For last post, I will be talking about Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009). I think Ice Age 3 is a movie catered to everyone ranging from children to the elderly who are young at heart and don't mind a slap-stick movie. The movie does not have a complicated storyline and does not make any sense since dinosaurs and wooly mammoths lived at least 60million years apart. The characters in the story have human like expressions and feelings.

 Look at the finger of the Opossums, either Crash or Eddie since they look similar. The right hand is pointing with one finger at the bird in front the way humans do and animals never do. I remember from my Secondary School Literature that the word for this is anthropomorphic which means giving human traits to animals. In animation this is big money. For example Kungfu Panda is also a franchise that makes a lot of money. The artistic works of Satoshi Kon or Hayao Miyazaki don't have the box office success of  this type of entertaining block busters with cheesy sentimental moments.

How did this film that cost 90 million to make have a box office gross of nearly 900million?




The story also has a 2 side-plot characters, Scrat and Scratte who loosen up the audience with funny stuns and a fight over an acorn. Scrat has been a recurring character in all the Ice Age Franchises. He always manages to get his acorn in every scene but inevitably loses it. He is basically the adorable loser. He is the comic relief in every film and has his own plot line. I think Scatte was added to spice up things a little like she this romantic feel around her and they make the two side-plot characters fall in love to make it funny for the older audience. Scatte was like the wall between the acorn and Scrat.  I guess it is also educational because they went to research on many species of dinosaurs. In fact, a fossil of the saber-tooth squirrel was identified in 2011 after the release of Ice Age and it resembled Scrat.

                                                                     We Existed!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/101102-saber-toothed-squirrel-fossils-paleontology-dinosaurs-science/


" "When [the movie] Ice Age came out, we thought the squirrel character in it looked ridiculous, but then we found something like it," said study leader Guillermo Rougier, a paleontologist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky."

Before 2011, the existence of this Saber-tooth squirrel was not known! Basically the people at Blue Sky Studio predicted the existence of a Saber-tooth creature.

Certain things like the wire in the carnivorous plant made the movie seem like it was a mix of modern and historic time.

This weasel named Buck is the only mammal to live with the dinosaurs in the dinosaur world and he is the main character who helps the other ice age creatures survive in the dinosaur world. Here he has to cut the wires of a plant that is going to digest them all. This fuses modern bomb detonating scenarios with the jungle theme of the dinosaur world.

The dinosaur world and the ice age world are clearly distinquished by the colour used. The dinosaur world as shown above is filled with saturated colours and greenery while the ice age world is in shades of whites and blues.

The dialogue is very modern such as when Manny says to Sid, " Do you want a birth certificate" when Sid is not sure if the female T-Rex is the mother of Eggbert, Shelly and Yoko the baby T-Rexs.


Eggbert, Shelly and Yoko were created by Melvin Tan, a Senior Animator at Blue Sky Studio
Read more here.: http://business.asiaone.com/Business/SME+Central/Prime+Movers/Story/A1Story20090708-153505.html




He also worked on Sid and Manny. Best of all he is an alumnus of Ngee Ann Polytechnic.
He says in the interview that he concentrate on observing the behavior of things to see if they are real.






 Rudy is the main villian of the film. Of course he does not do anything mean because this is a film where no one really dies, everyone is saved at the last second, animal who are eaten are spat out or manages to escape from a stomach such as Buck escaping from Rudy's stomach. The most amazing thing i found out about Rudy, who is an albino Baryonyx,is that that species is fish-eating! So despite the fearsome red eyes, sharp teeth and threatening claws, Rudy is essentially harmless!

 On the topic of food though, the animals all seem to get by pretty well without eating.  The only time when the animals eat is when the baby dinosaurs feed on a mysterious leg that comes from no where and did not seem to belong to any living creature.

Showing the animals eating each other up would have ruined the picture perfect sweet and absolutely inaccurate image of wild animal behaviour in any era. These are animals created to sell cuddly soft toys (merchandising as started by Walt Disney).

Personally I prefer Spirited Away, because it brought out the most emotions in me and the art was more interesting. There was a lot of hand animation which I prefer. And Hayao Miyazaki has a very surreal and unforgettable style. Money and art are two different things This movie  is entertaining but also feels run off the mill. But who am I to judge Ice Age 4 came out this month and has already made 400 over million.

Today, I am blogging about the movie called, "Waking Life". It is a movie about a guy trying to understand dreams connection with real life. The movies starts off with him at a young age playing a game with a girl and he picks the number which leads him to the reply "dream is destiny". This sparks an idea in the main character's mind about dreams and reality. The director uses rotoscoping to give the movie a dreamy element.

Max Flesicher invented rotoscoping in 1915 and used it in Koko the clown. Leon Schlesinger Productions which produced Looney Tunes used it occasionally and Walt Disney also used it for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). This cartoony feel to the movie makes it seem less of a serious film and also gives some space for comedy.

                                                                     " I rather be a gear"

This is in Chapter 6 - Free Will and Physics where the real life Philosopher professor  David Sosa is talking about, " trying to solve  the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuallity" ( from wakinglifemovie.net/Transcript/Chapter/6). A lot of people will be very drained by the amount of content and will fall asleep. So what the director does is that he makes the character's faces turn into what they talk about.

"the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws"

A man is driving down a street and he is very angry about many things.

As he continues ranting, his face turns red with fury.
The scenes are quite disjointed like in a dream and there is no conventional plot.

In the scene above 2 people are talking in a bar and he said "he has not used his gun in a long time and doesnt know if it works. The other guy says why don't you pull the trigger and find out." so the guy dies and the bar tender in the picture gets shot. The splat gives a comic style to this dark scene which turns out to be another dream of the main character.

                                                Can you recognise the 2 characters?

Julie Deply and Ethan Hawke. They acted in the film, "Before Sunrise" by the same director.
Here they play Jesse and Celine who are talking about reincarnation.

I think overall this film is bearable because the rotoscoping makes the film more interesting. The conversations are quite long  and is the most wordy film I have ever seen. My mind was like the main character in the last scene.

I like how the end and the begging of the film mirror each other. This time it is the adult that is floating away.

 Today, I am going to post on Millennium Actress (2001). I like this film  because it was very touching as I could see how passion for someone will drive a person to achieve a goal. Even though the lead character Chiyoko Fujiwara never managed to meet the man of her dreams again, she  is a great actress because she put her emotions for him into acting. I found this to be very emotional and different from Paprika(2006),  which is more intellectual. Just like Paprika, Satoshi Kon, shows different levels of reality and sometimes its difficult to tell what is reality and fiction or what is past and present.

To make things more complicated, the film also involves a director, Tachibana, who is trying to make a documentary about Chiyoko Fujiwara. However, we see him in every story she tells so the flashbacks are not reliable as they have his fantasy element of him being involved in the scenes.

In the two pictures above, wee see him acting out a role while he is interviewing Chiyoko.in real life.

In all the scenes from Chiyoko's previous films,

the director always acts as the protector of Chiyoko.

The scene above is suppose to be a flashback and if u look carefully at the background you can see Tachibana's face. This is very good use of background and foreground as in the foreground Chiyoko is accompanied by the director she will marry but in the background is the person  who genuinely cares for her but she does not even notice him.

The side kick of the director, Kyoji Ida is there for comic relief. He has a few stock expressions.

Reusing similar expressions is very common in Japanese Anime. Characters who are surprised will perform an extremely exaggerated expression like the 2 instances you see above. The beads of sweat rolling down when someone is frightened is also a convention of Japanese Anime.

Another sequence that shows how past recollections can bleed into a film is when Chiyoko talks to her mother:

In the shot above Chiyoko's image is reflected in the mirror. 

The conversation continues seamlessly but Chiyoko's real life mother has been replaced by an actress while in the reflaction is the old lady who  gives her the thousand year tea which makes her unable to forget the man she loves. We first see the old lady in a film that Chiyoko is acting in but the tea seems to have an effect on her real life and in real life she never gives up on looking for the man she met when she was a child.

 In the 2 stills above Chiyoko is acting as a princess from the past. The 2 gray dots on her face are meant to represent eye brows of the aristocrats in the Sengoku period.

 

This is from a fantasy sequence when Chiyoko in real life tries to find the artist she once met. She sees a painting and  the painting starts to move and the man she is lookong for waves goodbye and walks away. He is drawn without facial features as she has forgotten what he looks like.

 The still to the left is from the end of the film showing that Chiyoko who is dying in real life is actually going to space to look for the man again. Just like the plot line of the thousand year tea in her film, Chiyoko appears to really want to spend many life times looking for him.

 I read that this film was actually based on the life of Setsuko Hara, who was born in 1920,  a Japanese actress who retired suddenly and lead a reclusive life and is still living a reclusive life. The art of this film is not as complex as Paprika  and seems completely hand drawn with no CGI effects this is appropriate for the film because the story is a simple love story which spends the ages of not only time but reality. If there had been  too much special effects the emotions would not be that strong. In my previous post i wrote about Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within(2001) which came out i nthe same year as Millennium Actress(2001), Even though Final Fantasy had state of the art animation then, the CGI could not convey the emotions that Satoshi Kon did with his hand drawn characters. This is why I prefer Millennium Actress should not be technically good but emotionally supportive.

 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within ( 2001) (Original title: Gaia)

was a ground breaking animation film even though now the graphics would look a bit dated it was the first attempt to make a photorealistic rendered 3D featured films. Unfortunately,  thought it cost 137 million to make it only gained 85 million dolalrs world wide. (http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Spirits_Within). The plot is not fantastic but the ups and downs in the character's emotions were complemented by the music and graphics. I want to share about the amount of effort that was put into this film.

In the photo below, the animators used 80000 particles of dust for that scene to evoke a desolate world.

 

Original storyboard of Aki floating out of her chair:

Sketch of  Aki in the opening scene

:

Screenshot of Final Scene:

 Thought the shot above might look very simple a lot of time was taken to get every detail right. The lighting, the hair, and how she will float out of the chair later were all discussed in detail.

Motion-capture

The still above is from the documentary: The Making of Final Fantasy. Motion capture was quite a new technology at that time. With motion capture you can map human motion onto the motion of a computer animated character. However, motion capture can lack the individuallity of hand animated characters. The animators also hand keyed the hands since some subtleties are hard to achieve.

 The animators look into a mirror to see what exactly happens when an action is performed. For example when you swallow, you blink and your throat goes up.

The animators went scuba diving to see how the bubbles in the water would look like when someone falls into the water.

 Animator:

 Final Character:

Some of the rocks were hand animated while some used dynamics simulation:

Lighting

 

For a darker, more intense mood, the lighting has to match the atmosphere. Whether it was indoors or out in the barren landscape, the lead lighting artist has to make sure the lighting is not too cheery or happy. At the beginning, there’s a lot of blue light. A lot of the key/primary lights were from a practical source. The love scene was hard to light as there was a high contrast light from the space window and the fill light had to be very soft so as to create a mysterious, romantic setting:

Compositing

The artist had to sketch several suns for the director, Hironobu Sakaguchi, as this key scene was repeated several times in the film that was about protecting the planet from alien forces.

 Texture mapping was used on the sun:

Before compositing, they had to do a lot of rendering and in compositing they would take the layers they have rendered and put it together one by one. In the shot below of Aki standing on a platform, they had to render the platform, the bar, the background, the dust and fog, Aki’s light separately before compositing. In the background, there were billboards (which they photographed from Times Square) before changing:

 Sound

Unlike a live action film where some of the sound is recorded live on set. In an animated film, sound is built from scratch and is only limited by technology and the imagination. The sound designer used a combination of animal sounds such as tigers, lion and bears for the imaginary creatures.

The London Symphony Orchestra performed the score and it was recorded. Low brass music and Japanese drums were used when the scenes were more violent. In the scene when Aki talks about the death of a little girl, the music composer used a piano to express the feeling of home since a lot of people took piano lessons so the sound of the piano conveys a sense of familiarity.  

 This DVD has one of the most comprehensive of special features that I have ever seen ( I think they really need to recoup their loss.) The last image I want to share is the real life inspiration for Aki. Even though the film was not very successful, Aki Ross was very well designed and she was even the first animated woman to be make the list of Maxim's sexiest woman ever.

Aki's voice actress Ming Na: