahan joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1994 as lighting supervisor on the studio’s first feature film, Toy Story. She then served as director of photography on Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille and Cars 2.

Sharon knew at the age of three that she wanted to be an artist for Disney. She went on to study graphic design, illustration and photography. Following art school, she began her career as an art director for broadcast television and video production.

Prior to joining Pixar, she was a lighting director at Pacific Data Images completing commercial work, longer format television, and graphics packages.

Date: 24 Oct | Time: 11:00-13:00 | Location: Centro Congressi Torino Incontra
Registration: http://viewconference.it/?p=3745

In addition to that Enrico Casarosa, director of Pixar's upcoming short La Luna, will "deliver a workshop open to aspiring filmmakers, scriptwriters and animation artists. Saturday 22 October from 10.30am to 12.30am – Sala 1, Cinema Massimo"

More Information here.

It also looks as if legendary Italian animation veteran Bruno Bozzetto (Signor Rossi, Soda and West, Allegro non troppo) will be appearing at the VIEWFest.

VIEW Conference Press Release (English).

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A Miyazaki Treat by Way of the Ghibli Conversations Blog

And now for something completely unrelated:

Daniel Thomas McInnes' Studio Ghibli Blog is a place of constant inspiration to me.

One article I have come back to quite a few times recently is his posting of Miyazaki's complete original Mononoke Hime Storybook. What an amazing visual storyteller!

Be sure to also check out the sweet and poetic "Imoto He - For my Sister".

The World's a Stage in "Cape Feare"

2011-08-26T13:35:00.002+02:00

Episode 9F22 – originally planned as the final episode of season 4 but ending up as Ep. 2 / 5 – is one of the most popular Simpsons episodes and much has been said about the fact that this was the farewell episode of the show’s original writing team. I believe that this alone is enough of a pretext to study the storytelling and how they got the scarier moments across and told a “serious” story between slapstick rake gags, Itchy and Scratchy and a grampa missing his hormone pills.

Note: I won’t write in detail about the particular references since there are already a DVD commentary and an extensive wikipedia page full of valuable information about the making of this episode and the many different “movie connections”.

The Simpsons, a series of half-hour (or more precise 22 minute) episodes, consists of quite a lot very short scenes, some of them no longer than 15 seconds consisting of only one or two shots. So a lot of the character based humor is only possible because we’ve grown accustomed to a great many recurring Springfieldians besides the title giving family.

There is a wealth of narratively unrelated parodies, pop references and side gags in each episode, but – like “Cape Feare” – there are whole episodes based on famous movies. In the case of Cape Fear there are already two adaptations (J. Lee Thompson 1962, Martin Scorsese 1991) of the same J.D.MacDonald novel available. The Simpsons episode is closer to the more recent Scorsese version where Bobby DeNiro is hiding underneath a driving car.

One reason why a two-hour movie plot works as a 20-minute scary-comedy-operetta lies in the casting. Because we expect a certain behavior from Homer, Chief Wiggum or Lisa, it is simply entertaining to watch how these characters react to a well-known madman trying to kill Bart. And casting Sideshow Bob (Terwilliger) as the killer, we don’t even need character exposition, just a little brush-up about the townspeople’s previous encounters with Bob.

Suspense
A parody only works for people who know about or have actually seen the spoofed film. But a Simpsons episode (and every good parody for that matter) should also work as a story on its own. In contrast to many other episodes the main storyline starts right at the beginning and not on a detour.

The first third of the story is also a whodunnit.

Not even a minute after the opening credits, Bart gets his first death threat letter. This starts the game of suspense and surprise that structures the narrative emotionally. We know that Bart is really frightened because he doesn’t laugh at the violence of Itchy and Scratchy. For the next three and a half minutes he is first paralyzed by paranoia, then after learning that the police won’t be of any help in this matter he tries to reveal the killer with Lisa’s help.

About a third into the episode it is revealed that Sideshow Bob was the originator of all the death threats and that he’s about to leave the penitentiary. The suspense now lies in our expectations of how soon they will meet. After the first confrontation/chance meeting in the cinema, Bob is seen steeling his body while the Simpsons (and the audience) are given two minutes of rest when they are introduced to the Witness Relocation Program.

Even during the happy trip to Terror Lake Sideshow Bob is never far. The last third of the episode takes place in Terror Lake and again echoes the first third with Bart being frightened by Homer bursting into his room with a knife and a chainsaw.

The final confrontation on the houseboat only lasts for about two and a half minutes with Bob’s singing the “H.M.S Pinafore” taking up more than a minute. Nevertheless, within the 21 minute episode the sequence feels quite long and memorable. The suspense plot arguably loses momentum when Bart outsmarts Bob with his last request (a classical countdown suspense scene that somehow doesn’t create the tension it should). But the police capturing Bob because the boat passed by a brothel and Abe Simpson turning into a woman end the episode on such a funny note that we forgive the otherwise squibbed climax.

Expressionist Lighting
As we have seen, much of the suspense comes from the anticipated confrontation of Bart and his pursuer. These scenes work because of the way they are written, therefore they are mostly staged in standard TV show style (high key lighting, no extravagant angles).

The Scorsese topshot (left); Bart is scared, doesn't this cage remind you of The Birds? (right)

Surprises and scary situations on the other hand benefit greatly from – or are even generated by – audiovisual elements and effects. So it’s no wonder that “Cape Feare” employs subjective lighting and other horror clichés more heavily than the average Simpsons episode.

Whether someone seems scary is largely based on a subjective perspective. Consequently, people who look threatening to Bart also appear in a different light and from more unsettling angles.

The first subjective scary moment: Marge depicted from an extremely low angle.

Ned Flanders also from Bart's low point-of-view; There's an additional backlight effect as Bart gets tenser.

After all, there is an clear-cut open villain at work, not some mystery killer who is only revealed in the last act like in a whodunnit.

Tilt angles and strong low-key lighting to make Bob's entrance scarier (and more campy).

When Bob gets angry in the parole board room, the lighting changes like on a theater stage...

...and back again, before he talks to the board.

Later in the cinema, Bob only turns green when scaring Bart (or trying to).

Bart does not seem to be scared by Bob lying in the streets (no shadows). At the Bates Motel (tilt angles) there's low-key lighting all around while Bob is writing a diabolical note.

Again extreme angles, low-key (cast shadows), a Hitchcock/Scorsese topshot (god's eye view) from where we see that it is Homer after all...

...but Bart sees it much more expressionistic.

Now that all devices are used, the progression is in the way Bart's reaction is animated.

When Bob comes aboard, he is not scary (straight angle, another rake gag), but soon afterwards he's back in villain mode and tilt angle/shadows.

This time it's not Bart's imagination playing a trick on him. It's the real thing, there are no subjective colors.

Comedy: flat, no shadows...

...threatening again: tilt and low key lighting.

A Stage Show
There’s no question that such lighting looks artificial and theatrical, especially in a cartoon where ambient light and cast shadows are generally absent. In addition to spoofing and exploiting our knowledge of horror films, the theatrical staging is a recurring theme on many levels.

As if foreshadowing* the “final curtain” Bob refers to after singing the complete score of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, the episode starts with an elaborate broadway show couch gag that has been heavily critized because it was re-used from an earlier episode.

The TV show the kids are watching before Bart gets his first letter opens with so many curtains that it’s hard to miss the staging reference here.

The nature of a staged TV show is later parodied during the Witness Relocation Program when the Simpsons become the Thompsons and there is an all-new couch gag. Parallels to the popular film-within-a-film or musical-about-staging-a-show genres could be drawn here.

The stage and acting theme is also referenced when Martin is wearing women’s clothes in order to play a murderer in a school theater production (and yes, we see the Bates motel later on). It visually foreshadows not only Homer’s disguise as Jason but also Gampa’s hormone problem.

So it doesn’t come as a complete shock when Bob and Bart put up an full-blown operetta performance with obvious props and improvised costumes and all. Visually, the final curtain falls in the form of a Union Jack (see images above).

The visual representation of the dramatic/theatrical theme is supported by a memorable soundtrack that incorporates Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear leitmotif for Sideshow Bob, the Thompson family singing in the car and an abridged Gilbert and Sullivan score performed by Kelsey Grammer.

* There is one favorite instance of foreshadowing that is only marginally related to the staging theme: When Bob tells the parole board that “Die, Bart, Die” is German for “The Bart, The”, a board member says under her breath that “no one who speaks German can be an evil man”. Only minutes earlier we have been reminded of Germany’s violent past in one brief shot of a TV announcer in uniform (who introduces a homophobic TV host with a German/Austrian accent talking about the “music guy’s” costume).

Pooh vs. Pukh, a character analysis

2011-08-08T12:38:00.003+02:00

My interest in storytelling and defining screen characters led me to analyze two very different yet faithful adaptations of Alexander Alan Milne’s children’s classic “Winnie-the-Pooh”. It just so happens that Wolfgang Reitherman’s first Disney adaptation Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966) is based on the same two chapters as Fyodor Khitruk’s first two Vinni-Pukh (1969/1971) films, both of them about ten minutes long per chapter. However, Pooh and his friends come across as quite different characters in these two versions of the same simple story.

The first two chapters of A. A. Milne’s book “Winnie-the-Pooh” from 1926 are built around Pooh’s incessant appetite for honey. In the first one he fails to get honey out of a treehole inhabited by bees, in the second one he climbs through another hole into a rabbit burrow and eats so much honey that he gets stuck when trying to climb out.

While Milne concentrates on Pooh’s relationship with Christopher Robin (CR) in the first chapter and introduces the good-mannered rabbit in the second, he only mentions the other characters in a sort of preview of later chapters. After all, Pooh is Christopher Robin’s favorite toy bear and CR is the narrator’s six year old son who wants his daddy to tell Pooh stories about himself, Pooh that is. In fact, Milne’s own son was called Christopher Robin and the book contains many a conversation between father and son in parentheses.

Thus, one might say the self-reflective narration has always been part of the appeal of the Pooh stories. So there’s no wonder that both the Russian and the American adaptations feature voice-over narration and characters looking into mirrors or even straight at the camera.

Literal but playful and appealing
The way Khitruk and Reitherman differ in how they incorporate the narrator and CR into the story is essential to the way they handle the characters and their on-screen relationships. They both seem to do Milne justice on different levels, though. True to Disney’s literal “illusion of life” paradigm, Reitherman frames the animated segments with a credit sequence over live-action footage of a deserted nursery full of stuffed animals and a book of Winnie-the-Pooh which belong to a boy called Christopher Robin “and they all live together in a wonderful world of make-believe”.

This ghostly human world feels as artificial and lifeless that it seems only natural to see the book open all by itself. As it turns out, there is no connection between the English narrator (Sebastian Cabot) and the American animated boy Christopher Robin whose voice belongs to director Reitherman’s son Bruce (later the voice of Mowgli). This Pooh story is obviously told to us and not to CR.

Since the original stories already lack any opportunities for emotional involvement (or Disney sentimentality) the film makers have cleverly expanded the concept of characters inhabiting a printed book, no matter how distancing this may turn out. The original self-reflective conversations between CR and his narrator-father have been translated into occasional interactions between Pooh and the narrator.

Yet the printed book and the carefully rendered illustrations support the notion that this is a children’s story told from an adult’s point of view, fondly looking down on the lovable characters like one is looking at a young child. After all, Pooh is only “stuffed with fluff” and “of very little brain”. The stories in this book might fuel a child’s imagination and role play, audience involvement is not as immediate though because of this additional layer.

Diving into that world

Khitruk’s narrator, on the other hand, is in no other relation to the characters than faithfully narrating their story. When these characters look at the camera, they may look directly at us or appear to think something that we don’t know about. By eliminating the meta-level that both Milne and Reitherman used to indicate the child-like make-believe world of embarking on adventures with forest animals and stuffed toys alike, Khitruk is able to eliminate CR and humans in general.

Thus, the director creates a world of immediacy itself, a universe where Vinni Pukh and his friends are very much alive, not as forest animals or stuffed toys but as “real” characters with no traces of human interference, there’s no distancing book involved.

A narrative that follows children’s logic is ideally suited for a visual style that has the warmth of children’s drawings. After all, this artistic illustration style was much more contemporary in 1969 than the timeless Disney-fied Shepard imitations (I happen to like so much). So Khitruk even manages to discard the “literary classic” or nostalgia dimension of Reitherman’s film without compromising Milne’s spirit.

Although breaking the concept of either style, both films give us a point-of-view up-shot at the "black rain cloud".

Probably the greatest advantage of such a conventionalized, two-dimensional style is the fact that the characters don’t need to be animated in an “illusion-of-life” fashion. The obviously skillful Russian animators have found a naïve style that allows very laconic and deadpan comic performances.

Rabbit is all excited, in Khitruk's style tilted glasses do the job.

Characters

The gopher that is "not in the book".

Although only Pooh, CR and Rabbit appear in the first two chapters, Reitherman sneaks in the whole gang of Pooh characters from the first book as extras – except for Piglet (instead there is a much criticized American gopher that is “not in the book”). Piglet however is mentioned in the preface of Milne’s book and comes off as a small but somehow jealous guy who would love to be as popular as Pooh.

By substituting Piglet for CR, Khitruk gives Pukh a screen partner who unlike CR is not considered mentally superior. Thus, characterized by his relationship with Piglet (Pyatachok), Pukh comes off as a distinct character quite different from what we are used to from the Disney version. Apart from the fact that he hardly ever smiles at anybody he also walks and talks in a swift pace. Especially in the second Pukh film, Piglet is breathlessly trying to keep up with him.

Piglet replaces Christopher Robin

Milne’s Pooh
But before comparing the different film characters, let’s have a look at how Milne characterizes Pooh in the book: According to the narrator, Pooh is CR’s favorite toy and likes to play a game, sit quietly in front of a fire or listen to a story, preferably about himself (as CR remarks). He also likes to make up songs and poems which he sings/hums when wandering about aimlessly. His thought process seems to be slow and steady and he talks to himself. All in all, he is pretty confident that his plans work. And above all, he has an insatiable appetite for honey.

In the second chapter we also learn that he is capable of self-reflection: He exercizes in front of a mirror and afterwards thinks about what it felt like being somebody else. Yet he is persistent enough not to believe Rabbit’s polite way of trying to get rid of him by posing as somebody else or even “nobody” (“But this is Me! – What sort of Me?”). In fact, Pooh doesn’t get the concept of saying things out of politeness at all. When he’s stuck he’s embarrassed and even crying at the prospects of not eating for a week, but it never occurs to him that this situation might have been uncomfortable for Rabbit as well. In his case, social ignorance leads to resilience and one couldn’t even be mad at him for that. E.H. Shepard’s illustrations hardly show any strong facial expressions.

Reitherman’s Pooh

The stereotyped thinking gesture.

Sebastian Cabot introduces Pooh as a lovable bear with very little brain and an insatiable appetite for honey. We see Pooh exercising and talking to himself in front of a mirror (self-reflection). He’s obviously a Teddy Bear. His voice (Sterling Holloway) is rather high but slow and charming, he always smiles and there is a stereotyped gesture to show his thought process. He speaks not only to himself but also to the narrator and sings whenever he is on his own, sometimes supported by a choir that emphasizes the mood of warm American nostalgia right from the title song.

Talking to himself and stuffed with fluff.

Another framing device.

This happy-go-lucky Pooh might be regretful but never angry or hurt, he even laughs when he bangs his head to a branch. The first person he thinks of is not CR but “Winnie the Pooh”. But like in the book, he relies on CR to get him out of tight places. Yet, the narrator tells us, Pooh is not “the sort to give up easily”. When he put his mind to honey, he stuck to it. He may always be happy and not be able to think a bad thought but he certainly can’t read other people’s feelings/intentions. After eating all Rabbit had, he’s simply disappointed that there’s no honey left, and – like in the book – doesn’t think about what he inflicted on Rabbit by getting stuck in his front door.

Khitruk’s Pukh
Although the harpsichord title tune and the fairy-tale narrator suggest a deliberate pace, Pukh himself is quite the opposite. Before we see him, we see his tracks and the narrator tells us that he always likes a snack and that he’s a poet writing verses and even small songs. As I’ve written above, Pukh is walking and talking swiftly and comes off as rather gnarly, especially when he sings. He shows hardly a facial expression and pauses from time to time looking into the camera and guessing what to say or do next. His blank looks are funny in itself and combined with brilliant timing define an animated performance as laconic as anything Buster Keaton or Kaurismäki have done.

He is a slow thinker, though. During his first conversation with Piglet he hardly makes eye contact and speaks in choppy phrases. He treats Piglet like a younger brother whose always one step behind but running to catch up. Piglet seems to look up to Pukh and do whatever he demands. Although Piglet is eager to help Pukh, he is still better at doing some things like inflating a balloon.

The emphasis on relationships and character interaction becomes especially apparent in the second film/chapter, where Pukh only gets stuck in the end for a few seconds. Instead the honey-eating part is expanded to show how Pukh is ignorant of the whole politeness concept and how he bosses around Piglet without coming off as a tyrant. In fact, Pukh not only washes his little friend’s face, he also ties a napkin over his mouth so that Piglet isn’t able to eat or say anything during the whole meal. Pukh soon forgets about his proudly displayed social manners when he learns that there is still more food for him.

Although Pukh only thinks about Rabbit's honey...

...he still remembers his manners.

What really makes these characters come to life are such small gestures like in the end when Pukh tries to grab Piglet’s hand to run off with him.

Final Thoughts
Having grown up with Disney’s Pooh featurettes, I was slightly disappointed the first time I saw Khitruks Vinni Pukh not because of its visual simplicity and charming stylization but because it was built around a different title character and most of all, everything I loved about Winnie the Pooh – notably the book and narrator interactions – was missing from this version.

Only after seeing all three Khitruk shorts a second time I began to see why everybody in Eastern Europe was so fond of Pukh. Gradually, the brisk pace and singing became a valuable alternative to the laid-back style of the Sherman Brothers’ songs that in my mind had become synonymous with Winnie the Pooh.

Although both film versions follow the book very closely, even down to the dialogue (according to the subtitles, at least), Khitruk’s substitution of CR with Piglet sounds like a major change but ultimately leads to less detached storytelling than in the Disney version. Pukh’s relationship with Piglet gives us an additional dimension not present in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree* because it doesn't show when Pooh talks only to CR who he looks up to and not Piglet who looks up to him.

After all, and this is true for both adaptations, isn't it refreshing to have a protagonist who only cares about his well-being and never thinks about how his friends feel? Actually, the quirky Russian Pukh is also a more interesting character, simply because he isn’t always happy. I think it’s interesting to see what small decisions can lead to two different characters in roughly the same story.

*Piglet is present in later Disney featurettes, of course, but comes off as a rather different, timid and even stupid character.

Oh Bother! Yet Another Pooh (NO SPOILERS)

2011-07-15T17:29:00.003+02:00

Around the time Winnie the Pooh (2011) was released last spring, someone asked me whether Disney’s many Pooh films always told the same story and I had to admit that I’ve lost track of which element popped up in which featurette. Having more recent memories of the Russian version that also follows Milne’s chapters very closely I found it was time to take another look at both The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1966-77) and Fyodor Khitruk’s Vinni Pukh (1969-72) to clarify the situation.

While I’m not interested in meticulously relating the Milne chapters to the many film versions here, I like to share a few thoughts about the new Pooh today (its US release date) and have a closer look at the way Disney/Reitherman and Khitruk tell their stories, respectively, in a future post.

It was probably the first time ever that an animated Disney feature was released in Switzerland months before its American release date (on April 14, to be precise). Although it wasn’t eclipsed by Harry Potter it understandably went under the radar of most moviegoers and wasn’t perceived as the major Disney release of 2011. After numerous direct-to-video features and an omnipresent TV-show the prospects of yet another return of the (meanwhile trademarked) Disney-fied Winnie the Pooh were not especially exciting, to put it mildly.

Apart from my intention to see every theatrically released hand drawn Disney feature at least once (consciously avoiding upgraded direct-to-video releases like Bambi 2), there was another – wholly unexpected – reason to see it: the poster.

Although this is one of those familiar promotional group pictures where the characters are not really interacting or aren’t even arranged in an overall pose, it told me very clearly what to expect. All the characters are on the lookout for something to fight against except for Eeyore who is missing his tail and Pooh at the center who is looking for honey. There’s not much overlapping and we see the silhouettes very clearly so the animals appear as individuals rather than a tight-knit group.

But what intrigued me was the horned silhouette that gives us a hint of what the animals’ opponent might look like. It also reminds us that they might be once again chasing a figment of their imagination because they see things differently than they are – after all, it’s just a tree-top, anything else is interpretation at this point.

Mildly enjoyable, but really more of the same
The film itself is not bad measured by the three Pooh shorts that made up The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977). Closely inspired by some of A.A. Milne’s original Pooh stories the 2011 edition is able to capture the spirit of chasing one’s own shadow that made the early shorts so charming to me. All the familiar elements are intact and feel more of a piece but less inspired than before. It seems only consistent that the main feature is accompanied by a narrator-driven short that has “retro” and “hommage” written all over it.

Paul Felix (with Patrick Sullivan and his team) has to be credited for translating the 1960s water color background style to the computer era. As expected, the pencil clean-up is a lot less charming (with fake construction lines that are sometimes not even in the right place).

At first, I resented the redesign of Christopher Robin who now looks even blander than ever with his newly white eyes instead of the charming buttons. But considering the logic of having white eyes for real forest animals and button eyes for stuffed animals it is only appropriate. Eeyore seems to be an exception to the rule, but then maybe sad eyes aren't possible with buttons and he really isn't made of fluff inside his head... who knows...

Story less episodic, characters still simplified
The biggest difference is that this time the supposedly three Milne stories are interwoven rather than told as separate episodes, so despite a running time of only about an hour the new movie feels more like a feature than the 1977 film. Combining the elements of several chapters into one long episode has the advantage that the story arcs can be expanded without having to come up with more complex information within each narrative thread and the plot points can be dispersed more evenly across the film.

Familiar diversions such as song- and dream-sequences in different drawing styles and tongue-in-cheek elements try to mask the fact that Pooh and his friends are still serial characters who therefore can’t have a real character arc, i.e. undergo real changes.

Pooh himself is maybe telling us one too many times that he’s a “bear of very little brain” (as opposed to just being a “silly old bear”) which reminded me of Kung-Fu Panda’s Po. Piglet is acting less timidly than outright stupidly, which is a pity. All things considered the characters are coherent within the Disney-Pooh universe. Given the simple story and the amount of dialogue scenes I believe the opportunity to write (and animate) more complex characters without losing their established personality would have been there.

As always the book and narrator are part of the story with the letters probably more emphasized than in previous versions. Although the story contains many elements of Chapter Five in which Rabbit has a busy day, and we learn what Christopher Robin does in the mornings from Milne’s “House at Pooh Corner” with its many references to reading and spelling, the most interesting part of that chapter unfortunately didn’t make it into the film, although it would have contained the potential to explore Eeyore’s character beyond the “everything happens to me” attitude:

Eeyore had three sticks on the ground, and was looking at them. Two of the sticks were touching at one end, but not at the other, and the third stick was laid across them. Piglet thought that perhaps it was a Trap of some kind.
‘Oh, Eeyore,’ he began again, ‘I just –‘
‘Is that little Piglet?’ said Eeyore, still looking hard at his sticks.
‘Yes, Eeyore, and I –‘
(original colour illustration by E.H.Shepard)
‘Do you know what this is?’
‘No’ said Piglet.
‘It’s an A.’
‘Oh,’ said Piglet.
‘Not O – A,’ said Eeyore severely. ‘Can’t you hear, or do you think you have more education than Christopher Robin?’
‘Yes,’ said Piglet. ‘No,’ said Piglet very quickly. And he came closer still.
‘Christopher Robin said it was an A, and an A it is – until somebody treads on it,’ Eeyore added sternly.
Piglet jumped backwards hurriedly, and smelt at his violets.
‘Do you know what A means, little Piglet?’
‘No, Eeyore, I don’t.’
‘It means Learning, it means Education, it means all the things that you and Pooh haven’t got. That’s what A means.’
‘Oh,’ said Piglet again. ‘I mean, does it?’ he explained quickly.
‘I’m telling you. People come and go in this Forest, and they say, “It’s only Eeyore, so it doesn’t count.” They walk to and fro saying “Ha-ha!” But do they know anything about A? They don’t. It’s just three sticks to them. But to the Educated – mark this, little Piglet – to the Educated, not meaning Poohs and Piglets, it’s a great and glorious A. Not,’ he added, ‘just something that anybody can come and breathe on.’

So while the opportunity to further explore the well-known characters is ignored throughout, the story focuses on the “storm in a teapot” elements (like chasing a Backson and finding Eeyore's tail) decorated with mandatory, uplifting messages about friendship. A storm in a teapot, little more, is what this gentle imitation of – rather than a sequel to – The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh really feels like.

Scorsese vs. Hitchcock: Camera as Character

2011-07-01T15:36:00.003+02:00

Travis is introduced through his eyes and his reflection in rear-view-mirrors.

One of my favorite fields of interest in films of any kind is narrative point-of-view. This post may be about live-action films exclusively, but since animation artists are essentially film makers we can learn a great deal from analyzing the thinking behind two very controlled directors’ decisions. There are mild spoilers ahead, as always when classics are debated, so if you haven’t seen Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or Scrosese’s Taxi Driver (1975) yet, go see them, they are great examples of what night-time cab-driver Travis calls “morbid self-attention”. And hey, they both are masterfully scored by Bernard Herrmann and are available in stellar image quality on Bluray!

Film history provides us with a wide range of psychological studies that are essentially told from a character’s subjective perspective. With the exception of Robert Montgomery’s Raymond Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake (1947) the camera doesn’t usually limit itself to the literal point-of-view of the first person narrator.

Lady in the Lake: a whole movie composed of point-of-view shots.

In fact, we are accustomed to the convention of seeing a character within the image and still accept it as his personal vision of reality. Yet in many subjective movies – particularly the ones dealing with voyeurism – there are moments when the director intentionally breaks the concept and either shifts the narrative’s point of view to another character (Brian de Palma’s Sisters, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo) or – more interesting – has the camera see things that no character inside the movie could see.

Voyeurism and self-reflection
The principal visual leitmotif of Taxi Driver is the mirror. We are introduced to protagonist Travis Bickle by seeing his eyes and their reflections in the rear-view-mirrors of his taxi before we see anything else of him. There’s no doubt that self-reflection is the central theme that is perhaps most obviously illustrated in the famous mirror-scene (“you talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here.”).

But Travis is also a voyeuristic substitute of ourselves as movie spectators – observing what goes on around him rather than being part of it – and he more disturbing, this leads him to become a murderer. Even without being aware that composer Herrmann cites his own Psycho motif just before Travis kills for the first time, the connection to Hitchcock’s “peeping tom” Norman Bates can be easily seen.

While Scorsese – with the exception of one and a half scenes – confines the narrative to Travis’ point of view, Hitchcock radically changes our perspective from a thief (Janet Leigh) to an obsessive murderer (Anthony Perkins). From that point on we also share the knowledge of his pursuers which is the basis of Hitchcock’s suspense technique.

Manipulation vs. distancing effect
Taxi Driver however is not a crime thriller since no one is really paying enough attention to Travis to pursue him – or at least we don’t see them. Furthermore, the two directors have fundamentally different agendas. Hitchcock uses subjective narration to manipulate our emotions so that we are as thrilled that we don’t question the logic as long as we are watching his films.

Scorsese on the other hand is constantly trying to disorient us with subtle jumpcuts and other Nouvelle Vague techniques to slightly distance us from morally ambivalent Travis. Even though he gets us interested in Travis’ life (the sentiments might be fascination as well as pity), he encourages us to reflect on what we see. He does so most obviously in some shots that are held longer than the information they give us needs to sink in, so that we become aware that we are watching a movie which would clearly break the suspense of a Hitchcock movie.

He also gives us moments of rest after something emotionally excruciating happened. In Taxi Driver the longest “pause scene” is the song that plays after Travis’ first murder. There is also a brief scene after he tried to kill the senator and Travis sits even down in the middle of his “roaring rampage” right after he killed Sport. Of course, in a Scorsese picture the distancing effect is never as dominant as in a Brecht play or a Godard film.

Borrowing from horror movies
In the Criterion director’s commentary, Scorsese reveals that he applied techniques of classical Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur horror movies to suggest Travis’ paranoia. One of the examples I found is when Travis first enters the brothel with Iris.

In the following video we first see a classic suspense situation from Psycho and then the analogous scene from Taxi Driver. It’s interesting to see how much of Psycho is composed of simple shot-reverse shot scenes (the basic cinematic difference to theater) with extreme control over what is revealed at what time.

The Taxi Driver ends on a jump cut to De Niro in the room, which might not be noticed consciously but adds to the sense of uneasiness. More interesting, at the beginning of the excerpt, we believe that the camera shows us Travis’ point of view while the reverse-shot shows us that he hasn’t yet entered the room.

Camera as additional character
We don’t normally perceive camera moves as long as they are reframings in order not to lose the actors from sight. We also accept camera moves along a character’s personal stuff inside his apartment, especially if the move ends on the person who lives there.

Hitchcock however likes to use his camera as an additional character who moves independently from the actors and points towards what he wants the audience to see. He always uses this device to give us additional information and heighten the suspense (while emphasizing a red herring once in a while, too).

In his British comeback film Frenzy (1972) we already know that a red-haired neck-tie murderer strangles women after telling them “you’re my type of woman”. Like in many scenes of Psycho and Taxi Driver the camera is positioned in a staircase while we see the murderer and his victim ascend the stairs. Once we heard the crucial sentence, we don’t have to see the murder to know what’s going on. Instead, the camera character tracks down the stairs and out of the house where we learn that no one will notice the murder because of the noise outside.

Both of Hitchcock’s observing cameras are clearly intended to transport information to the audience.

In Taxi Driver, however, there’s a scene where Travis is talking to Betsy on the phone one last time. According to Scorsese this is the key shot of the film and first that came fully formed to his mind when starting work on the film.

Here the camera, like in an Antonioni or Huillet/Straub film, moves independently away from Travis, but we only see a corridor. Scorsese repeatedly said that this conversation was too painful to watch, so he wanted to pan away from it. At the same time, this gives us one of those shots that outlast our expectations. From our subconscious movie knowledge we either expect someone coming through the corridor or out of one of the doors. The non-existing moment of suspense fizzling out, though, once we see Travis enter the frame from the left.

Camera as transcendent observer
The last video starts with a scene from Psycho that pretends to reveal the long-awaited visual information about Norman’s mother. Ultimately, Hitchcock manages to deceive us once again, though, by having the camera perform a move that suggests a free floating agent who can assume any perspective, even one that is usually attributed to god alone.

typical Scorsese rostrum shot for rituals.

Scorsese (like his apt pupil Wes Anderson) likes these top shots a lot. Especially his 1990s films like Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) are rife with god’s-eye-views that have been said to represent not only the point-of-view of a not-so-goodnatured divine being but also the point-of-view of a priest during consecration (looking down on the communion table). Therefore he often uses such rostrum type shots for ritualistic moments. In Taxi Driver we see it when Travis applies for the job, when he asks Betsy out on a date and when he purchases and handles the guns for his ritualistic killing.

He comes back to that perspective in the end, when the camera slowly observes Travis’ trail of blood and finally leads into a homage to the Frenzy scene described above.

There are also some more explicit intertextual references as in all of Martin Scorsese's works. A good account of many of those not documented on the imdb can be found in this essay by John Thurman.

Recommendation: Sony’s new Taxi Driver BD is among the best restorations of a 1970s film so far. Contrary to current practice the picture is not enhanced or “fixed” but just restored to what it looked (and sounded) like in 1976. The heavy involvement of Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman made sure that even the overly grainy Columbia logo used during the 1970s was kept intact.

The main difference to most of the earlier DVDs is that they were “color corrected” towards a colder white/blue whereas the film was always intentionally more yellow/dingy. Even the altered colors of Travis’ bloodbath are still in the grainy sepia look that made the artificial blood look much better than in other violent movies of the time. In short, it looks rather like film than like a super-enhanced DVD.

all comparison images lifted from DVDbeaver.com

For DVD comparison see DVD Beaver's review. Don't be fooled by the relatively small difference in sharpness of the stills. Seen in motion this Bluray really looks like film rather than video and vastly superior to all previous editions.

For more information about the restoration process: Digital Bits interview with Sony's Grover Crisp.

Please bear with me...

2011-06-20T17:18:00.001+02:00

If you happen to live in Switzerland, you might be interested to know that on June 29 at 8.15pm there will be a special Taxi Driver screening of the digitally restored BluRay edition in the cinema Seehof in Zug. I’m also posting this because preparing my introduction to and lecture on this masterpiece is part of what kept me from writing lately. Martin Scorsese is one of my favorite directors and the 1970s are among my favorite historical periods in regard to American movies.

Sony’s Taxi Driver restoration is probably the most faithful digital presentation of a New Hollywood movie so far and therefore highly recommended.

It’s been more than a month since my last post and honestly, I don’t really know when I’ll have the time to post something more substantial. Looking at my Google Analytics page I can’t help but notice that the daily traffic – that was steadily increasing until a few weeks ago – is now steadily dropping to about half of what it once was. I regret that especially since I was really pleased to discover that this blog has now more than 250 public followers. Thanks for reading my stuff!

Two posts a month should be manageable
The only saving grace at the moment are plugs by the likes of Michael J. Ruocco’s Animation Smears that are featured on cartoonbrew. So in order not to lose too many of you I try to establish a steadier posting rhythm, so to speak, that is still manageable during busier times. My plan is to come up with a new post twice a month starting in July.

I could do a lot of short industry and festival news posts inbetween just to keep the traffic going, but firstly I think that there are already more than enough information sites and secondly I don’t want the longer articles to be obscured by them. Instead I will stick to my practice of previewing animation events and plugging interesting sites once in a while without being able to do justice to all the interesting information I receive.

So I hope you understand that not reviewing a short film, website or festival announcement doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it. It’s just that there are other things on my mind, too, that consume my time. And – you might have guessed it – I’m a little obsessed with researching a lot before I dare to write about something.

Special sites for special posts
As you may have already seen, I have organized the most popular posts on special sites just below the header making it easier to directly access them. Hopefully, this will keep you interested during low tide.

Pooh-color [Updated]

2011-05-14T14:21:00.001+02:00

While writing about Disney's new Winnie the Pooh (2011) and its American and Russian predecessors I thought it would be fun to do a tiny little color-guessing post once again. It's an easy one whether you know Fyodor Khitruk's 1969 short Vinni-Pukh or not. But if you don't you should probably give it a chance. An English subtitled version is available on youtube.

Screenshot with desaturated bear.

What was Pooh/Pukh's fur color in the Russian adaptation?

You can answer/guess in the comments or simply look it up on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqdiEUp6s4E&feature=related (First short 1969)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdogzjfzKTM&feature=related (Second short 1971)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73uIn56G1YE&feature=related (Third short 1972, part I)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtVVRuy1T9c&feature=related (Third short 1972, part II)

Enjoy!

Update:

The correct answer was C, of course!

Erika Giovanna Klien: Shapes and Colors (2/2)

2011-05-07T01:15:00.000+02:00

This second post on Kinetismus painter Giovanna Erika Klien is mainly concerned with the structure of some of her more famous paintings. They are a true inspiration to me. A short summary of Klien's life and work can be accessed here.

Let’s focus on the clearly structured Diving Bird (Erika Giovanna Klien, 1939) once again:

to fully appreciate the image click on it for larger version.

Regardless whether we recognize the many stylized bird silhouettes, we see two dynamically intertwined overall shapes that divide the picture into four parts of negative space (below left). The lower shape is visually heavier because it is larger and the dark part is darker than its reflective part in the upper shape. One could also see it as a single twirled form in space (below middle) – my own interpretation, of course.

A few rolling extra lines that do not seem to be part of the bird silhouettes define the texture of the shapes (above right). These are following the intersection points of the silhouette lines.

This is where color comes into play: Klien treats the small ornamental shapes defined by overlapping lines independently from the objects and larger shapes these lines describe. Looking at them without the context of the whole picture, these triangles and Ds transport the ornamental quality of decorative patterns.
The only exception is the lowest eye-catching bird silhouette that is by and large colored according to its outline.

The different dark tones are arranged like a gradient from dark to light in more than one direction. This concept is used in many instances throughout the whole painting as if to underline the perpetual character of a bird in motion.

The gradients of the interlocked patterns converge towards white which heightens the contrast with the dark bird silhouette.

The outermost gray triangle pattern of the overall shapes is more or less kept in the same tonal distance from the background / negative space (with a partial white overlay in the upper shape).

Visual unrest

But her work hasn’t always been this clear and distant. If we look at paintings from her late Vienna period, we discover a wilder – I think more emotional – approach of visualizing movement.

The color palette for one isn’t as muted as in the later bird studies but equally reduced to two basic colors. During the 1920s, Klien seemed to be especially fond of blue-gray vs. yellow-ochre-salmon colors as we can see in the paintings below.

Klien: Vogelflug (bird flight), 1928

Although the five birds are relatively easy to discern, this picture looked like a vivid but well-balanced abstract composition to me at first. Overall there is a strongly felt curve (1) that follows the heads in the direction the birds are flying.

But apart from that and the curved wing outlines (which cannot always be assigned to specific birds) there seem to be some curves (2) and straights (3) that are purely compositional.

Again the resulting minimal shapes are painted as separate parts. Although the colors are not really arranged gradually and hierarchies are harder to detect, there seem to be one or two areas of negative space around the birds. These are filled with the less intense colors. (4)

Everytime I look at this picture I’m drawn to different overall shapes. In my mind, this painting not only depicts motion but creates it by forcing me to constantly re-imagine it.

Klien: Begegnung (encounter), 1927

In Begegnung (1927) I believe I can see at least three human silhouettes going from right to left (with the circles as joints and heels) although the main compositional elements are straights that broadly segment the canvas. The heaviest area seems to be at the top (darker colors) yet the picture does not feel unbalanced. Maybe the human figures are mere figments of my imagination, maybe the whole picture is purely abstract.

Here are some pictures of the same period that are also structured by strong straight lines with decidedly more representational motifs:

Klien: Häuser (houses), 1924

In contrast to Vogelflug and Begegnung, here the colors are arranged in a way that strongly supports the representational aspects (the blue houses structure the image) and in some instances helps differentiating which elements stands in front of which.

Klien: Kirche (church), 1930

The gouache picture below on the other hand looks fairly representational on the surface but is conceived as an abstract composition. The technical clarity seems to be typical for Klien’s New York years.

Klien: Silex abstraction, 1935

Underpainting

Finally, let’s take a look at Klien’s most famous picture that serves as identification symbol of the DYNAMIK! Exhibition in Vienna:

Klien: Lokomotive, 1926

Combining many characteristics of Klien’s style it depicts a modernist favorite of technical progress: the steam locomotive. Composed of fragmented circles and long straights it is painted in a pointillist fashion. The shapes are often painted in colors that are next to each other, the steam engine itself is depicted in the darkest and most saturated blue and even graded to invoke the materiality of steel. Contrary to that clarity the outlines are somewhat ambiguous with doublings that work look like afterimages to present-day viewers.

The non-representational shapes are emphasized by slight color (value) contrasts as seen in the lower right corner.

(desaturated and slightly exaggerated contrast)

What struck me most in this picture is how well we can see through its physical construction: because of the pointillist technique (that is also visible in many of the other examples) the colors are not only more vibrant but it also allows us to see the larger shapes that are painted underneath in different colors. To make the case even more interesting, there are areas where top and bottom layer are from the same basic colors while in many instances Klien applies blue over an underpainting of the yellow-ochre family and vice versa.

In addition to the particular paintings discussed in these two posts, Klien also created some more distinctly representational pictures including people and typography some of which can be found on the internet as well.

Erika Giovanna Klien: Kinetism (1/2)

2011-05-01T23:54:00.003+02:00

Erika Giovanna Klien: Lokomotive, 1926

In an extensive exhibition in Vienna I have encountered Kinetismus (kinetism), a Viennese variation of expressionism established by Franz Cizek who synthesized cubism, futurism and ornamental arts. It struck me that the rhythmic approach of capturing movement in space made Kinetismus a natural kin to animation. The pictures that especially appealed to me were all painted by Erika Giovanna Klien, probably the most important exponent of this particular style.

Erika Giovanna Klien was born in Italy in 1900. When she was 19 and her father wouldn’t allow her to become an actress, she went to the applied arts school in Vienna, later known as the School of Decorative Art. The teaching artists of the European avant-garde “attempted to erase the distinction between fine art and the decorative arts” (fembio.org)

Under her mentor Franz Cizek Klien discovered a holistic approach to self-expression.

“She wrote poems and reworked them as typographical pictures and comic-book style drawings; she formed her handwriting into an artistic gesture and consistently replaced the punctuation marks she found annoying with dashes in her personal correspondence. In her own way she remained true to the theater.” (fembio.org)

Her special love for the theater finally led her to the Vienna Drama School in 1922/23 and she created a “marionette theater with a novel stage, backdrop and figures and wrote a play for it” (fembio.org). This marionette theater is worth mentioning for its use of unnaturally moving characters within equally moving stages. Unfortunately, these dynamics don’t come through in the sketches of the theater I’ve seen.

After a career as a commercial artist and art teacher Erika Giovanna Klien moved to New York in 1929 and became a U.S. citizen in 1938. She died of a heart attack in 1957 after an emotionally and economically troubled life of trying to survive as a single mother. During her lifetime she was more popular as an encouraging modern art teacher in America than as an artist. Re-evaluation of her work has only begun almost twenty years after her death.

Abstract and representational at the same time
Klien’s pictures may be unique but they were conceived in an extraordinary avant-garde environment that was fuelled by analytical, structural and positivistic thinking. The 1920s in Vienna were the time of twelve-tone music, psycho analysis, constructivism and gestalt theory to name but a few.

Some historians assume that the Swiss painter Johannes Itten (most well-known for his theoretical works on color) might have been a key influence to Cizek and Klien who is even said to have elaborated on Itten’s Vienna period while he himself has returned to representational depictions for many years. I would have liked to compare Itten’s Häuserrhythmen II (1917) with Klien’s Reitschule in Salzburg (around 1922) but couldn’t find either of them online.

Johannes Itten: Die Begegnung (the encounter), 1916

In my opinion, Klien’s examination of movement and dynamics is evident in two different ways: On the one hand, she painted moving objects and creatures with multiple outlines like an animated scene seen on a light table. On the other hand, she interwove geometric shapes with abstract and representational forms and elements to a structure that seems to be in constant motion.

Erika Giovanna Klien: Diving Bird (1939)

In Diving Bird (1939), my favorite of all her bird-flight pictures, we see multiple “snapshot” outlines overlapping as well as a new overarching shape. The resulting splinters of forms are colored like an abstract pattern that works against the bird shape as well as supporting it. The near symmetrical composition as a whole seems perfectly balanced like a piece of ornamental art. In its original size, this painting is a real eyecatcher despite its muted, almost monochrome colors.

As we will see in the second post, flying birds have never ceased to inspire her. Below we see one of her later motion studies using the same techniques twelve years later.

Klien: Flight Rhythm, 1951

Klien's fascinating and – as some feel – threatening New York subway and city pictures are even more monochromous and technical rather than emotional.

Klien: Turbine, 1930

Klien: New York St. Marks Place, 1930

Klien: Times Square Subway Station, 1931

"In these works Klien seems to have taken the Kinetism and made it a part of the staccato experience of New York. These works are at once both hauntingly beautiful but also strangely lonely. In both images the viewer is apart from the scene as voyeur and observer. Klien the immigrant from Austria was looking at this strange landscape with an astute eye and she managed to capture something about New York that few other artists could relay about that time and place. The ever present hustle and bustle, the despair, the haunting beauty are all there in Klien’s depictions of these New York scenes." (Rob Meredith)

I will further examine the structure and color of Klien's paintings in a second post.

You can still see the exhibition DYNAMIK! (Kubismus / Futurismus / KINETISMUS) in the Lower Belvedere in Vienna until May 29, 2011.

Further reading online:

Bear Fight in the Snow

2011-04-23T17:54:00.003+02:00

If you follow Hans Bacher’s blog, you have probably seen a lot of beautiful preliminary artwork from Amblimation’s last animated feature Balto (1995). According to Bacher who worked as a production designer on the film, Steven Spielberg was afraid that the snowy Alaskan sets would prevent the audience from developing warm feelings towards the characters. So the film makers tried to get as much varying color into the snow as possible. Due to artists like Bacher and Colin Stimpson this didn’t result in gaudy all-over-the-place colors as one might expect. Instead the background paintings look rather restrained and subtle.

The Bear Sequence
Balto and his companions are looking for a team of sled dogs who have lost their way trying to deliver medication to sick children. The sequence I’m analyzing starts right after we have learned that the team led by Balto’s rival Steele is stuck in the middle of nowhere.

The sequence before: Everything looks dark and blue due to night time and weather.

1. Establishing the mood
The Bear Sequence starts with a shot of Balto so that we don't have to wonder which story strand we're following right now. The scene could have easily opened on the polar bears throwing snowballs at the goose and then cut to Balto at the front but this might have caused an undesired moment of irritation.

Then we get a god's-eye-view that sort of establishes the staging, lighting and environment. This way, we don't see the sky yet. The background is still mostly blue but with diffuse areas of light and shadow.

The goose's orange beak and feet stand out from the blue while Balto and the polar bears (unmistakably the work of character designer Nico Marlet) have slightly warmer fur colors.

For the companions it's business as usual. They don't perceive the forest as dangerous at all.

2. Creating tension by arousing suspicion
But then we get a slightly moving "spy-cam" view from the distance which implies a point-of-view (POV) shot by an unseen character. Balto notices something and we get a reverse shot from his POV.

Next follows a "spy-cam" down-shot (below left) from which we learn that the unseen menace seems to be rather large. Balto turns towards it and in the reverse POV shot we see a dark shape hiding behind a tree.

During this last shot it stopped snowing altogether. It is also the first background that has more contrast in the brighter snow areas.

This kind of tension does not come from character interaction. Instead it seems to be heightened by the fact that the other characters are oblivious to it (above). We do not get "spy-cam" shots when the narration is with them.

Now we see the sky for the first time and it looks orange*.

While the goose feels superior it is not too surprising that we have an up-shot at him. But the polar bears who might never be scared of him would certainly never have to look up to him.

The polar bears have visually grown while the background stayed the same. This gives a similar effect to having them photographed with a more wide-angle lens to show the increasing tension.

3. The bear attacks

The first time we see the bear, we see it in silhouette because that's how the goose sees it against the sky. Apart from establishing the orange* glowing sky color we also accept the bear being completely black except for some outlines.

What I find interesting about these backgrounds is the fact that the trees are getting orange as well at the top. This makes the bear and the tress look even larger since only objects that are some distance away are affected by the haze of the glowing evening sun. On the other hand we see that this clearing itself lies in the shadow. From here until the end of the scene whatever is at a certain distance is in monochrome orange.

Since we're looking against the sun, almost everything in the shadow is seen in dark blue silhouette. This is underlined by Balto's appearance. The bear itself has consistent blue and orange outlines that were established by Hans Bacher:

The bear's size is further emphasized by this goose's POV shot. Compared to the realistic handling of the bear, the goose's running movements are surprisingly cartoony. At the moment of the impact we get a whip pan (above right) and only see the result (below).

Middle: the background is the same as before but now the lighting has become warmer.

4. Balto to the rescue

The two-color scheme is most saturated when Balto attacks the bear in these extreme wide-angle shots.

When Balto attacks again he's coming from the other side and the bear finally nails him down.

5. Surprise help
Just in time to prevent the bear from slaying Balto, Jenna who has secretly followed them arrives out of nowhere to distract the bear. As is expected she is shaken off...

6. final confrontation
...and the bear is once again confronting Balto who in turn tries to flee downhill.

Out on the frozen lake he is finally out of the shadow area which neatly defined the battle ground.

Balto's reflection tells us that the darker blue surface is ice and that he is standing on dangerous ground.

But now it looks as if the wind had changed. Balto is seen in front of the orange sky and the bear is in the blue shadow.

As soon as the bear is on the ice too and close enough to shatter the ice beneath Balto, is reversed again. But finally the bear breaks through the ice surrounded by blue. Complementary colors orange and blue not only contrast within the frame but also in time from one shot to the next.

7. Rescuing Balto
Nevertheless, Balto is still in danger. While he is drowning the ice around him is slightly greener than before with the strongest green underwater.

If this isn't careful planning, it might be brilliant intuition or a lucky coincidence: After rescuing Balto, the polar bears are against the warm and healthy colors while Balto is seen against cold snow.

8. Parting ways
After finding out that Jenna is injured they have changed positions once again and the friends are seen against blue while Balto is leaving them for the orange horizon.

The bear sequence is followed by a brief scene from the home office and then dissolves back to Balto at night. These two shots display the same temporal warm/cold contrast as seen above.

Conclusion
With the bear merely as a catalyst the purpose of the scene is to split the group or Balto separated. Rather than having a verbal argument it's visually more attractive (and easier to understand for the children in the audience) to have a situation that leaves not much to argue and doesn't alienate the characters from each other.

It's only coherent that the setting also changes visually:

The characters are seen walking through the forest, reach a clearing and end up out in the open on a frozen lake.
In regard to lighting, they finally come out of the shadows.
As long as the bear is invisible to the protagonists, there is no orange in the backgrounds which means that the backgrounds change from monochrome to two basic colors. If you look at all the images from afar, the green underwater shot will clearly stand out (after all, it's Balto's near-death experience).

The lighting changes during the bear sequence are less continuous than the ones we've seen in The Jungle Book or Tarzan but the effect of expressionism disguised as realism is the same. While the colors themselves are not extremely unusual or spectacular I'm always fascinated with the orange trees and treetops and how strong and natural they work within these backgrounds.

One additional thing that stands out in this action sequence is Simon Wells' highly visual directing/boarding style that is firmly grounded in live-action staging and editing.

For more information about Balto go here and here on Hans Bachers blog.

* I write "orange" because that's the way these backgrounds look like on DVD (which appears to have pretty good white values). On photographs of the original backgrounds the trees and sky look rather yellow.

Vienna

2011-04-09T13:52:00.001+02:00

View from the belltower of St. Stefan in Vienna.

It's been some time now that I've posted any of my own sketches. Two weeks ago I was in Vienna for the first time. I don't think I have ever seen so many great pieces of art within less than a week. Schiele, Klimt, Futurism, Expressionism, Pop Art, Realist painters of the 19th century... Don't be surprised if you'll see more posts about painting in the near future.

Anyway, since I don't usually take photographs on holiday, back home I did a little "color script" from memory (and in two instances from small sketches I did on location) depicting the situations (and works of art) that stayed in my mind visually.

Afterwards it occurred to me that I left out most of the people... Maybe that's because I'm currently drawing backgrounds for a short film and subconsciously treated these sketches in the same way.

Pastel crayons on black paper (Click on the picture to see larger version)

Book Review: Color and Light. A Guide for the Realist Painter.

2011-03-24T13:28:00.001+01:00

A book by James Gurney, creator of DINOTOPIA.

"This book examines the painter's two most fundamental tools: color and light. It is intended for artists of all media interested in a traditional realist approach, as well as for anyone who is curious about the workings of the visual world." (Introduction, p. 8)

I have rarely seen a book that is as clearly structured and at the same time as thoroughly informative as Color and Light by James Gurney. Even artists who have no interest in realism or oil painting benefit a lot from the extensive knowledge in this book.

Gurney's approach doesn't "contain recipes for mixing colors or step-by-step painting procedures." He sets out to "bridge the gap between abstract color theory and practical knowledge" and succeeds in giving us a set of tools which help us translate our observations into the pictures we're working on.

The book is divided into 10 chapters on specific topics like “Sources of Light” or “Color Relationships”. Each of these chapters is broken down into 6 to 16 double-page spreads devoted to one single subject.

After analyzing some acclaimed realist painting by old masters in the first chapter, Gurney then reverts to his own paintings. That way, without coming across as narcissistic, he is able to explain the thinking behind each picture.

Gurney's illustrations demonstrate that he knows what he talks about.

Limiting himself to just two to four paintings, some explanatory graphics and photographs and one spread per topic, his writing is very focused and precise: always enjoyable, never colloquial. The compressed but easily readable text alone offers a lot to chew over. It contains eye-openers (about color reflections in shadow areas) and reminders of well-known concepts that we too often tend to ignore when working in color (the virtue of using grays and neutrals).

A short 11th chapter summarizes the themes that came up in the previous chapters. The book is rounded off by a “Resources” chapter that contains among other things a guide to “modern, familiar, reliable pigments” and a commented “Recommended Reading” section – each filling exactly one double-page.

No matter whether I’ll be able to successfully incorporate the lessons into my future work, the book has already sharpened my perception and triggered my imagination. What more can I wish?

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Prolific Limitations: Autumn Colors (5/5) Part II

2011-03-17T13:26:00.011+01:00

This will be the final post on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox for the time being. Here, I will look at how the autumn colors are balanced by gray and where that leaves blue and green which according to the publicity interviews were banned from the film.

This palette is the one Mrs. Fox uses for her thunderstorm and landscape paintings, but it could as well have been the one the art direction team used for the movie.

Autumn Colors
Initially Wes Anderson wanted the whole film to be in mud and dirt colors but eventually settled for a limited palette of autumn leaf colors like yellow, orange, red and brown. Nowadays such an overall tint is often achieved by colored light or color correction in post production to unify all the colors in a shot. But as someone who had a lot of the sets of his previous live-action films painted in flamboyant colors (see screenshots in post 3 and 4) Anderson seems to prefer color concepts that rely more on local (object) colors than on colored lighting. Therefore skin tones remain relatively constant (mostly on the warm side) and the movies themselves are evocative of those glorious Technicolor musicals of the 1930s and 1940s.

Green lighting/color correction unifies the elements in this shot from The Princess and the Frog. Left: original, right: automatically white balanced to see how many hues would come to light.

In Fantastic Mr. Fox, objects are already painted tone-in-tone in the limited spectrum of autumn.

Although all the objects are in autumn colors, the warm lighting simulating the golden hour sky becomes visible when you look at the stones.

left: grass and plant colors; right: stone colors which our brain sees as gray in contrast to the more saturated grass.

At the same time the golden hour lighting and overall warm colors of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited evoke the 1970s. This is even taken a step further in this animated film because the autumn color palette is heavily associated with that decade that wasn’t shy of combining dark wooden textures with patterned wallpapers in orange and yellow.

From dirt to dandy: interiors are also in 1970s autumn colors. Note: down-to-earth Mrs. Fox always wears the same dress.

Although Fantastic Mr. Fox deliberately isn’t set in a specific period of time, many elements (songs, the time the book came out, cars, costume and interior design) suggest that the story takes place in a parallel version of England in the 1970s. It’s not just about a family being stuck in the past like the Tenenbaums, Mr. Fox seems to be rather a trend-setting kind of guy.

Emphasizing Tactility
I have already written about the camouflage or chameleon effect where characters are blending in with their surroundings (color-wise, that is). Here are some more complex examples:

This is my favorite example: Mr. Fox is doubly framed within the frame and his head is approximately the same color as the wallpaper. Kylie on the other hand is outside in front of the wood that is almost of the same gray as his fur. Both have a white spot below their heads (the shirt and the card).

Keeping most of the characters and sets within a limited range of hues (and values) results in a shift of emphasis from color contrast to contrast of materials. This way, the tactile qualities of sets and puppets come into their own.

It’s been widely known that the director insisted on using the actual materials (i.e. real wood, real stones, the same fabric these clothes would be made of in the human world etc.), especially the controversially discussed real fur for the fox puppets. To what extent this has finally been achieved I do not know, but a lot of the materials lend a strange kind of realism to the film.

As we have already seen here, neutral colors are present to balance the autumn hues and prevent our brain from correcting the colors. Even a relatively small gray road highlights the intense (and unnatural) colors of the countryside.

The sewer system in the end is complete devoid of brown and yellow. The animals have adapted from dirt dens to stone caves.

The kitchen of the Bean family is easily recognizable by its creamy, neutral walls. Being the realm of a mean manly woman it’s no wonder there is hardly any warmth in this room.

Specific Objects
At least since the India themed Darjeeling Limited Wes Anderson seems to like large yellow areas. Apart from the title card, there is a large yellow door that has to be easily identifiable because it is quite important during the showdown. The terrible tractors are also yellow.

The showdown is mainly taking place in a gray environment. The lighting is not as warm as before because the sky is gray. Therefore, the autumn colored objects like the patterned motorcycle stand out in these scenes.

Bean's annex is mostly gray with some objects painted yellow (and red).

The door behind Bean is distinguishable from other yellow doors by the large "21A".

This yellow door is important because the rabid beagle is finally let loose on the humans by opening it.

There are a couple of red props like the artificial bone for the rabid beagle or Kristofferson’s apple cage.

Isn’t it ironic that a man as lean and gaunt as Bean has his property painted in an “autum colored rainbow”? At least, this pattern is unique and instantly recognizable.

The Remains of the Spectrum
Although there are no large blue or green areas (at least in the daytime), all the hues of the spectrum can are present in the movie, even purple. But as expected, these only serve as tiny spots of color to contrast and balance the dominating warm hues. They remind us of the orange nature of most of the pictures.

Green props are visible but kept to a minimum.

left: a small green bottle at the bottom; right: liquids of all hues including green and blue.

What other color could poisoned blueberries possibly have?

Since the eyes are where we’re usually supposed to look at, it's not surprising that there is contrast of hue. Mr. Fox and Ash have green eyes, Mrs. Fox and Kristofferson blue.

To emphasize Kristofferson’s outsider status the film makers decided to dress him in light blue. His blue eyes also identify him as a member of Mrs. Fox’ side of the family.

In fact, blue is rather heavily used. Basically, in every night scene the lighting accents it so much that the dark blue sky looks unnaturally saturated.

Sky Colors and Lighting
After all those local colors, let’s have a look at how lighting and sky colors achieve different moods:
During the prologue, the autumn colors dominate completely, with a late afternoon yellow orange sky.

Right afterwards, the sky is overcast with gray clouds (slightly tinted brown).

We get a whole variety of moods by changing sky colors:

Indoors there is mostly warm light, as we have already seen in many interior shots at the Foxes' home.

The cider cellar is rather dark but illuminated by light shining through yellow cider bottles.

Left: the badger's office, dim warm light sources, rather sober; right: Ash's room: feeble but warm yellow lights.

Outside with the farmers: no blue night sky, just darkness. Bean is taking the lead and holding the lights.

The Bean kitchen, the supermarket or the refrigerating storage house on the other hand are seen in cold light. Overall, there are more objects painted in neutral colors than autumn tones.

Both of these frames highlight the center in warm light. Left: Mr. Fox dancing; right: the cookies (in an unusually strong contrast of value).

The lights in the supermarket resemble those in Mrs. Bean's kitchen we have seen further above.

After the showdown at Bean’s annex, red seems to have vanished from the landscape, with almost all the leaves fallen. This change of seasons culminates in Mr. Fox’ climactic confrontation with the wolf where winter is looming on the horizon. It feels as if they had reached the boundaries of their land of eternal autumn. This winter really feels cold

left: top autumn, bottom gray; right: bottom autumn, top winter (gray).

Conclusion
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a film of extreme opposites. It is so full of details that it may well overstrain you the first time you see it, yet its formal execution is defined by so many rigid limitations. The geometric compositions appear highly artificial while details and used materials evoke a kind of hyperrealism at the same time. The protagonist’s inner conflict between animal nature and domestication is translated into a very unique style of animation. Much of the laconic humor is based on the combination of deadpan dialogue delivery in scenes of great emotional tension.

A few weeks ago, I have written that on the surface, Fantastic Mr. Fox contained “everything that defines standard Hollywood animation blockbusters”, but that all these elements – family themes, stereotyped animals, star voices, pop songs, side-kicks – were also part of Anderson’s trademark style. In the case of the stereotyped animals, the writer-director even adds an existential dimension by having his characters question their “natural” role in the world.

Looking at Fantastic Mr. Fox in the context of Wes Anderson’s previous films (and not in comparison with current animated features) it seems that it actually represents an advancement in content and style. Regarding content this may be his most stringent film although he still seems to be more interested in the individual scene than the superordinate dramatic arc. Formally all the familiar limitations like understated acting, 90° camera angles and intense colors are applied with a precision that would have been impossible in a live-action film and it all works in favor of the story. If ever he was accused of “style over substance” again, it wouldn’t be for this film.

The story itself is rife with interesting topics like the advancement of city foxes in England and their adaptability to new habitats, the country animals growing dependence on the farmers, a protagonist who comes off as winner although his selfishness is the reason for the misfortune of those who hail him. But all this goes beyond the scope of this analysis. Anyway, I’m already looking forward to what Wes Anderson does next.

Gray Balance

2011-03-12T15:08:00.109+01:00

Contrast of saturation
A color is always perceived in relation to its neighboring colors. So basically the more saturated of two colors will stand out by contrast of intensity. Therefore, a spot of color that is surrounded by less saturated colors attracts our attention. It helps if the emphasized color is red as in the following picture, because human perception reacts most strongly to this hue.

Der heilige Christophorus by Konrad Witz

If completely desaturated, Christophorus' coat is receding while his face and the child he carries are emphasized.

The surrounding colors are so much less saturated that they tend towards the neutral. We can sense their basic hue, though, and the depiction looks fairly natural color-wise with the muddy water reflecting a slightly overcast sky and the stones and rocks in sand colors and bluer in the back as a result of aerial perspective.

In the four swatches on the left, the red of Saint Christophorus’ coat is surrounded by the neutral tones of the water, stones and rocks directly as they appear in the painting. On the right side, I have surround the same red with fully saturated versions of these formerly neutral tones. Suddenly, the hierarchy isn’t as clear anymore and we have competing colors that are only different in hue and value and all more saturated than the red that looked so intense on the left side. The red would still stand out because the other three hues are closer to each other.

Neutral colors
Theoretically, really neutral colors would have to be completely desaturated – which would leave us only with the gray scale. But thanks to our ability to perceive even the slightest tint of a color if seen against a different hue and the brain’s seemingly counteractive urge for color constancy, all dull colors can be used as neutrals.

Photograph by Niklaus Rüegg taken from his website.

Gray with a tint of blue is perceived as cold (like the paint pot above) while gray with a tint of red, orange or yellow is perceived as warm (like the sand color above) and would actually be called brown or beige depending on its value.

left: cold neutral, middle: gray, right: warm neutral.

As you can see in the following screenshot from Bambi*, all the colors are more or less subdued, yet it is a colorful image that is carefully structured by different degrees of saturation and value.

If you look at the desaturated version you can see the basic hierarchy of values. It’s very subtle, but Thumper is dark on light (in the pool of light), with the flowers – the closer the darker – surrounding the stone.

The interesting part to me is in this part of the picture, though:

We have a gray rabbit on a gray stone, or so it would seem. At least in this specific picture, Thumper is slightly tinted brown but is perceived as warm gray.

Thumpers body colors

The stone on the other hand is made up of many different hues that are similar to those used for the flowers. Only that on the mossy stone they are generally less saturated. We have complementary contrasts of red and green. If you look at the top plane of the stone, the gray looks cold compared to the other colors on the rock, when in fact it is a shade of brown (see swatches: bottom row, second from left) and not blue.

left: stone colors, right: flowers in the foreground, highly saturated

left: stone colors, right: flower buttons in the background (the petals are brighter)

Color Constancy

This effect of perceived color constancy is used in many paintings and movies to evoke the impression of a certain mood.

Heavily overcast sky at dusk. It somehow feels warm.

If we look at this still from Fantastic Mr. Fox (above) we perceive the upper part of the sky as gray in contrast to the salmon lower part and the orange-brown landscape. The gray clouds also serve as a balance to the rest of the picture preventing it from looking monochrome (more about this in the final Mr. Fox post).

But if you look closer or examine the gray in photoshop with the “eyedropper tool” you will see that in reality it is brown as well. But since the whole picture has a warm brownish tint, the least saturated color is perceived as gray by our brain that is constantly adjusting the white balance.

For comparison: Here we have another still from Mr. Fox that transports a different mood and daytime. Here the gray looks much more neutral, even colder:

The contrast to the lanscape is much stronger, the light seems to be whiter. The atmosphere is more sober and cold.

left: the brown dusk sky; right: the grayer afternoon sky.

This color constancy effect is much stronger in a cinema because there are no other objects and lighting situations than what we see on the screen, thus we have no reference to compare the colors to. At the start we may notice the color cast strongly, but over time our brain adjusts to it all the more. It still has the intended impact of emphasizing certain colors and evoking a certain mood (you can see this in David Fincher’s (dingy yellow tint) and Clint Eastwood’s more recent films (gray-green tint).

Therefore, color casts in movies can be really extreme without the audience noticing (If you leave the theater during projection and return soon afterwards, you’ll see the color cast much stronger). Seen on a computer or TV screen, the effect is much stronger because our eyes and brain have a frame of reference from the colors surrounding the monitor.

Sometimes we notice a strong color cast that went unnoticed in cinema only when seeing the same film on DVD. I remember the DVD of Three Kings (1999) having a disclaimer that the colors were meant to be unnatural and oversaturated because viewers would complain about “bad” picture quality which never happened when the film was in theaters (and looked more or less the same).

It seems that every frame of Sylvain Chomet’s Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003) is heavily tinted either brown, yellow or green. At times the compositions look almost uni-colored/monochrome. It has derogatorily been described as pee- and poo-colored (which in fact says more about the tastes of the reviewer than the quality of the color concept itself).

All these screenshots are in their original appearance on the left, and automatically white balanced on the right (with photoshop sometimes rather leaning towards light blue):

Without the yellow tint one can see a variety of hues.

The newspaper which appears to be gray is olive green on the left and blue on the right.

The street is still slightly brown on the right.

It’s not only important to keep the value of neutral colors in mind but also that the whole concept of cold vs. warm colors is relative as well.

* I’m analyzing a screenshot of the 2005 digitally restored DVD as is. I cannot say how close this comes to what the original Technicolor prints looked like regarding tints and colorcasts.

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Prolific Limitations: Understated Acting (5/5) Part I

2011-03-06T01:34:00.001+01:00

It was a last-minute decision to divide this final chapter on Fantastic Mr. Fox into two parts (I like to refer to it as a Deathly Hallows decision) because I didn’t want it to become as long as the last one. This first half is entirely concerned with acting while the next one will be about the limited color palette.

Nevertheless, let me start with an addendum to Mr. Fox post (4/5): Now that The King’s Speech has won the Academy Award for best picture, chances are even more people are going to see it if they haven’t already (at least around here it is still playing in theaters). Anyway, if you happen to see it (again): Inkeeping with stern royal protocol, the film contains a good share of central perspective shots with Geoffrey Rush sometimes almost looking at the audience (e.g. the film’s closing shot). There’s an early dinner table conversation in the 90° style (without the whip pans, of course). Also note the patterned wall paper in the therapist’s apartment and a few “chameleon” effects. Slightly to heavily distorted wide-angle lensing is visible in many scenes, especially the ones that transport the reluctant king’s uneasiness with his new “profession” of “kinging”, as they say. (No pictures to back that up since I don’t have access to a DVD and the publicity stills show nothing of this, I’m afraid.)

Regardless of these superficial similarities, the film’s overall style does not even remind one of an Anderson film. I just brought up this example to make sure that these stylistic devices are in no way exclusive to Anderson’s films and in a more conventional drama their use is hardly noticed.

Understated Acting
I didn’t think of Fassbinder when I started writing about acting in Anderson films, but thanks to a lucky co-incidence, I’ve just seen Fassbinder’s two-part science fiction drama Welt am Draht (World on Wire, 1973) the other night and a couple of influences/similarities suddenly became clear to me (e.g. I can see now why Wong Kar-Wai claims to be influenced by Fassbinder). Michael Ballhaus’ manierist camera choreographies are among his most elaborate even measured by the standard of his works for Scorsese.

So as a starting point, look at the following Youtube-Clip from Welt am Draht that not only anticipates part of the camera move from Life Aquatic (excerpted in Mr. Fox post 4/5) but also includes some of the more static and artificially understated acting and dead pan dialogue delivery:

Within this movie about virtual reality and deceptive appearances the acting style works very well. The actor playing “Fred Stiller” is the same Klaus Löwitsch whose acting I’ve analyzed here before.

We have already seen that characters in Anderson’s films are often emotionally paralyzed and have difficulty breaking out of their habits and, visually speaking, their geometrically organized environments. This is reflected in how Anderson directs his actors. Part of the comedy comes from characters who deliver their zany lines nonchalantly even in moments of great turmoil or in deeply emotional situations.

Whether they are melancholy like all those played by Bill Murray or rather optimistic like the Owen Wilson characters, they hardly raise their voices and are usually speaking rather slowly. His films have been described as “slowed down farce or souped up tragedy”. Either way, Anderson has a great, unique sense of timing that grows on you with repeated viewing.

Watching the following excerpt from Life Aquatic, keep in mind that Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) has just met a man who claims to be his son (Owen Wilson).

By the way, one reason among others why Life Aquatic never really lifts off, I believe, is the fact that the one-note Murray character for once is the protagonist who is so full of self-pity that there’s not even dramatic tension in the confrontations with his antagonist played by Jeff Goldblum.

Animating internal conflicts
A lot has been written about Anderson’s decision to take the actors to a farm and record the dialogue “on location”. That’s the part most “making-of” features and interviews cover, so there’s no need for me to recycle it here. What’s interesting from an analytical point of view is the further development of Anderson’s trademark style with the unique tools of animation.

The voice acting style of Fantastic Mr. Fox is closer to Anderson’s live-action films than to the average animated feature. If anything, the dialogue pacing is slightly faster, in fact, George Clooney talks pretty fast for an Anderson film at times. This is picked up in Mr. Fox’s movements which are often a little faster for comic effect, like a film projected at a slightly quicker speed. The voices themselves sound relatively close-miked and thus pretty intimate while still being firmly embedded in the sonic environment of the locations.

Henry Selick who served as animation director in Life Aquatic (and was cast as animation director of Mr. Fox before being replaced by Mark Gustafson due to scheduling conflicts) once talked about the challenge for the animators to adjust to Anderson’s vision. As can be seen in Mr. Fox, the director wanted the characters to be animated rather differently from the prevailing standard of organic pose-to-pose style.

When you look at scenes from Mr. Fox, strong line-of-action changes are rare. Although animated expertly with attention to subtle details, the puppets themselves remain relatively stiff and upright, which sharpens our perception for the subtle motions possible with this kind of puppets. This not only reminds me of the Eastern European stop motion tradition that Anderson cited as a key influence, it also translates his understated acting into animation while taking it even a step further by incorporating the characters more naturally into the geometrical compositions.

Since the story is mainly driven by Mr. Fox’s internal conflict between domestication and animal instincts, the animators have found a brilliant way of visualizing these “wild animal” outbursts contrasting the domesticated acting. Animal instincts prevail whenever the animal characters are eating, digging or fighting. These outburst erupt suddenly and not without comic effect as you can see in the following clip:

Interestingly, the “wild animal” movements are even more stylized than the understated acting scenes. It’s clearly neither a case of natural animal movements vs. restrained domesticated gestures, nor are the animators applying the Disney technique of smoothly combining natural animal movement with exaggerated human behaviour.

The digging especially is rather iconic: instantly readable without a hint of realism. Just look at the following frame grabs:

Nine consecutive frames of digging.

The arm movement is a mechanical loop which is performed by all the characters behind Mr. Fox without a physical effect on the wall. It is just a symbol for digging, not an actual depiction.

One of the advantages of the iconic digging movement is that it doesn’t get in the way of the conversation. Because it appears so mechanical we focus on the dialogue delivery. Note how the dirt in front of Ash is vanishing although he is busy blocking his ears with dirt:

Six selected frames of a digging close-up.

Overall the animation style is so different from what we expect from American animation that the animators couldn’t hardly revert to clichée acting and poses. Once you get past the initial “awkward animation” feeling you’ll see that the animators have done a very fine job of specific acting – also on the human characters.

Two Links

2011-02-27T21:26:00.001+01:00

Before posting the last part of the Wes Anderson series later this week I’d like to guide you towards two Disney related pieces:

Fantasia mosaic
Steven Hartley is literally in the middle – he has just reached the intermission – of posting a Fantasia mosaic using the drafts to comment on who animated what on Walt Disney’s ground breaking third feature. Steven seems to be a bit disappointed that he doesn't get too many reactions from readers. In any case, these mosaics come in very handy as a starting point for researching an animator's particular work.

Walt Peregoy in his own words
Most of you might have already seen this as it was on cartoonbrew last week, but as someone who is interested in animation backgrounds and 101 Dalmatians in particular I feel obliged to mention it here as well:
Steve Hulett has just posted a new interview with Walt Peregoy over at the TAG blog in two parts (here and here). It’s always interesting to hear the veterans tell their story in their own (in this case explicit) words. While recounting the facts and putting them into context is better left to the researching historians, such interviews reveal more about the way these people think and how they see themselves within their working environment and society.

However derogatory Peregoy’s remarks about his fellow employees may be, he does show great respect for the fans – the people who research animation history - and he knows that he is famous among them. If anything, he likes Amid Amidi’s book Cartoon Modern an awful lot, especially the comparison of his and Eyvind Earle’s backgrounds for Paul Bunyan (see Amid’s online version here).

From the interview, we do not get too much insight into Peregoy's artistic point of view other than that he is very proud of his unique work. I would have loved to hear him talk about the thinking behind his color concepts or how he approached work on a new film.

There’s one instance where he questions one of the “trite clichés” as he calls them: According to Steve Hulett, on Jungle Book, his father (Ralph Hulett) wanted the characters to read light on dark, because he thought that jungles were dark, but Woolie wanted them the opposite way, dark on light backgrounds. Walt Peregoy: “your father was wrong in this sense. I did most of the key Jungle Book backgrounds, they were colorful. And here’s the thing: your father suffered from the ancient “reading them characters”. […], anything that moves reads."

Light characters on dark background: Cinderella's pastel colored characters were often staged against shadow areas - day (left) or night (right).

Dark characters on light background: with little exception all the Jungle Book characters are seen against lighter backgrounds - day (left) and night (right).

While this is basically true and you could get clear silhouettes across easily by strong outlines and such, this was the opposite of Disney’s intentions to minimize the outlines around the characters. Woolie had his way and Al Dempster finally did the conventional key backgrounds for the version of The Jungle Book that got made (after Walt Peregoy was fired und Bill Peet left the studio).

One of the few Jungle Book color keys by Walt Peregoy found in Pierre Lambert's book.

Later on, Peregoy referred to this again saying: “If it reads, the thinking is, it’s a flat inked and painted image over a flat background. But that’s not necessary and I know this”, because of his work on The Lone Ranger series and The Shooting of Dan McGrew.

Bill Justice's White Rabbit

2011-02-24T00:52:00.000+01:00

Today, the 60^th anniversary BluRay edition of Alice in Wonderland hits the stores around here. I'm already curious how different the colors will be compared to the recent "un-birthday edition" that was already very different from the previous DVD release.

If ever I have time to write about the color design of a whole Disney feature again, it will be Alice. I particularly like the whole Mary-Blair-haircut-house scene with the bordeaux grass and the balancing gray.

In remembrance of Bill Justice who passed away two weeks ago, here is a whole animation scene (31 drawings altogether, all exposed on twos):

The White Rabbit is witnessing the burning of his own house. The beginning of this shot has him cheering along with the Dodo who sets the straw on fire. The turning point comes when the Rabbit realizes again that he must do something against it in order to save his house. Bill Justice accents this turning point with a take that takes the rabbit beyond the frame edges (just look at the shadow - probably by the effects department - that appears only when necessary and without connection to the overall lighting scheme).

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Flat Staging and Camera Moves (4/5)

2011-02-19T15:00:00.001+01:00

Over the years, Wes Anderson has found a way to translate his visions into pictures as rigid as if they were drawn with a ruler and a spirit level. Since he obviously likes to control every single detail in his films it’s astounding how long it took him to finally end up in animation.

As we have already seen, many of his distancing trademarks translate very smoothly into animation, others can even be exaggerated due to the stylized nature of the medium.

If you look at any Anderson film from Rushmore on you’ll notice the many top shots (or “God’s eye view” as used by Scorsese and Hitchcock) and slow tracking shots. Already quite distinct in the beginning, Anderson and his director of photography on all live-action films, Robert Yeoman, have perfected their system of preferred framings into a very rigid concept.

top shot inserts (left TRT, right TDL).

TRT: from relative close-up on detail (left) to top shot of characters (right).

left (TRT): god's eye view like point-of-view of a character, right (TDL): no character could see this perspective.

Note: On Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson worked with DP Tristan Oliver for the first time. While all the style choices seem to be straight Wes Anderson, there’s hardly any wide-angle distortion visible and it’s his first film since Rushmore that is not filmed in cinemascope.

Top row: top shot inserts aka rostrum camera shots; bottom row: god's eye view on characters.

Central perspective
Anderson’s preference for central perspective first cropped up in a few right-angled top shot inserts in his debut Bottle Rocket. In Rushmore, he started to favor flat setups with the camera perpendicular to the background.

left: The Royal Tenenbaums (TRT), right: The Darjeeling Limited (TDL)

central perspective and symmetry in TRT.

He kept shooting most of the dialogue scenes in standard overshoulder style. There are a few instances of point-of-view shots, though, that are straight on. In later films (starting with The Royal Tenenbaums (TRT)) these straight-on point-of-view shots become independent from the actual characters so that there is a feeling that the camera is an additional character in the room. Henceforth, virtually all the conversations are filmed either full frontal or in profile with the camera always horizontally perpendicular to the background or the speaking character. This way, the characters often seem to speak almost directly into the camera.

shot - reverse shot in Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (LAWSZ)

TRT: The camera usually stands on the axis, and makes 180° turns during conversations.

LAWSZ: The characters looks slightly to the side of the camera although they sit in the middle of the frame. This way they avoid breaking the fourth wall.

Conversation over a very long dinner table.

Ozu often used such setups for his dialogue scenes as in Late Autumn (1960), just look at the trailer:

To achieve something of a standard shot – reverse-shot continuity with the characters to the left and right side respectively, he still places the camera perpendicular to the background, but the characters are not sitting or standing in the middle.

one of the rare overshoulder shots in TRT

TRT: The background is in central perspective, the second character is not centered, however.

LAWSZ: The same, only with Bill Murray even more on the edge.

LAWSZ: The off-center character can have overshoulder shots without blocking his opposite.

Same here with Kylie and Fox.

This flat staging also emphasizes the lightness and comedy potential of the story as opposed to the more angular deep focus staging of more dramatic films. Mark Kennedy has extensively written about it here. Especially the central perspective wide-angle long shots are reminiscent of theatrical staging.

We either get the characters in profile...

...or full frontal.

upper row: profile and full frontal in same frame, lower row: the same, but there's a 90° turn from lower left to lower right so that profile and frontal are reversed. This also shows us that we're not looking at the stage from outside but can assume positions within.

There seems to be an exception to this strange 90°-rule: on the vertical axis, the camera can assume almost any angle, low or high.

high angle shots.

low angle shots to make the characters look more powerful to limit of distortion (upper left).

Doll house aesthetics
Some of the right-angle shots are not connected by a cut but by a whip pan of approximately 90° (sometimes 120° if characters are blocked in a triangle). This can be seen most often in The Darjeeling Limited (TDL) when the three brothers (sometimes including the mother) are having three- or fourway conversations. Speaking of whip pans and Indian movies: there is a similarly turning whip pan from one setup of a face to a central perspective framing of a doorway in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955).

While it’s nothing unusual to have the camera follow a character throughout a scene (think of Scorsese’s GoodFellas or Raging Bull), Anderson often organizes his camera moves in straight lines, horizontal and vertical (dolly as well as steadycam shots). Like the fixed camera setups, the tracking shots are increasingly limited to 90° angles. Again, the feeling that the camera is a very limited character itself or is carried by an omniscient narrator is emphasized.

Especially since TRT, Anderson often shows sets in cross-section so that we can see how the characters’ environments relate to each other. The outer circumstances are always straightforward and easily manageable, yet the characters’ inner life seems to be confused to the point that they are paralyzed emotionally. Anderson also likes to frame his characters within the frame.

These cross-sections involuntarily remind me of a doll-house. So it’s not surprising that this rather mechanical, distancing effect works best in Fantastic Mr. Fox, where the sets actually are doll-houses.

TRT: like mocking his own concept Anderson shows us a stage model with pencil to get the size relations.

In LAWSZ we see the whole ship in cross-section. There's no way we believe this to be a true ship out on the see.

TRT: Like the windows of an advent calender we see the separately framed characters in one frame.

TRT: left: Margot is framed by curtains; right: the children are framed by the bench under which they lie.

TRT: here the characters are less obviously framed, left: by the door, right: by the background wall. The "chameleon concept" enhances the effect.

Most often the characters are framed by windows or door frames.

left: windows and doors, right: cooking area as framing device.

left: the resulting pattern effect is also picked up in this split screen top shot; right: geometrically patterned split screen.

Screens in the back provide split screen effect and frame-within-frame.

Flat staging to the max
While classically hand-drawn animation often tries to painstakingly simulate depth by way of multiplane devices, it is fairly easy to create natural depth out of a stop-motion set by just filming it from a natural angle. Yet, there have always been artists who favored flat staging to compress the filmic space into a relatively two-dimensional world. In this context, Anderson’s basic approach doesn’t stand out as much as in his live-action films. However, he is able to expand his concept.

The evolution of the doll house cross section in four examples (many more in the actual films) from TRT, LAWSZ, TDL and Fox. I have removed the sound so it doesn't distract from the camera moves.

Depth cues can be altered by using different lenses to photograph a set, but in puppet animation the set can also be built to the desired specifications. While there are sets that expand far into the background, others are more compressed. Especially in doll-house scenes and tracking shots the sets are built increasingly flat. Sometimes they are hardly distinguishable in style from Mrs. Fox’ paintings (~~which are allegedly painted by Wes Anderson’s brother Eric Chase Anderson who also voices Kristofferson in the film~~ [UPDATE: according to Christian De Vita, the storm paintings were done by Turlo Griffin (see comments below)]).

Here we have depth by having two planes of action, one in the background, one in the foreground.

This is one of the rare examples of deep staging with a real horizon that is far away.

Usually, even in spatially deeper sets, the view is limited by objects in the near background that prevent us from seeing the horizon. Most often these are walls or houses.

Here we have walls and mountains to limit the space. Nevertheless this is about as deep as it gets in this movie.

Most of the interior scenes are staged really flat (theatrical again).

Also this exterior looks rather flat because we have no real depth cues except for the train size in background.

This top shot is from a helicopter and looks similar to the paintings of Mrs. Fox.

These three-dimensionally constructed long shots look rather flat/two-dimensional

These are all framegrabs from the same horizontal camera move to the right.

As soon as the animals start digging, Anderson resorts heavily to cross-section dollhouse shots.

With this being the most extreme. The set looks almost like a two-dimensional painting.

In the end, the sewer system is revealed to us in a mechanical camera move.

Speaking of these paintings: we’re in England and it never rains, there’s not even a hint where she gets the inspiration for her thunderstorm depictions.

By the way, there are some point-of-view camera setups, some of them reminiscent of ego-shooter game mode:

The one on the right is technically no POV, as we see the character's head in the picture, it looks more like a camera mounted to a dog.

Links and Thanks

2011-02-13T15:36:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Daniel Caylor’s plug traffic on this blog has more than doubled last week and the Tarzan posts have outperformed the Dalmatian posts in popularity for the first time in years.

At the same time, reader Jim Turner posted a link in the comments section of the last post that I absolutely have to highlight here. It refers to an analysis of the cinematic and literary influences on Wes Anderson’s style, both visually and narratively:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

If you have any interest in Wes Anderson’s work beyond Fantastic Mr. Fox this is mandatory reading.

Matt Zoller Seitz from movingimagesource.us not only wrote about it in four installments, but also did excellent video essays to accompany the articles. The fifth installment is an “annotated version of the prologue to The Royal Tenenbaums”. Just look at this video and you’ll be hooked to read the whole series.

At first glance I thought in the light of these articles my next two posts would be obsolete, but fortunately this isn’t the case so I will continue with the series.

Fantastic Mr. Fox: A Wes Anderson Family Film (3/5)

2011-02-05T01:33:00.000+01:00

Thanks for participating in the poll about Mr. Fox (see results at right). I still can't figure out how these google polls work, since there have been 29 participants of whom 20 have seen the film (of which 22! liked it) and 5 haven't. But at least I'm sure now that some of you may be interested in this Mr. Fox series at all.

At first glance, Fantastic Mr. Fox contains everything that defines standard Hollywood animation blockbusters:

action sequences
family themes
typecast animals
star voices
pop songs (that have replaced musical numbers ever since Shrek, at the latest)
the hero – Mr. Fox – even has a side-kick.

But then it turns out that with the exception of the action sequences (which have already been part of the original book) all these elements are also part of Wes Anderson’s trademark style. As I think this may be the clue to why Fantastic Mr. Fox feels so different from standard animated features, let’s have a look at Wes Anderson’s approach to film making. As always, there are spoilers galore.

The films of Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson (b. 1969) was born in Austin, Texas, where he started making films with the Wilson brothers at the age of 25. Two years later, with the help of Hollywood producer James L. Brooks he was able to expand this first short called Bottle Rocket into a feature film of the same name. The story doesn’t really work, e.g. it never becomes quite clear why the middle class protagonists so desperately want to become criminals, but they do and Wes Anderson gives them a lot of dialogue to talk about it in an entertaining way.

Another two years later, his breakthrough came with the high school comedy Rushmore (1998) where he cast Bill Murray as a melancholy loser for the first time. Ever since, Anderson has made ensemble films, with the same people both behind and in front of the camera. His “family” of actors and crew members has grown over the years, but some of them, like Owen Wilson, have been associated with every film he made.

I see him as part of the same generation of American film makers like Sophia Coppola: "auteurs", who are more interested in personal and private stories than political and social statements. Anderson’s movies usually deal with family problems and the protagonists’ own internal blockades. In fact, they are so much self-obsessed that even an antagonist introduced as Zissou’s “nemesis” can not motivate dramatic tension in Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). That the actions of a protagonist are affecting a whole society – like it is the case in Fantastic Mr. Fox – is a novelty.

Family themes: father-son-conflicts and men who never grow upFather-son-relationships and conflicts are always central to the films’ narrative, especially from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) on. Most often the protagonists were adolescents like Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) in Rushmore or men who have never grown up like Bill Murray’s Blume (or as Olivia Williams puts it: “you’re both little children”), Steve Zissou or the brothers aimlessly travelling on the Darjeeling Limited.

In my opinion, the father-son-conflict between Mr. Fox and Ash is the central addition by writers Noah Baumbach and Anderson that made a simple children’s story interesting enough to hold a feature film. While we could argue that the tensions come from the fact that Mr. Fox himself has never really grown up, the person who seeks the approval of the father figure is actually a child. So it’s much easier to relate to Ash’s problems than if he were a grown man like many of Anderson’s earlier characters were. The brother rivalries from earlier films are played out by cousins here.

Anjelica Huston in The Royal Tenenbaums

In Anderson previous three films, it was always the ex-wife/mother who held the family somewhat together while still being excentric herself, to say the least. But as opposed to the men, she was able to cope with her new situation. It is no co-incidence that all of these slightly odd women have been portrayed by Anjelica Huston: in Tenenbaums she played the mother of three misfits, in Life Aquatic the brains (and ex-wife) behind Steve Zissou and in The Darjeeling Limited (2007) the newly spiritualized mother of three unshepherded brothers.

Now for the first time, Meryl Streep who is more of the warm, motherly type than Huston is playing the role of the down-to-earth woman behind the protagonist and for the first time the lovers are still together. George Clooney’s Mr. Fox himself seems to be a more successful relative of Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum, Bill Murray’s Steve Zissou or Owen Wilson’s Francis Whitman. There are also overtones of earlier roles like Danny Ocean or Ulysses Everett McGill from Oh brother, where art thou?. I’ll adress the acting (both voice direction and animation) in a later post.

Rigid settingsLike all of them, he is dedicated to some insane plan he’s stubbornly following through although it’s obvious that it is destined to fail anyway. It’s interesting that many of these Anderson anti-heroes are turning their misadventures into plays, books, screenplays or in this case newspaper columns that no one ever reads.

Anderson seems to be more interested in the pacing of individual scenes than the overall arc of a picture. Often, he structures his films like novels using chapters, intertitles and in the case of The Royal Tenenbaums even a narrator.

This book even has a library tag as if to say that the film makers only borrow its story as opposed to owning it.

The Royal Tenenbaums is all about books and owes its literary structure to that fact.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is still structured by chapters.

This way he is also able to introduce a large cast of characters more economically.

Anderson likes to have his large cast of characters all in the same scene (Life Aquatic)...

...which - to that extent - is not very common in animation.

Rushmore has overtones of a stage play, complete with curtain and all which makes sense since Max Fischer is directing stage play versions of New Hollywood movies.

What makes Anderson’s movies so special is the way he stages the individual scenes. His films have been described as “slowed down farce or souped up tragedy” and “art gallery precision misapplied to screwball comedy”. His trademark style of humor derives from great writing and very understated acting with dead on timing in combination with the rigid visual world the characters live in.

Within the narrow confines of overly detailed sets the emotionally crippled characters are hardly able to move let alone grow or change. In addition to the understated acting, he often uses color to emphasize the connection of a character to an overwhelmingly detailed setting.

Chameleon-like characters
If you look at these two images of Wes Anderson (above), you’ll notice that he likes to wear clothes that are close in tone to each other. In his films he uses the effect of placing characters in front of backgrounds of the same color as their clothes very often.

Do you see the house keeper Pagoda at the left?

Ben Stiller is so unable to grow that he wears the same tracksuit during the whole film (he even wore it as a child).

In the end at his father's funeral, only the color changes, but it's the same kind of tracksuit.

Luke Wilson as his brother who is living in the past as well.

Gene Hackman wears a brown suit outside...

...and takes it off indoors only to reveal a gray suit in a gray environment.

Steve Zissou wearing his pale blue overall is very often photographed against the blue sea, at least that's where he seems to be at home.

Here, he is obviously not at home. We're in the room of the brown man in the center.

Cate Blanchett in her bunk.

Jason Schwartzman in his hotel room.

The transition from suitcase to train furniture is hardly noticeable.

Like Pagoda in the first picture, people working in an environment wear the same colors, here even the same kind of pattern.

Here we have the conductor of the first train...

...and here we have one of another train.

Barbet Schroeder must be the boss of this garage

Mr. Fox in his natural habitat...

...and farmer Bean at home.

If you look closely at these films, you'll be surprised how many more examples there are!

Next: camera setup and central perspective

Anne Trister - analogous colors and accents

2011-01-31T04:25:00.152+01:00

Before the next Fox-installment, let’s look at a totally different film that seems to be related to Wes Anderson’s movies in regard of using color.

If we try to make an image instantly readable, we often increase contrast between character and background so that the silhouette gets clearer. In live-action films in particular, this isn’t always necessary because characters are easily distinguished from the background simply because there’s always some movement. In fact, some films make it part of their artistic design to blend character clothes in with their surroundings. In a future post we’ll see that Wes Anderson is often dressing his actors in this chameleon-like way.

Like a "trompe-l’oeil" painting
In Léa Pool’s Anne Trister (1986) this all makes sense because protagonist Anne Trister is a trompe-l’oeil painter in search of her roots. Hairstyles and heavy synthesizer music are so blatantly 1980s style that the timelessness and subtlety of the film might get overlooked at first.

Anne Trister seems deliberately to be one of the most colorless color movies since Tati’s PlayTime (1967). The art direction carefully constructed an all gray environment against which skin tones sometimes come off as warm accents or blend in when surrounded by warm grays/browns.
The contrasts are subtle, some of them only tonal, some of them in pattern, some of them in hue. This all makes sense since the film is about a trompe-l’oeil painter.

Nevertheless, the light looks fairly natural. There is a complex (and maybe principally intuitive) pattern of red and to a lesser extent blue accents. It doesn’t seem to be just a matter of warm or cold colors. The film's focus is on the growing relationship between Anne and her psychologist friend Alix. While the receding blue is often present in sweaters, red is the only color Anne Trister uses in her work. It is also the color a disturbed child uses to act out her violent excesses.

This is the first shot of the film showing Anne with her mother after the death of her father.

In the middle, Anne is seen in silhouette, at left and right her clothes match the gray walls more or less.

Sand is the central motive of the film, there are visual analogies with snow.

Anne paints her atelier with a sand-like structure using gray, white and red to create the illusion of a different room.

Red Accents

When we first see her paint, she's the only one using red.

Mother and boyfriend after Anne left Switzerland, red accents everywhere.

Anne meets her friend Alix in Montréal

Blue accents

Alix in her practice (left), in Anne's atelier (middle) where Anne blends in (right).

Red and blue

Soft cold vs. warm

Alix in flesh colored sheets, Anne still gray

Very soft contrasts of warm (brown) and cold (blue) gray reversed in two different scenes.

before Anne leaves Montréal in the end, red is very soft.

Alix alone after Anne's departure (left), with a message of Anne from the desert (right).

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Inspiration (2/5)

2011-01-27T00:32:00.007+01:00

Here, I try to assemble a fragmentary meandering on referenced sources, some of them cited as inspiration by the director, some of them my own guess-work. Down below I have included Google Video for the first time (just excerpts from music, though).

early depiction of vested fox

Unlike Jeffrey Katzenberg, for example, Wes Anderson does not believe in drowning his films in pop cultural references of the day. If you look for them, you can find a lot of references in his films, but you never have to recognize them to enjoy a scene and – at least, that’s what I think – all of them have stood the test of time and will not seem dated in future decades. I experience them rather as an extra layer of meaning beneath the surface.

Foxes wearing clothes and walking on their hind legs have a long tradition in illustration. The Story of ”Reineke Fuchs” or “Reynard the Fox” dates back to medieval European folklore, with even older origins in fables. In these stories the fox is a sly trickster and successfully plays the other animal characters off against each other – which he gets away with in the end.

Especially in the German-speaking part of Europe Goethe’s poem about “Reineke Fuchs” is well-known and has inspired many illustrations. During the 19th century, illustrators like Heinrich Kley, Gustave Doré, John Tenniel, John Swain or Wilhelm von Kaulbach have drawn anthropomorphic animals.

Wilhelm von Kaulbach (Reineke Fuchs, 1857)

John Swain (Punch, 1883)

When asked about inspiration for his stop-motion-feature Fantastic Mr. Fox Wes Anderson frequently cites Ladislas and Irène Starevitch’s 1930 feature of the French version of the story called Le Roman de Renard. With a length of 65 minutes it is one of the few pre-Snow White animated features. However, it hadn’t found its way into cinemas until the Nazis showed a German language version in 1937. It only hit French screens during the war in 1941.

The black and white stop motion film connects episodes of Renard’s bad deeds by having the aggrieved victims tell the lion king of their suffering. Compared to what we are used to see in children’s films today it has a real wild story including a extra-marital romance of the lion queen with a singing cat. In the end, the fox is even able to talk himself off the gallows so that the king decides to make peace and elevate the fox to become his minister. It is on youtube in full length with English subtitles.

Its creator, the then-renowned Ladislas Starevitch (or Ladislaw Starewicz), was originally Polish. Seeing the animation style in Wes Anderson’s film, it is not surprising that a lot of key inspiration was Eastern European stop-motion animation, especially Hungarian.

Burl Ives as Sam the Snowman

Anderson also mentioned the Rankin-Bass christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in which Burl Ives plays a singing onscreen narrator called Sam the Snowman. There are at least three Burl Ives songs playing during interior scenes of Fantastic Mr. Fox. All of them are from 1949 and can be found on a pair of records with songs for children (the same year Ives was nominated for an Academy Award for a song he sang as Uncle Hiram in Disney’s So Dear To My Heart). According to Wikipedia these children’s records coincide with the birth of his own song. It’s not unexpected that Burl Ives records can be heard mainly in Ash’s room and at the family table.

Two of the scenes accompanied by Burl Ives records

Jarvis Cocker as Petey

All of these songs were recorded before he was blacklisted by and then cooperated with the HUAC causing a rift with fellow folk singer Pete Seeger. Without thinking about this connection (and I’m really just guessing here) I’ve understood the banjo playing character Petey as a homage to Pete Seeger despite Jarvis Cocker being English like all humans are in contrast to the all-American animals. Yet making him an onscreen character who supposedly, at one point, was meant to become an onscreen narrator, too, there’s also a resemblance to Ives’ snowman character in Rudolph. Throw in cousin Kristofferson who is allegedly named after Kris Kristofferson and you get a blend of different folk musicians that probably doesn’t literally mean anything but nevertheless triggers a wide range of associations.

Talking about vested foxes one cannot ignore Woolie Reitherman’s Robin Hood (1973). Anderson, born in 1969, must have seen this as a child and he uses its song “Love” in an idyllic scene outside the treehouse. It’s barely audible, but it’s playing like a piece of mood music.

The record playing in this scene is from Robin Hood.

According to Robin Allan, “Ken Anderson wept when he saw how his character concepts had been processed into stereotypes for the animation on Robin Hood”. By then, the film makers had eradicated any interesting character trait that might have been left over from the original Reynard character. All that was left were the clothes and hunter’s hat. But animating the real story of “Reynard” was in talks as early as 1937, even before Disney could have seen the Starevitch feature. According to Charles Solomon (The Disney that never was, p. 81ff), Disney

“expressed reservations about the personality of the title character: ‘Well, our main character is a crook, and there’s nothing about him having the ‘Robin Hood’ angle. […] He’s not to be a murderer under any circumstances. He shouldn’t take advantage of anybody but a stupid individual.’”

He further cited his problems with the Hays Office because of Cock Robin. Later, it was to be combined with "Chanticleer" and under discussion until the 1960s. Its later character design “provided a jumping-off point for the artists when they made Robin Hood” (Solomon).

study for the Reynard feature (image lifted from 2619 Hyperion)

"Reynard attempts to woo a demure old hen", drawing for Chanticleer by Marc Davis (in Charles Solomon's "The Disney that never was", p.82)

See also: Chanticleer and fox by Jeffrey Pepper and Robin Hood confidential by Will Finn.

Musically, there is a wealth of references with Alexandre Desplat’s brilliant score weaving such disparate sources as Beach Boys, Burl Ives, Truffaut soundtracks and Morricone imitations together into one seamless fabric that is dominated by banjo and chimes.

As always with Wes Anderson, there is a Rolling Stones song playing during a key scene. Using songs of the late 1960s, early 1970s is one of the director’s trademarks. Here they fit perfectly, since the film seems to take place around the year 1970 when the book came out.

Mr. Fox’ confrontations with the farmers, Bean’s security rat and the wolf are successfully staged like Sergio Leone shootouts. Since these spaghetti western spoofs have become an annoying staple of so many comedies, it’s positively surprising when one is really working. A lot of its success is due to the perfect musical timing and scoring.

I have juxtaposed three of Desplat’s sound cues with Ennio Morricone’s originals they reminded me of.

All the Western-soundalikes are based on the film's signature tune, the children’s choir nursery rhyme about “Boggis, Bunce and Bean” (see/hear excerpt below):

Coming soon: Wes Anderson’s visual style

Fantastic Mr. Fox: The Book (1/5)

2011-01-21T18:19:00.001+01:00

Now that Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) finally showed up on a few Swiss cinema screens (on Bluray, as there are no digital or 35mm prints available) I’ve been heavily digging into the works of Wes Anderson lately.

Since I don’t know too much about my readers, I’m curious how many of you have actually seen Fantastic Mr. Fox and if you liked what you saw. Please take a minute to answer the two questions on the right.

Roald Dahl’s children’s book “Fantastic Mr. Fox” came out in 1970 with Illustrations by Donald Chaffin. Nowadays most editions are illustrated by Quentin Blake (see picture on the left) whose style is rather different from Chaffin’s.

But Wes Anderson – claiming that “Fox” was the first book he owned – is very fond of Chaffin’s original illustrations and thus invited him to work on the production design.

As you can see in these 1970 illustrations, Chaffin and Anderson share a lot of stylistic preferences such as made-to-measure suits, central perspective, axially symmetrical compositions and cross-section views:

According to Wikipedia, this is the first edition cover (but it might as well be the one from 1978). Does somebody know about this?

The original cover illustration according to the film makers

Chaffin's concept art for the film

The actual title in the film

The tree and Mr. Fox in the beginning

Axially symmetrical and cross-section through Mr. Fox's hole

Cross-section through Mr. Fox's bedroom in the basement of the tree

Digging in cross-sectio

Central perspective

Chaffin's version of the farmers

On the left: the three farmers as puppets by Mackinnon and Saunders.

Concept art for the film...

...and actual framegrab.

Coming Soon: Inspiration from different sources

Miyazaki's 70th Birthday

2011-01-11T08:00:00.024+01:00

I'd like to commemorate Miyazaki-san's 70th birthday (01/05/1941) with a few reconstructed background pans from his first feature as a director: Rupan sansei: Kariosutoro no shiro (Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro).

Although it looks like a less personal work than his later fantasy epics, Miyazaki's style is already visible. Despite its limited animation, Cagliostro is very entertaining even if one doesn't know anything about the whole Lupin III franchise. It's set in that lush, dreamy version of Europe - in this case the Riviera - that Japanese artists evoke so successfully.

2010 film review

2011-01-06T20:59:00.001+01:00

Looking back on 2010 I could rant about the recent conversion to digital cinema, the decline of cinema attendance or how Inception didn’t quite turn out to be the event I was hoping thought it would be. But 2010 is also the year I caught up with the last two Wong Kar-Wai movies I hadn’t seen, a 70mm screening of Tati’s PlayTime (1967) as well as a bunch of great Woody Allen comedies. So next to the list of my ten favorite new releases of 2010 I dig into what has become a habit by now: that the films that made the biggest impression on me were old ones.

As far as movies are concerned, 2011 couldn’t have started better. Right on New Year’s Day I saw Des hommes et des dieux, a French film about a group of Trappist monks executed in Algeria in 1996. It is one of several French films that transcend the usual dialogue-heavy “je t’aime… …moi non plus” attitude we associate with French drama.

Of 2010’s new releases there was no single outstanding film so I just list my ten favorite films in alphabetical order:

Kûki ningyô/Air Doll (Kore-Eda, Japan 2009): As soft and light-weight as its wide-eyed sex-doll-come-to-life protagonist. With its musette score it plays like a Japanese version of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, but less flashy, subtler and certainly more enigmatically philosophical.
L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (Bromberg/Medrea, France 2009): The thrilling tale of a movie that might have been, had it ever been completed. Romy Schneider with blue lips in a psychedelic phantasmagoria.
Die Fremde/When we leave (Aladag, Germany 2010): the first of two thoughtful and subtle films about the tensions of modern women suffering from religious traditions. Formally and emotionally superior to Na Putu/On the path.
Gainsbourg – vie héroïque (Sfar, France/USA 2010): A biopic that dares to leave blanks. What might have become a clumsy act of worship is transformed into a raw and at the same time polished piece of art by first time director Joann Sfar based on his own crudely drawn graphic novel.
L’illusionniste (Chomet, UK/France 2010): Less zany than Chomet’s earlier Triplettes de Belleville but ultimately more beautiful, this out-dated Illusionist roaming around Scotland combines Jacques Tati’s slow building visual gags with the melancholia of a dying art form. This year’s only animated feature without action sequences.
Nowhere Boy (Taylor-Wood, UK/Canada 2009): A polished period piece as decidedly British as they come. I have certainly seen better films in 2010 but this one will stay in my memory. After all, how could I resist a film about John Lennon’s youth, no matter how modest in scope?
Precious (Daniels, USA 2009): An emotional bulldozer that hits all the right notes. Gabourey Sidibe proves that a great actress is able to avoid the victim-trap even with a character that has to endure an almost preposterous amount of adversities.
Shutter Island (Scorsese, USA 2010): Scorsese even succeeds when reworking the 50s genre pictures he adores so much. Call it unfocused, even weak in comparison to his “auteur” projects, but it was one hell of a ride with a perfect soundtrack.
A single man (Ford, USA 2009): Can a western director succeed in bringing Wong Kar-Wai's style to a literary adaptation? A few lapses aside, yes, if he is fashion designer Tom Ford.
Winter’s Bone (Granik, USA 2010): Gut-wrenching, bone-chilling – this year’s Shotgun Stories, just stronger and from a female point of view. Lead actress Jennifer Lawrence is a natural.

What remains on the cutting floor
The Kids are all right, A serious man, and The Social Network almost made the list. Fantastic Mr. Fox is not included because I had to see it a second time to fully enjoy and appreciate it, so I went for Sylvain Chomet’s film instead. But why only one animated feature in a list of ten films? First of all, I wasn’t overwhelmed by any animated film this year like I was by Mary and Max, Ratatouille or Spirited Away in previous years.

The Toy Story 3 screening was ruined by several factors, so I can’t say much about that. Tangled was better than expected and far above last year’s The Princess and The Frog. The storytelling was floweing seamlessly, the zip-style animation was limited to a horse acting like a dog – which was surprisingly funny. All in all, it was a successful return to the tightly structured 90s features like Beauty and the Beast. The problem is that it’s just not the kind of picture I would want to see or the direction I would want a once inventive studio to take. Not that I have anything against fairy tales or screwball comedies along the lines of It Happened One Night. But frankly, I don’t need to see an average American teenager stumble through a set that looks like it was inspired by Disneyland, no matter how beautiful and impressive the animation – and believe me, it is impressive. Since they get the teenager characterization so right, why not do a story taking place in a real 2010 environment?

The good news is that I actually liked large parts of a Dreamworks feature: Hadn’t it been for the tedious action scenes, How to train your dragon could have been a masterpiece. I’m sure, the core relationship between the boy and his dragon would have been strong enough to carry the whole film. The other thing I liked was the fact that the final battle had a lasting effect on the boy. Why these films always resort to a scene where the hero is assumed to be dead remains a mystery to me, though.

Expanding the back catalogue
When I wrote about Italian cinema last year, I wouldn’t have thought that a year later I’d write about the same subject again. Then the musical Nine made me wish to see Otto e mezzo (1963) again. Not only was my wish granted, I was even given the opportunity of presenting it in a public screening. While the Fellini are part of the cinema italiano I've known for a long time – the director driven art house branch beginning with Rosselini and Neorealismo and ending with Antonioni, Visconti and Bertolucci – Scorsese opened my eyes for the vital tradition of purely entertaining screen comedies of the 50s, 60s and early 70s by directors like Dino Risi and Ettore Scola. Last summer, I finally saw some of these films and I’ve become addicted to them ever since.

After seeing Otto e mezzo several times, Marcello Mastroianni was already my new favorite actor. But I only discovered his immense range of expressions in films like Dramma della gelosia (Scola, 1970) or Divorzio all’italiana (Germi, 1961), two gems I’d watch again anytime.

Another great discovery of 2010 was Swedish director Jan Troell, especially his monumental two-part emigrant saga Utvandrarna (1971) and Nybyggarna (1972) about a poor family who leaves Sweden to settle down in Minnesota. Doing his own (hand) camera work, Troell achieves a level of realism that transcends even Terrence Malick’s similar undertaking in The New World (2005). I don’t think I have ever seen such an intimate saga completely devoid of sentimentality or any insight into the characters inner life. The slowly paced experience takes a little less than seven hours but is worth every minute. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann act like forces of nature in their struggle against the harsh realities of a farmer's life.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T22:19:00.001+01:00

Chomet - like Tati - relies heavily on long shots both in space and time.

If you live somewhere around Los Angeles or New York, do yourself a favor and see Sylvain Chomet's poetic feature The Illusionist. It may not follow tried-and-tested formulas but those who are able to adjust to a pace representative of a dying art form (vaudeville, stage magician, cinema, you name it...) will discover a marvel with many a reference beyond Jacques Tati's films.

Mood is everything.

Here's a clip of a key scene in the relationship between the magician Tatischeff and the girl Alice.

I haven't written about it yet, since most of my readers seem to live in the United States where the movie hasn't come out until now.