CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds
Surman, D. 2003/4. "CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds", Gamasutra Education Online
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CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds
David Surman Autumn 2003
CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds
Image Appendix (see centre insert)
Figure 1: Dr Aki Ross, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. (© Final Fantasy Film Partners, Inc. All rights reserved.) Figure 2: Digital reproduction. (© David Surman.) Figure 3. Disney’s industrialised production schema. (Fields, R. D. 1947. The Art of Walt Disney. Collins: London and Glasgow. p. 73) Figure 4. A final model sheet for Pinocchio (Disney, 1940). (Fields, R. D. 1947. The Art of Walt Disney. Collins: London and Glasgow. 149) Figure 5. Promotional posters: Europe and America (left) and Asia (right), Toy Story. (© Walt Disney Pictures, Inc. All rights reserved.) Figure 6. Yuna from Final Fantasy X (© Squaresoft, Inc. All rights reserved.) Figure 7. Squall from Final Fantasy VIII (© Squaresoft, Inc. All rights reserved.)
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Contents
Introduction Chapter 1: Indexes, Mimesis and the Digital Image Falling with Style Chapter 2: Realism as the Language of Correspondence, and the Possible World Possible Worlds Image Appendix Chapter 3: Technological Determinism, Idealism, Genre The Pseudorealist Animation Genre On Caricature Real Bodies, Still Lives Dr. Aki Ross, Virtual Idol Chapter 4: Pseudorealism, from Cultural Contexts to Textual Analysis Towards a Conclusion: Final Fantasy and Animated Film Criticism Final Fantasy as…American Animation Final Fantasy as…Anime Final Fantasy as…Videogame Conclusively…Final Fantasy as…Live-Action Bibliography 47 49 50 51 53 54 56 30 34 37 42 44 17 21 27 8 13 4
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Introduction
…a broad shift has taken place in visual culture: the shift from analog to digital. As a cultural and technological transformation, the incorporation of the digital into every aspect of visual communications has been much remarked upon. (Crawford, 2003: 110)
Computer generated images have unbalanced how we the audience assess the credibility of cinematic representation; they shift the position of the film image on its scale between the fantasy and reality. We are no longer able to wholly invest our imaginary in the material ‘truth claim’ of traditional photography as it was once hypothesised. Just as photography superseded the reality effect of painting, the digital image has ruptured what was once thought to be an image of unquestionable, automatic mimesis. In the post-photographic era of the CGI feature film, the loss of indexicality has meant that the cinematic sense of realism is now authenticated in other ways. For the purposes of clarity – though it may sound like stating the obvious – the CGI feature film is an animated film which is entirely computer generated. In the CGI reality, objects do not pre-exist, and no pro-filmic events take place. In the CGI feature film, credibility is drawn from the collective reality effect of the conceivable, homogenised diegesis, known here as the ‘possible world’. This thesis contests ontological theories of realism, in order to posit the collective reality effect in the CGI feature film as a combination of perceptual cues and cinematic language. The CGI feature film is a relatively new addition to the historiography of the moving image, and has brought many new terminologies, at times leading to obfuscating theoretical analysis. Anne Crawford succinctly summarises the impact of CGI:
The more significant shift from analog to digital arrived in the form of computer-generated imagery, or “CGI”. With CGI, the keyframes in animation are produced through the manipulation of data within a computer program, and made visible through a combination of calculation heavyprocedures generally known as modelling, texture-mapping, compositing and, finally, rendering. In CGI, the convergence of computing and visual media has enabled truly unprecedented practices in production, distribution and reception, as well as shifts in the aesthetics of animation. (Crawford, 2003: 113)
The practices noted by Crawford – production, distribution, reception and aesthetics – provide an excellent discursive approach for a tentative study of CGI feature
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film. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu Sakaguchi, 2001) is a CGI feature film in which the human characters are intended to be as lifelike as possible [fig.1]. As Warren Buckland similarly suggests of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and The Lost World (Steven Spielberg, 1997), the characters of Final Fantasy ‘replicate the realism and illusionism of the photographic image by conferring a perfect photographic credibility…’ (Buckland, 1999: 185). This aesthetic has been referred to as ‘photorealism’, a term previously applied to painting.1 I shall refer to the aesthetic of the CGI feature film as pseudorealist, will incorporate the subdefinitions of photorealism and stylised realism explained later. However, it is worth saying that ‘hyperrealism’ is the term used by director Hironobu Sakaguchi, who remarked that: ‘The development of hyperReal CG [computer generated] characters has been technically more challenging than initially anticipated, and has lead us through a series of hurdles to overcome’ (Kent and Cox, 2001: 5). The definitions and distinctions I make here are necessary to my argument, though are at times contrary to other discussions of the same subject, which shall be explained in due course. Ontological notions of cinematic realism are challenged by Final Fantasy because, like all computer generated representation, it does not have the indexical correspondence to the known world found in photographic and live-action images, and yet (to use Stephen Prince’s term) constructs a ‘perceptual realism’ (1996). This thesis attempts make clear the role of reality effects in CGI feature film, and how they contribute to the production of a plausible fictional realm. Though the digital effect is a major component in Hollywood live-action cinema, for discursive coherence I shall focus on the CGI feature film, with only brief recourse to the world of composite film and special effects. No more than a few years ago, it would have been hard to construct a viable canon of CGI feature film work. However, in the last decade the CGI feature film has emerged as a popular cinematic form2, most notably through the work of John Lasseter’s Pixar Studios, Blue Sky (a subsidiary of Fox), and Dreamworks. From a moderate number of films, the most well known being Toy Story
1
The 1980s trend of ‘Photorealism’ in painting; with figures such as Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Audrey Flack and Frank Gersch; is contemporaneous with the emergence of CGI. For Photorealism in painting, see: Malpas, 1997: 69–71; Lucie-Smith, 1994: 188–202. 2 The popular CGI film still remains ostensibly directed at younger audiences, through merchandising campaigns and tie-ins, for instance with fast food retailers and videogame developers.
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(John Lasseter, 1995), the CGI feature film has developed distinct codes, conventions, recurrent styles and other generic traits. Consequently, I shall attempt to consider the CGI feature film as a genre. Moreover, as a genre it exists between live-action and the animate, drawing upon both of these conceptually cogent forms. To summarise, this thesis takes Final Fantasy as its central case study, and positions it within a context of CGI feature film history. It also accounts for the culture of Japanese anime and Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy videogame franchise, in order to gain a broader understanding of the film. Put simply, Final Fantasy’s unprecedented level of photorealism provides an excellent basis for a renewed account of cinematic verisimilitude in light of animation and the digital image. This is at an adjunct to the often discussed role of special effects and cinematic technologies—a discourse which has until recently sidelined the socio-historical aspects necessary to a richer understanding of this new era of moving image practices. Aside from discussing the specific qualities of the CGI feature film, the boxoffice failure and mixed critical reception of Final Fantasy adds another dimension to this discussion, provoking a renewed account of how audiences relate to an animated image which seeks to reflect the aesthetic of live-action. In my first section I examine the origins of realist criticism, with special focus put on the ontological dimensions of film as a photographic image. I reiterate recent theoretical work by underlining the fact that the digital image is radically different to the photographic since it does not share an indexical correspondence with its referent. In order to reconcile the problem CGI poses for ontological theories of realism I reiterate the ideas of Stephen Prince and Warren Buckland, both of which have revisited realist theory in order to accommodate the emergence of CGI. I hope to put forward a clear synthesis of their separate perspectives regarding CGI, while incorporating my own suggestions regarding cultural contextuality, filmic reception, and popular culture. I aim to show that realism in the CGI film can be understood as a possible world (governed by internal parameters drawn from our own world), brought about by the visual language of perceptual cues which produce an emergent reality effect. The reader may note that in this thesis there is not significant mention given to the structuralist and post-structuralist theories of realism that emerged in the seventies. This
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area, when notions of the apparatus, spectatorship and suture first emerged, will not be incorporated into the history that it put forward. My primary aim is to reveal an observed continuity between specific socio-historical instances, rather than vainly attempting to construct a total History of realist theory, onto which I might adjunctively tack animation. Rather, by examining early ontological theories of realism and then extending to similar dimensions in the digital image I confront the material transition from analogue to digital. Moreover, by then incorporating the (primarily cognitive) film studies’ work of Prince and Buckland, I knowingly sideline the diverting, complex, and expansive discourse that accompanies the post-structuralist theory put forward by Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry and Stephen Heath. However I will make occasional inferences regarding this tangent of realist discourse, when it affirms or provides useful countenance to my investigation. Following this initial discussion I shift towards a closer analysis of the specific films in question. By examining the ambitions of CGI practice, with regard to fears surrounding the technological determinism of CGI aesthetics, I bring into view the specific problems that characterise Final Fantasy. Through this perspective the cultural context of production is centralised, and leads to chapter three, where I expand upon the genre conventions that surround the CGI film. In my fourth and final section I devote my attention to a fuller analysis of Final Fantasy, with recourse to the conclusions of the previous, more theoretical chapters. Here I hope to account for the contentions of industry professionals and critics, incorporating points that emerge from popular discussion of the film in internet forums and the press. By foregrounding an analysis of the popular reception of Final Fantasy alongside an inter-media analysis I hope to avoid the less grounded assumptions present in existing theory concerning animated film, anime, CGI and the videogame.
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Chapter 1: Indexes, Mimesis and the Digital Image I would like to point out that the kind of cinematic realism I shall discuss is not the ‘socially inclined realism’ (Malpas, 1997: 69) indicative of traditionally ‘realist’ liveaction cinema3. As such, debates surrounding the ‘truthfulness’ of the image in a moral sense – those often applied to documentary and more recently ‘reality television’ – are not particularly relevant. What I investigate is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon, perceptual realism. Before I advance my argument any further, we must review the critical origins of realist theory. At the root of notions of cinematographic realism is André Bazin’s seminal thesis: ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1967). Here Bazin suggests that the broad function of the plastic arts (read historically) is the denial of death, ‘the preservation of life through the representation of life’ (Bazin, 1967: 10). The consequence of this is the emergence of a creative idealism: the greater the representational likeness, the more imbued with life the creation is, and the closer to the psychological conquering of death. He goes on to give examples of Egyptian mummification and French portraiture. This thesis will knowingly set the computer generated figure within this idealist framework, alongside such historical examples. Bazin posits photography as the source of the great shift towards expressionism in painting and the plastic arts. It had freed them from the drive toward unachievable likeness, since the image produced by automatic means was (believed to be) an exact copy. Up until then, the invention of the camera obscura (and the discovery of perspective) had fuelled a realist trajectory in painting, which aimed to duplicate the outside world whilst communicating the symbolic realm of the spirit. He distinguishes between the true realism of ‘concrete’ expression, and ‘pseudorealism’, which ‘aims at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind)’ (Bazin, 1967: 12). I shall take as a recurrent reference for the aesthetic of CGI Bazin’s term ‘pseudorealism’, since it refers to the illusory reality effect found in perspective and trompe l’oeil: images of three-dimensional
3
For instance British Social Realism, see: Lay, 2002.
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space constructed artificially on two dimensions. Bazin summarises the influence of photography on the pseudorealist imperative in the plastic arts as follows:
In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us an illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all in its very essence, our obsession with realism. (Bazin, 1967: 12)
He goes on to suggest the artist’s liberation from a desire for realism brought about by photography is not an aesthetic solution, but rather a psychological one. Since the photographic image is produced by automatic means, without an ‘intervening hand’ bringing with it an ‘inescapable subjectivity’, the reproduction of reality attained the highest level of likeness, greater than any other material expression. As continuous with the thing represented, the photograph was an index of the real. Since the camera reproduced the image of the world without agency then it was believed to be a mimetic representation, and as such unquestionably real. The photographic product, of the camera-as-mechanism, evoked a scientific ‘truth’, liberated from an author’s interpretive mediation, and the fallibilities of human organic perception and expression. Bazin saw painting, before the advent of photography, as having a ‘resemblance complex’ which it shed in the advent of automatic reproduction. The subjectivity found in painting is only present in photography by virtue of what is chosen to be photographed. For him, the ‘objective nature’ of photographic reproduction relates an unquestionable ‘credibility’ of the existence of the reproduced content of the image. The photograph’s liberation from the interpretive agency of subjective perception/expression is central to its automatically reproduced truth claim. In this we find the fundamental assertion of Bazin’s thesis, in which he elevates photography to the position of the premiere realist medium:
In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction. (Bazin, 1967: 14)
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From Bazin and the beginnings of an ontological theory of realism in the cinema4, it is not difficult to see the immediate problem posed by the digital. Prince writes that: ‘For reasons alternatively obvious and subtle, digital imaging in its dual modes of image processing and CGI challenges indexically based notions of photographic realism’ (Prince, 1996: 29). The computer generated image is not automatically produced, but is the result of an algorithm, a calculation which is the result of human ideation, whose visual product (the seen pixel) is the outcome of a written equation. Moreover, the CGI sequence has objective content (character, colour, depth) and yet it is artificially generated. The image is non-transparent, non-indexical. Buckland writes:
The photographic image is…indexically bound to the actual world. The photographic is an analogue of the real. However the digital (or post-photographic) image is not determined or limited to the actual world in the same way. Whereas the photographic image is an analogue of the preexisting real objects that is reproduced automatically, the digital image is produced by numerical digital codes, each of which is then realized on screen as a pixel or point of light. The continuous lines, masses, and contours of the analogue are divided up into discontinuous, discrete fragments of [data], or pixels, on a monitor. (Buckland, 1999: 184)
To expand upon Buckland, pre-existence is not a requisite for digital representation. Though, for instance, a digital camera produces an exact likeness akin to the traditionally photographic [fig.2], it is a manifestation of an agreed artificial type: the replication of red from world to image is a consequence of a digital algorithm pertaining to an agreed value ‘red’: ‘a digitally designed or created image can be subject to infinite manipulation’ (Prince, 1996: 29). A mathematical algorithm of this type is a language, which is to say, fundamentally, that in digital reproduction a language is mediating the world at a material level. This language is a language of correspondence, both in its imitation of the process of analogue photography, and in the generation of objects through CGI. To expand upon Bazin’s thesis, the digital image is affiliated with the plastic arts, since the representation is the result of a human material intervention, albeit at the level of the technological apparatus.
4
For a similar thesis on the role of photography and realism, see: Kracauer, 1960 in Braudy and Cohen, 1999: 171–182
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I suggest that digital reproduction is pushing towards and has achieved a new reinvigoration of pseudorealist idealism. Digital realism is pseudorealism, in that it constitutes a reproduction of likeness and the ‘fundamental deception of the eye’, and reincorporates the mediation of human agency. In digital visual culture someone has to set the parameters of vision, since digital image making technology is built upon artificially set indexes. A realist rationale tempers the possibilities of ‘infinite manipulation’. To indulge such an infinite capacity without a conforming principle would produce an incoherent, anti-realist reproduction. The correspondent indexicality of a pixel is the result of an artificially determined calculation. In digital representation, automatic reproduction vis-à-vis analogue photography no longer exists in the material sense, and instead operates as an explicit functional aspect in the case of digital photography, upon the implicit mathematical parameters of digital imaging. Mark J. P. Wolf reflects on the centrality of mathematical language in digital representation:
The mathematical basis of digital technology, and particularly computer graphics, is unavoidable; any digital representation of an object will require a mathematically expressible representation of that object. What matters, then, is the degree to which mathematics is subsumed into higher functions that simulate objects and their interactions, how quickly and easily they can be manipulated by the artist, and the degree of realism desired. (Wolf, 2000: 74)
In summary, the digital imaging apparatus reproduces the world through human mediation, since the final image is the sum of a mathematical language, of man-made rule sets. These foundational calculations mediate the world invisibly, yet are philosophically equivalent to the brushstrokes of a painting, since they represent human intervention/mediation. It can be argued that the digital image is an incarnation of coauthorship, since at a level of the mathematical algorithm there is a perceptive judgement, and at the level of subject choice/creation there is perceptive judgement: one invisible yet fundamental (to digital camera/CGI software function), the other visible yet infinitely variable.5
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In another respect the apparatus’ mathematical algorithm could be seen as a meta-language, and the image taken as an object-language. To paraphrase Lapsley and Westlake, the former can be imagined as quotation marks (meta-language) which encase and objectify the nominal element informing us of its status as an expression (object-language).
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Digital reproduction/representation has been referred to as ‘post-photographic’, given the post-indexical factor. As I have said, the supplement of automatic reproduction with the language of digital artificial mediation affiliates the digital image, no matter how resemblant or apparently indexical, with the plastic arts.6 Consequently, we understand the CGI feature film to be an image of pseudorealism in Bazin’s terms—a fundamental deception of the eye. Of course the cinema itself in whatever incarnation involves a deception of the eye, that of the ‘persistence of vision’ effect. Though things appear to exist and have causal properties, they are the product of man-made parameters. From now on I shall employ Bazin’s term pseudorealism when referencing CGI feature film practice which aims towards a certain reality effect, incorporating its bifurcation into photorealism (as in Final Fantasy) and stylised realism (such as the films of Pixar Studio’s discussed later). To return to Bazin, it is worth pointing out that elsewhere he classifies (talking about live-action cinema) three kinds of realism. Buckland writes:
According to Bazin, there are three types of realism in the cinema: an ontological realism, which (to paraphrase Bazin) restores the object and decor to their existential density, the weight of their presence; a dramatic realism, which refuses to separate the actor from the décor, the foreground from the background; and a psychological realism, which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception, a perception which is never really determined. (Buckland, 1999: 185–186)
Buckland expands on Bazin’s third principle of realism, the psychological, with Stephen Heath’s theory of suture, which posits the imaginary involvement of the spectator in the text: ‘According to [Heath’s] theory, realism is nothing more than an effect of the successful positioning of the spectator into an imaginary relation to the image, a position which creates a sense that the film’s space and diegesis is unified and harmonious’ (Buckland, 1999: 186). I shall discuss the perceived harmony of the diegesis later, though for now my main interest is the still first principle of realism, the ontological.
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As Moszkowicz has noted, on occasion CGI representation retains some level of index to the real, through motion-capture technologies, and the mapping of digital models directly from sculpted ceramic models. Such indexes function invisibly however, and through they have correspondence, are often exaggerated upon and altered by the animator/modeller—blurring the indexical nature and undermining its primary correspondence to the ‘real’. They do not have the rhetorical truth claim of the (indexically linked) photographic analogue.
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Buckland (discussing the Jurassic Park movies) notes that, regarding the hyperrealism of the digital dinosaurs, what is digital has a perceptual equivalence with the live-action element as part of a possible world. ‘Object’ (CGI) and ‘décor’ (photographic environment) are perceptually unified. They are ontologically unified as one image, since they appear governed by the same observable principles. Prince greatly emphasises the ongoing dilemma this phenomena poses for film theory, where things appear real without index, as a perceptual realism (Prince, 1996: 36). In the CGI feature film, which is entirely digital post-photographic imagery, the composite does not need to unify differing ontological elements: be that homogenously as in the Jurassic Park movies or heterogeneously as in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemekis, 1988). In the CGI feature film, a composite is of multiple digitally produced layers of parallel computer generated origin. Though these elements have material unity (regarding the material basis of production) their textual and diegetic unity is another matter, discussed in my second chapter. Falling with Style
In CGI feature film, a perceptually coherent realism is dependent on artificially produced parameters, which work in accordance to produce a plausible world. For instance in Toy Story, The fantastical yet inhibited physics that govern Buzz Lightyear’s various attempts at flight are consistent with those laws that govern sliding or falling objects, and the inertia of moving characters. They are similar to the physics of our world, but are stylised to match the aesthetic of the film. Such artificial ‘world laws’ are in this respect playfully Newtonian – a parody of our earthly laws. For instance the almost surreal cartoon-style of the CGI feature film Ice Age (Chris Wedge, 2002) is governed by an equally comedic set of physical laws. This union of aesthetics and physical object properties is important to the collective reality effect of the CGI feature film. This realist principle is central to the historical continuity between the twodimensional orthodoxy of Disney and the emergent orthodoxy of the CGI feature film noted hereafter.
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Julia Moszkowicz writes about how Walt Disney inspired the ‘realist’ governance of the animated world through the transposition of rules derived from our own worldly experience, contrary to the surrealism of the rival Fleischer studios. Recalling my point concerning continuity between 2D and 3D conventions, she also points out how this tradition manifests in the contemporary CGI feature film Shrek (2001):
If Disney misrepresented the animated form and its specific capabilities by aligning animation with aspects of photorealism, then this ‘misrecognition’ of animation’s potential continues to this day. Indeed it is interesting to note how the solid figures in Shrek occupy a space governed by the physical laws of nature rather than one solely governed by imagination, only engaging in occasional moments of ‘plasmaticness’. When Donkey exceeds the confines of realism and takes to the air, the sequence is not offered as an imaginative space in which to contemplate fantasy ‘versus’ reality, but as a moment of heightened naturalism. Realism is thus distorted, momentarily, in an effort to highlight the contradictory nature of Donkey’s speech. (Moszkowicz, 2002: 311)
In these virtual worlds, the administration of rules governing objectivity (both environmental and figurative) is integral to a consistently plausible diegesis, and a legitimate reality effect. I use the term ‘plausible’ in accordance with Christian Metz’s definition, as Richard Neupert writes: ‘According to Metz, “the Plausible…is an arbitrary and cultural restriction of real possibles; it is in fact, censorship: among all the possibilities of figurative fiction, only those authorised by the previous discourse will be chosen.”’ (Neupert, 1994: 111, my emphasis). This quote is particularly illuminating because it reiterates how plausibility is the product of the restriction by an intelligible style. Secondly, the suggestion that plausibility must be recognised as continuous with permissive prior discourse (of previous related plausible arrangements) is saliently expressed in the continuity between Disney’s ‘illusion of life’ governed fictions on into the now hegemonic CGI feature films with their ‘worlds within worlds’ realism. Plausible worldviews presented by animation are not simply a formalist cohesion of aesthetic details. I suggest that they are a union between aesthetics, physical principles (and there stylised restriction) and most importantly conducive audience reading practices (discussed later). On reflection, the realist inhibition of physical properties is similar to the determination of colour previously mentioned, where indexicality is an artificial construct. These parameters inhibit the potentially incoherent world in order for it to
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appear coherent, to the extent that all elements appear to be governed by a unified spatial logic, thus reflecting the order of the real. In this respect, object physics, as part of their ‘existential density’, are a kind of invisible reality effect that exists as a root correspondence; a parameter functioning beneath the surface play of representation, yet influenced by the aesthetic standard of that representation. This is central to the construction of a ‘pseudo-reality’ and is one of the textual problems of Final Fantasy. The aesthetically photorealist figures are of a generally consistent standard as a single reality effect7, but at points the movement and inertia that govern the figures is jarringly artificial, due to the erroneous use of ‘motioncapture’ technology. The technology of motion-capture, where an actor’s movement are stored in computer and used as a ground for a digitally created mannequin, has historically been a poor reflection of the standard set by animators. Claims that the problems of motion-capture have been ‘ironed out’ have marked most stages of its development to the present day:
While the motion capture data does not look like much on its own, when combined with the impressive models created by Square USA, it will produce characters that nearly duplicate the look and movement of real human beings. Audiences may be able to tell the difference between Square’s virtual actors and the real ones used in live action motion pictures. (Kent and Cox, 2001: 140, my emphasis)
The standard of realism determined by the aesthetic is fallen short of by the movement, puncturing the reality effect and making inadvertent reference to the mode of production. The question in my mind when watching the film: ‘if they look that real, why don’t they move equally realistically?’ In short there is a stylistic contradiction, which nullifies the perceptual realism. To summarise, aside from the aesthetic pseudorealism characteristic of CGI cinema, an important reality effect is the imposition of a consistent physics. It may be derivatively photorealist as with Final Fantasy, or a more stylised principle, as with Toy Story, but as long as the illusory coherence of the diegesis is maintained, then the reality
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I would like to observe though that the character Dr. Sid is more photoreal in my opinion—presumably because the intricacies of his elderly wrinkled face deflect the perceptual scrutiny one administers to the perfect contours of Dr. Aki Ross.
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effect perseveres. Mark J. P. Wolf notes the aesthetic of Toy Story with regards to this hypothesis:
Toy Story (1995) was the first feature-length film to be completely computer-generated; all objects, scenery, lighting, and so on, existed as only digital models in the computer. While the film attained a remarkable degree of photorealism and realistic movement, it was still unmistakably stylized —no one would mistake one of Toy Story’s human characters for flesh and blood actors. (Wolf, 2000: 76)
Toy Story is plausible, precisely due to its stylised quality. Style ‘censors’ all of the elements of the diegesis and mise-en-scène in line with a single aesthetic principle. Such formal coherence translates into interpretive coherence, and a pseudorealist effect is produced. In this chapter I hope to have suggested that with regards to issues of realism in animation we need not make recourse to ontological discussions of the photographic/cinematic image. Yet in doing precisely that I have been able to expand upon some of the finer points concerning the digital image and the relationship between aesthetics and physical principles of the realist mode seen here. Further analyses, of the perceptual and linguistic aspects to realism, form the body of the next chapter.
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Chapter 2: Realism as the Language of Correspondence, and the Possible World At the end of Bazin’s discussion of the photographic image, he rhetorically concludes that: ‘On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language’ (Bazin, 1967: 16). In this section I would like to build upon this observation with more recent film discussion, which has centred on how we perceive and make intelligible interpretations of the visual language of film. In Film Theory: An Introduction, Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake introduce their section concerning realism as follows:
Although since [early cinema] few spectators have mistaken the image for reality itself, film’s extraordinary power to imitate reality has made realism a central feature of cinema aesthetics. Prejudices in favour of or against the new medium frequently centred on its unique capacity for mimetic representation, with some people maintaining that its mechanical reproduction of what was in front of the camera permitted little, if any scope for creativity or self-expression, while others held with equal fervour that the disclosure of reality was at once the privilege and vocation of the cinema. (Lapsley and Westlake, 1988: 156)
The creative and critical attitudes toward the ontology of the photographic image have been varied, but all recognise that realism, through the ability of the cinematographic image to ‘imitate’ a reality, has been central to the cinema. With regards to the conclusions of my previous chapter (on the redundancy of Bazinian realist theory to CGI), this is problematic because it states that realism is rooted in the mimesis of a known singular reality—realism is not something to be created but derivatively reconstituted, presupposing a pre-existing shared reality, the actual world, leaving no place for the animated film and its realist capacities. From this standpoint the cinematic apparatus can only synthesise (through photographic reproduction) a pre-existent realism which, combined with the illusionist devices of cinematic language, produces a reality effect. Final Fantasy, as with all other CGI feature films, is not a mimesis of reality, and yet sustains a kind of cinematic realism. The suggestion then is that, aside from issues of ontology, cinematic reality effects and their reception play a greater role than is commonly understood. The CGI feature film affirms that realism is in some respect the product of a creative and receptive ‘language’, since photographic indexicality no longer applies. 17
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Moreover, languages are culturally specific, and therefore the social context of that language is recognised to be another determinant to realism; putting rightful emphasis on the historical condition of the spectator. Realism is not just the product of a films internal logic but also its cultural context—it is both a textual operation and a reading practice. Lapsley and Westlake go on to note the importance of contextuality:
The illusion of realism in the cinema is dependant on a ‘truth claim’ which promotes an account of reality. Such an account requires contextual corroboration. ‘Thus any complete account of the functioning of realism would have to consider not just its textual practices but the social practices within which these are situated. (Lapsley and Westlake, 1988: 157)
In my initial quote, Lapsley and Westlake summarise the division of realist film theory into critics who focus on cinema’s ‘…unique capacity for mimetic representation’, the realist theorists (Bazin, Kracauer, Cavell); and secondly those for whom ‘…what was in front of the camera permitted little, if any scope for creativity or self-expression…’, who instead focused on the cinemas capability to stylistically produce a heightened reality, known as the formalist realist approach (Arnheim, Vertov, Eisenstein). In an effort to suggest a means of incorporating CGI into realist theory, Stephen Prince returns to the functions of perception in order to reduce the widening divide between a flourishing digital film practice and a turgid and unreflective realist film theory. In ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’ Prince proposes ‘…an alternate model, based on perceptual and social correspondences, of how the cinema communicates and is intelligible to viewers’ (Prince, 1996: 28). I shall explain Prince’s paper at length, since it is fundamental to my own argumentation. Much of the beginning of the paper describes the ontological basis of ‘realist’ theory and need not be rehearsed, since my initial chapter already expanded on this area. His central hypothesis goes as follows: since the digital image can construct the appearance of a reality without need for the recording of a pro-filmic object or event, it undermines realist theories that rely on the indexical properties of photography. Moreover, the formalist belief that realism was the product of stylistic grammatical arrangement of film sequences into a ‘heightened realism’, as propounded by Arnheim, Vertov, and Eisenstein falls short of accounting for the specific qualities of the
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pseudorealist CGI aesthetic and its reception. Regarding the contemporary transformation of the latter (into primarily apparatus and psychoanalytic film theory) Prince writes:
In these cases, cinematic realism is seen as an effect produced by the apparatus or by spectators positioned within the Lacanian Imaginary. Cinematic realism is viewed as a discourse coded for transparency such that the indexicality of photographic realism is replaced by a view of a “realityeffect” produced by codes and discourse…Writing about the principles of realism, Colin McCabe stresses that film is “constituted by a set of discourses which—produce a certain reality.” (Prince, 1996: 31)
And:
Where classical film theory was organised by a dichotomy between realism and formalism, contemporary film theory has preserved the dichotomy even while recasting one set of its terms. Today, indexically based notions of the cinema realism exist in tension with the semiotic view of the cinema as a discourse and of realism as one discourse among others. (Prince, 1996: 31)
Given the increasingly challenging actualities of digital imaging, in which the real and the not real blend indistinguishably, Prince proposes an approach to realism that avoids an ‘essentializing conception of the cinema stressing unique, fundamental properties and by employing, in place of indexically based notions of film realism, a correspondence-based model of cinematic representation’ (Prince, 1996: 31). The benefit of such an approach is that it does not anchor realism to a single material property, and instead demonstrates that realism ‘…builds on correspondences between selected features of the cinematic display and a viewer’s real-world visual and social experience’ (Prince, 1996: 31). Whatever the media, be it CGI, cine/photography or animation, the way in which the film puts forward cues which simulate the condition of real world experience (depth of vision, colour, luminosity, spatial awareness) is central to the creation of filmic realism. The way in which the aforementioned ‘perceptual cues’ correspond to our real world experience means that, in our experience of them in the cinema, we interpret and register their function in the construction of a collective reality effect: ‘Under such conditions, empirical evidence indicates that naïve viewers readily recognize experientially familiar pictured objects and can comprehend filmed sequences, and that continuity editing enhances such comprehension’ (Prince, 1996: 31).
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Regarding the intelligibility of figurative characters and ‘interpersonal’ scenarios, Prince notes that spectators interpret such aspects with similar correspondence-based means: ‘Socially derived assumptions about motive, intent, and proper role-based behaviour are employed when responding to real and media-based personalities and behaviour’ (Prince, 1996: 31). To expand, one could add the animated character under the classification of ‘media-based personalities’, considering the performative and vocal aspects of orthodox animation as a character-oriented audiovisual media. Prince asserts that if we think about representation as ‘…significantly, though not exclusively…’ operating through the modes of structured correspondences, we can begin to consider how the film uses these cues in the construction of its reality in various ways, without recourse to the realism versus formalism dichotomy:
Instead of asking whether a film is realistic or formalistic, we can ask about the kinds of linkages that connect the represented fictionalized reality of a given film to the visual and social coordinates of our own three-dimensional world, and this can be done for both “realist” and “fantasy” films alike. Such a focus need not reiterate indexicality as the ground of realism, since it can emphasise falsified correspondences and transformation of cues. Nor need such a focus turn everything about the cinema back into discourse, into an arbitrarily coded reorganization of experience. (Prince, 1996: 32)
In CGI reality the dominant perceptual cue, from its earliest applications in films such as Tron (Chris Wedge, 1982), is depth – the pseudorealist simulation of perspective. Bazin similarly noted depth as a realist perceptual cue, with the emergence of deep-focus lenses for live-action film (see Bazin, 1967). The primary faculty of organic binocular vision is the ability to perceive depth. Depth, as the conveyor of spatial logic and physical interrelations has been an ongoing imperative through animation history. For instance Disney’s parallax-movement depth cue (achieved using the ‘multi-plane camera’) greatly contributed to the realist illusion that characterised the studio’s work. The aesthetic revolution of the multi-plane camera was the quintessential technique to characterise realist 2D animation. With the advent of digitisation the three-dimensional production of space in CGI is central to all subsequent reality effects. In a similar way, the twenty-four frames-per-second projection speed underlines all subsequent advances in live-action cinema’s realist technological imperative. Prince writes that:
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A perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audiovisual experience of three-dimensional space. Perceptually realistic images correspond to this experience because film-makers build them to do so. Such images display a nested hierarchy of cues which organise the display of light, color, texture, movement, and sound in ways that correspond with the viewer’s own understanding of these phenomena in daily life. Perceptual realism therefore, designates a relationship between the image or film and the spectator, and it can encompass both unreal images and those which are referentially realistic. Because of this, unreal images may be referentially fictional but perceptually realistic. (Prince, 1996: 32)
Possible Worlds In the previous sections I suggested that realism in the CGI feature film could be understood as a perceptual effect, and that this was a mnemonic experiential correspondence rather than an articulation of indexicality. I described how CGI is a new visual language which has the representational capacity to produce extreme likeness without a real world referent, albeit from a mathematical linguistic foundation, rather than automatic reproduction. As I suggested earlier – in my brief prelude to the discussion of possible worlds theory – a perceptually coherent realism is dependent on artificially produced parameters, which work in accordance to produce an internally (and interpretively) plausible possible world. What do I mean by possible world? In his articulation of the idea, Buckland makes a useful summary:
Why do Spielberg’s dinosaurs hold our attention and fascination? One potential answer is that they are not simply fictional, but exist in what philosophers of modal logic call a ‘possible world’. A possible world is the modal extension of the ‘actual world’. Fiction, on the other hand, we can think of as a purely imaginary world that runs parallel to, but is autonomous from, the actual world. (Buckland, 1999: 177)
And:
…film (or, at least, the post-photographic, or digital image) has the unique capacity to present access to possible worlds, and to combine seamlessly the actual with the possible, by means of digital special effects. The specificity of film’s presentation of possible worlds therefore lies in its digital capacity. (Buckland, 1999: 182)
Buckland sees the relationship between the actual world elements and the possible world elements being weighted in favour of the actual world, for instance that the emergence of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are a ‘modal extension’ of the larger normality.
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This is due in part to the fact that he uses live-action film as evidence, minimising the fantastical possibilities in favour of more plausible instances of counterfactuality, in order to make clear that: ‘Possible world theory enables us to see the contingency of both cultural and historical events, and even natural laws such as biological evolution’ (Buckland, 1999: 181). To incorporate Prince’s thesis here, Buckland’s statement that fiction is ‘autonomous from the actual world’ need not be opposed to the possible world, since as we have learnt from Prince, even the most fictional unreal images can employ realist perceptual cues made intelligible by interpreted correspondences: ‘unreal images may be referentially fictional but perceptually realistic’. Considering the potential of CGI animation, I would like to suggest a less conservative application of ‘possible world theory’ than Buckland’s, which incorporates Prince’s suggestions towards a correspondence theory of realism, in which the possible world is a scenario constructed around correspondent iconic rather than indexical forms (a world of signifying likenesses rather than automatic reproductions). Buckland positions the possible world in philosophical history as follows:
The theory of possible worlds challenges the philosophy of logical positivism. For logical positivists, the actual world is all there is, and non-actual objects or possible states of affairs are meaningless because they do not correspond to immediate experience. It was only with the rise of modal logic (the study of possibility and necessity) that analytic philosophers broadened their horizons to analyse the possible as well as the actual. (Buckland, 1999: 180)
On reflection, a Bazinian conception of photography is logically positivist, in which knowable truths are believed to be present in the ontology of the photograph. It figures then that the undermining of the photographic truth claim by the digital loosens the positivist hold on how we conceive of a photographic representation. Questions such as ‘is that real?’ Or ‘have they altered that?’ Alongside perceptive insights such as ‘they’ve airbrushed that out’ or ‘that is done on computer’ are noteworthy reoccurrences that pronounce the speculative realm of the possible as being central to the contemporary understanding of photographic representation. Falsity vies with truth in the rhetorical claims of the contemporary digital photograph. In the past, animation has been the media to provoke analogous questions, in its role as minor effect or large scale production.
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From the perspective of possible worlds, reality is not simply made up of a fixed realm of facts open to immediate experience, but a complex structure of sub-systems, only one of which is actual. In opposition to logical positivism, the theory of possible worlds stipulates that ‘non-actual possibilities make perfectly coherent systems which can be described and qualified, imagined and intended and to which one can refer’. The notion that one can refer to the non-actual – possible – world has a significant number of consequences for theories of filmic representation… (Buckland, 1999: 181)
Buckland does not incorporate the wholly animated film into his discussion, and only addresses digital effects and composite images. For him CGI effects (for instance one of Spielberg’s dinosaurs) are subsumed into the perceptual realism of the photographic elements of the mise-en-scène. What unifies these elements (and is simultaneously the product of such a union) is the aforementioned notion of plausibility. Plausibility is the sum of many contributing factors, not least correspondence to the referent thing or concept. In animation, the desire to express a plausible, coherent worldview relates how naturalistic idealism is central to the development of most feature film animation since early Disney, specifically Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Wells comments that ‘…the ideological freedoms of animated films displaying both graphic and narrational anarchy, gave way to overtly moral confrontations within realistic scenarios’ (Wells, 1998: 23). The industrial schema of the Disney production process [fig.3], taken from R.D. Field’s The Art of Walt Disney (1947) is an excellent means of explaining the production of collective perceptual cues in the form of a singular realist illusion, the possible world. In the diagram the separate production divisions: modelling [fig.3], atmosphere, story, dialogue, music, sound effects, layout, backgrounds, inking, painting, special effects, camerawork; are shown flowing like tributaries toward the final film product in its totalised form, marked metonymically as ‘screen’. In chapter one I noted how a plausible realism is the product of creative restriction necessary to the homogenisation of the mise-en-scène. I shall refer to the standard that governs and orchestrates the harmony of these effects determined by the producer simply as ‘style’. Stephen Hunter brilliantly how internalised possible world laws, style, and perception function collectively in animation, both our realist position and the non-realist work he cites:
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It has to do with the interaction of two separate systems. The first is the internal limit of each movie world (or the lack thereof) and the second is our human perception of that reality as played against our index of the expected. When we see a cartoon – like Road Runner and the Coyote – we understand and accept the conventions. We have entered a special zone of the imagination where much of the pleasure is in seeing the immutable laws of physics broken merrily for comic effect…The idea that Coyote's response to gravity is conditional to Coyote's awareness of gravity is always funny and never perplexing. We have grown used to it, and we rapidly decode the indicators – the two-dimensionality of the figures, the stylizations of the facial and body information, the flatness of the backgrounds – and without making the decision consciously, we adjust. In fact, we adjust so fast it's not even noticeable. (Hunter, S. 2003)
To recall my point made concerning Final Fantasy in the previous chapter, when these separate reality effects are not in a diegetic harmony (I suggested when movement is not stylistically similar to the aesthetic) then the reality effect is fractured and the perceptual realism of the pseudorealist CGI film is lost. On of the central techniques used in the development of animated films is the model sheet [fig.4], the one shown here taken from the pre-production for Disney’s Pinocchio (1940). Model sheets are prepared for everything from beds to cuckoo clocks to the protagonists themselves. These then act as a referent for the animator, in order to sustain the look and feel of the thing to be animated. The model sheet is still used today in preparation for CGI feature film production, and is a staple in character animation development. With regard to the philosophy of the possible world, the model sheet ‘furnishes’ the tabula rasa of the potential world with objects, all unified by an agreed style. For instance a style bearing Swiss European influence runs throughout Pinocchio, unifying the aesthetic elements into a singular stylistic reality.8 The model sheets are only one of a number of practices shown to contribute to the production of a perceptual realism. Initial stylistic decisions that govern the whole of the film contribute to a homogenous and therefore immersive audience experience:
When he [Walt] sat in those first meetings looking at the glorious color sketches from the stylist or the inspirational artist, an image was forming in his mind, a total image of what this picture could become—how all the parts would fit together, how it would look, how it would sound, and how it would make people feel. It was a slowly developing concept, but all the parts were closely related from the start. He began to see a place that was real, inhabited by characters that were real, whether they were dwarfs living in a land of magic or a wooden puppet being chased by a monstrous whale, or tiny
8
For an extensive discussion of Disney’s relationship to European stylisation and folkloric narrative see Allan, 1999.
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fairies spreading drops of dew at night. In his imagination it was all coming to life—mythical, but believable. This was not a dull, humdrum type of reality but one that sprang from dreams: a land where one could feel at home, yet where everything was fresh and new and different. To achieve this on the screen, great attention has to be paid to locales—the size of the furniture, the props, the trees. The animals, the shadows they cast, the air they breathed, the clouds that floated over them, the rain—it all had to be right, just what you would find in such a place.’ (Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 243)
The use of sound, camera movement, voice actors etc. reflect the stylistic decisions generated in the final conceptual phase, and come together to manifest the possible world of perceptual realism. The animated film produced in this manner, with homogeneity between its (materially) disparate techniques and effects, reveals that the sense of a reality alternative to our own (a possible world) need not be anchored by the photographic reproduction of the actual world, but can through correspondence construct an internally governed realism made complete in the act of reception. As Wells remarks: ‘With each technical development, however, Disney moved further away from the plasmatic flexibility of many of the earlier Silly Symphonies, and coerced the animated form into a neo-realist practice’ (Wells, 1998: 23). The strength of the reality effect is celebrated in Disney’s ability to add pathos to and make distinct the transition from wooden puppet into ‘flesh and blood’ boy in the conclusion of Pinocchio, without reflexive textual reference to the fact that the essential nature of the boy hasn’t changed: since all characterisation remains a sequence of painted acetate cells. The collective reality effect of the film suspends our disbelief into taking the filmic realism on its own terms, as a possible world, to the extent that the existential status of Pinocchio does not refer to his being as the material condition of animation, but rather the sheer correspondence of the living. The perceptual cues governing the aesthetic change in Pinocchio are sufficient to construct a perceptual realism governed by style. Prince quotes Christopher Williams stating ‘…that viewers make strong demands for reference from motion pictures, but in ways that simultaneously accommodate style and creativity: “We need films to be about life in one way or another, but allow them latitude (sic) in how they meet this need.”’ (Prince, 1996: 35). In this chapter I hope to have recognised style as a powerful element in the production of perceptual realism, to the extent that the filmic reality appear governed in ways analogous to a plausible realm, or possible world. This effect has been named the
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‘illusion of life’ in a Disney context: it is discussed at great length by animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in their canonical Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (1981). The next chapter will further discuss this notion, with an eye to further defining CGI feature film and by extension Final Fantasy.
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Figure 1: Dr Aki Ross, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Figure 2: A digital reproduction, revealing pixels
Figure 3. Disney’s industrialised production schema
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Figure 4. a final model sheet for Pinocchio
Figure 5. promotional posters: Europe and America (left) and Asia (right), Toy Story
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Figure 6. Yuna from Final Fantasy X
Figure 7. Squall from Final Fantasy VIII
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Chapter 3: Technological Determinism, Idealism, Genre Final Fantasy exemplifies the photorealist imperative still present in the plastic arts. Bazin’s belief that photography has freed painting from the struggle for likeness may have had some degree of truth in relation to the art practice of his historical context, but evidentially we see that in the last two decades pseudorealist aesthetics have resurfaced in old and new media. Photorealism has been an ongoing imperative within CGI practice alongside other, less historically continuous, agendas. I use the phrase ‘historically continuous’ to describe the emergence of photorealist CGI characters because, as Brian Winston has noted, the accurate representation of the human figure is exemplary of the ‘addiction to realism’ in western culture (Winston, 1996: 23). The development of CGI practices is characterised by a highly technological language, of which the layman might know virtually nothing. The vocabulary or ‘texture mapping’, ‘gouraud shading’, ‘collision detection’, ‘light sourcing’, ‘splines’, ‘boolean intersection’, ‘nurbs’, ‘ray tracing’, ‘particle engines’ and so on is presently inaccessible to those not conversant in the material technicalities of CGI software. This exclusive language suggests that the one of the reasons CGI animation might take photorealism as its ideal is that it is a technologically determinist media: since such an imperative is held by producers and not consumers, in this case the audience. Technological determinism is the notion that technologists, those central to the invention and production of new technologies, create new artefacts which then in turn shape the society that they are incorporated into. The common person is passively subject to the shaping force of new technologies, which are necessarily adjusted to and accepted. However, from the outset I would like to oppose this position, in accordance with the work of Winston in Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (1996), who writes: ‘Holding a technologically determinist view is, I would claim, like believing that it is the movement of the leaves on the trees that drives the wind’ (Winston, 1996: 2). Winston discusses technologies as being dependent on, what Fernand Braudel refers to as, ‘accelerators’ and ‘breaks’.
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To explain, one could see the idealism that is central to the CGI industry as an accelerator. By this I mean that the desire to achieve a plausible likeness of the human figure drives the innovations and developments of the industry. Final Fantasy is certainly a film example of the power of technologist’s ‘accelerators’ to shape a textual product of the CGI feature film industry. As a counter to the determinism of the accelerator is the concept of the ‘brake’. The brake is the force that inhibits the emergence and success of technological innovation. The idea of an accepting market (one ready for such innovation) is the clearest example of this. Winston gives the example of the emergence of cinema, posing the question of why the cinema failed to emerge complete earlier than it had, given that the technologies to do so were in place. Metz’s second determinant to plausibility, in which the proposed requires the affirmation of the prior discourse to become plausible, is equivalent to the function of the ‘brake’. I shall reflect on the notion of accelerators and breaks in my closing analysis of Final Fantasy in chapter four. However, for now I shall reflect on the realist idealism in animation history, a trope in which extensive work was made to naturalise the ‘coherent text’ into a market that had been dominated by the incoherent, uncanny and the surreal, up until 1932. I shall talk at length about the idealist practices that were introduced by Disney, and show how they underpin the contemporary North American CGI feature film, hereafter referred to as the pseudorealist film genre. Disney, historically, was the quintessential ‘break remover’, through ingenious use of the emerging technologies of sound and colour in narratives which diegetically naturalised the new amongst the perceptual cues of established conventions (see Neupert, 1994). As I previously noted, it was Disney who prompted animation’s drive towards greater realism. Wells writes:
Even though Disney dealt with what was a predominantly abstract, non-realist form, he insisted on verisimilitude in his characters, contexts and narratives. He wanted animated figures to move like real figures and be informed by plausible motivation. As Disney’s animators undertook programmes of training in the skills and techniques of fine art in the constant drive towards ever greater notions of realism. (Wells, 1998: 23)
I would like to draw attention to the rhetorical tone of the last sentence: ‘…the constant drive towards ever greater notions of realism.’ This may seem somewhat hyperbolic on the part of Wells, yet this statement can be corroborated by the thoughts
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and reflections of the Disney animators themselves. Animators Thomas and Johnston noted how Disney sought to transcend the cartoon world from which his art had emerged. In what follows I feel it necessary to reflect at length on the importance of the realist Disney practice in the history of animation aesthetics.
In the mid-thirties he wrote a memo, “The animation has made a definitive advance forward which, in my estimation, is close to 100% over what it was a year and a half ago. I know that eventually we are going to attain a degree of perfection never before thought possible. It proves to me that the time we have spent studying, trying to analyse our problems, and systematizing ourselves, is bearing fruit. The hit-and-miss is going.” (Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 90)
To reiterate, what made Disney animation distinct from its competitors was its commitment to the genesis of a realist animation practice. Janet Wasko has observed that it was in the early thirties with the release of the Silly Symphony cartoon Flowers and Trees (1932) that we see the first clear incarnation of what would go on to become Disney’s trademark aesthetic and moral leitmotif (Wasko, 2001: 111). In 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released, and was representative of the collective efforts made towards a realist animation practice during the production of the Silly Symphonies series of shorts and thereafter. Thomas and Johnston write:
[On the production of Snow White:] There would be need for drawings with great appeal, characters with life and believability, and personalities that could hold an audience for well over an hour. Gags, funny actions, and visual tricks would not do it. If the audience were to be drawn into this film, this world of fantasy would have to be a real world with real things. This would not be a cartoon. It would be “theatre,” and Walt would have to have men leading the way who could make it all come true. (Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 90)
The motivation then for the development of Walt Disney’s vision was an idealist desire to capitalise on the animated film’s potential for realism. Paul Wells has noted that the Disney standard of realism can be taken as a level against which to assess the realist dimensions of other animated films. With this I do not entirely agree, since the Disney standard of realism is primarily aesthetic and cannot stand for a multidimensional realist elements, most notably the political and the documentary, regarding their ‘illusion of life’ principles. However, Wells does provide a useful series of criteria with which to characterise the realist film, and by extension the pseudorealist genre of CGI film:
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The design, context and action within the hyper-realist animated film approximates with, and corresponds to the design, context and action within the live-action film’s representation of reality…The characters, objects and environment within the hyper-realist animated film are subject to the conventional physical laws of the ‘real’ world…The ‘sound’ deployed in the hyper-realist animated film will demonstrate diegetic appropriateness and correspond directly to the context from which it emerges (e.g. a person, object or place must be represented by the sound it actually makes at the moment of utterance, at the appropriate volume etc.)…the construction, movement and behavioural tendencies of ‘the body’ in the hyper-realist animated film will correspond to the orthodox physical aspects of human beings and creatures in the real world. (Wells, 1998: 25–26)
Many of Wells’ points have been covered in the previous chapters and deal with the construction of the text in accordance with a ‘hyper-real’ (Wells refers to Umberto Eco’s use of the term) aesthetic. I would like to briefly expand to incorporate the notion of perceptual realism also being the creation of the audience member, in their interpretive response to perceptual cues. The idea of the audience member’s imagination being central to the production of realism in animation is recognised by Thomas and Johnston, whom reflect how the early radio shows inspired the Disney animators:
In the great days of radio, there were many programs presented in such a special, intimate way that they drew the listening audience into their stories completely. The mystery programs were particularly good at this, using voices that reached out to you—and good sound effects: heavy breathing up close to the microphone, echoing footsteps, a creaky door; you were held spellbound. The broadcasts were projected through symbols into your imagination, and you made the situation real. It was not the actor’s emotions you were sensing anymore. They were your emotions. (Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 19)
And:
Fortunately, animation works in the same way. It is capable of getting inside the head of its audiences, into their imaginations. The audiences will make our little cartoon character sad—actually, far sadder than we could ever draw him—because in their minds that character is real. He lives in their imaginations. Once the audience has become involved with your characters and your story, almost anything is possible. (Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 19)
Disney capitalised on the audience response to pathological characters in order to sustain interest in his characters in feature length productions. The emergence of the animated feature film in the Disney style is less a product of pressure to make animation like liveaction, and more a symptom of the economic dire-straits the Disney Studios found themselves in the late 1930s. Thomas and Johnston write:
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Walt has a different answer to this predicament [the lack of capital], according to Dave Hand: “If we put 10 of these 700 foot shorts together, we’ve got us a feature—7000 feet. Now they won’t pay us but 15 thousand for a short, but for ten on these, that would be 150,000, and surely we can get more than that for a feature. Dave does not remember if Roy [Disney] fainted at that bit of financial wizardry or not. But he does remember his own feelings: “there was no other way that he [Walt] could stay in business. He would not sit still and make cartoons at 15 thousand dollars.” (Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 90)
In the contemporary box office, retro-classical Disney films such as Treasure Planet (2003) struggle to gain a fraction of the earnings of the years big Pixar release, most recently Finding Nemo (2003). The moralistic pathos of many Disney features is now thought of as a dated and clumsy relic by many, especially when compared to the savvy attentiveness and streetwise humour of the CGI feature film culture (omitting Disney’s mediocre Dinosaur (2000)) and network cartoon channels. Currently, Disney 2D animation struggles to compete with 3D CGI film and the growing Japanese anime market in America and Europe.9 The ‘Pseudorealist’ Animation Genre In this section I would like to briefly review the development of the genre of pseudorealist film, in order to contextualise Final Fantasy, and note the emergent conventions of this group of films. As I suggested in my introduction, the North American CGI feature film, now referred to as the pseudorealist film, can be thought of as a genre, since it displays certain recurrent conventions and tropes. I seek to broadly define what those tropes are, and further examine how Final Fantasy relates to them. The genre dates from the mid-nineties to the present day. In response to the question of the necessity of genre criticism I agree with Moszkowicz, who writes that ‘…the significance of genres within visual practice begins to emerge as more crucial to the history of CGI than some commentators would like to suppose’ (Moszkowicz, 2002: 301–302). Though genre criticism ‘originally served to displace the debate surrounding the earlier auteur theory’ (Hayward, 2000: 166) it is through a brief discussion of an ‘auteur’ that I can begin to expand upon the generic qualities of the CGI feature film.
9
Disney recently became the distributor of the immensely successful Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli production house, presumably in an effort to adapt to the changing consumer climate.
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Before Toy Story (1995) John Lasseter had directed a small number of animated shorts: Luxo Jr. (1987), Red’s Dream (1987), Tin Toy (1988) and Knick Knack (1989). His trademark aesthetic capitalises on the innate properties of the computer generated form, with strong geometries and graphic three-dimensionality. Lasseter’s Pixar animation studios, creators of Toy Story and subsequently Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter and Lee Unkrich, 1999), Bug’s Life (John Lasster, 1998), Monster’s Inc. (Pete Docter, 2001) and Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003), have attained notoriety for providing intellectually mature films which parody both film and animation culture, whilst operating within a ‘children’s film’ remit. Playing to the success of Pixar studio’s ‘tried-and-tested’ formula (which I posit as a continuation of the prior Disney studio practice), rivals Dreamworks released Antz (Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson, 1998) and then later Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jonson, 2001), with Fox subsidiary Blue Sky releasing Ice Age (Chris Wedge, 2002). Paramount/Nickelodeon also entered the genre with the TV spin-off Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (John A. Davis, 2001). Though the shorts of John Lasseter count as significant antecedents of the genre, in Toy Story we find thematic and formal elements which are common to all the subsequent films: comedy, a homogenous style, a ‘family’ of characters, a narrative involving journey, a child audience orientation, and reflexive referencing to live-action film and previous animation cultures (the generic/nostalgic cartoon-series featuring Woody in Toy Story 2 for instance). Toy Story also marked the emergence of the genre since it was the first feature-length CGI animation. It is clear that Final Fantasy is at the margins of the genre. Most explicitly, the pseudorealist CGI genre recalls the aesthetic of the cartoon in its characters via stylised realism, whereas Final Fantasy is photorealistic. There are however significant reasons why Final Fantasy should be incorporated into the pseudorealist genre, albeit at its margins. The pseudorealist film expands upon the conventions of the cartoon, whereas Final Fantasy has more similarities with the videogame, action sci-fi cinema of the 1980s and Japanese animé. Wells has noted the connection between Lasseter’s early work and the animation of Tex Avery: ‘While computer animation clearly offers another visual language in which comic devices may be created, it is, ironically, an ex-Disney animator
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working in the style of a Warner Bros cartoon who has achieved a great deal through its use’ (Wells, 1998: 180). I offer a different perspective to Wells, and put forward that Pixar films and their imitators are more consistently similar to the Disney tradition, a point which I shall expand upon throughout this section. Aside from John Lasseter’s early Disney career which undoubtedly affects the aesthetic of his work, the success of Pixar – and its subsequent hegemonic status in the pseudorealist genre – can be related to its formal/aesthetic and thematic conventions drawn from Warner Bros and Disney animation, and the way that it simultaneously fulfils and develops the mass-cultural conception of the cartoon. ‘Lasseter thus combines the characterisation and comic structure of the cartoon form with the multiplicity of possibilities in the construction of material contexts made available by computer animation’ (Wells, 1998: 180). The pseudorealist film, by claiming continuity with the styling of earlier North American animation, refers to itself—as both similar to and different from its cel-painted predecessors. This self-reflexivity relates, in part, to the accumulation of capital and the need to ensure a continuity of attendance: as animation audiences expand from a 2D conception of animation and into a 3D one. As Neupert (quoting Metz) had said previously, the plausible requires the affirmation of the prior discourse: in this regard the stylised realism of Pixar and the pseudorealist films are the inheritors of Disney’s ‘illusion of life’ legacy’. Since roughly the mid-thirties, the development of orthodox animation had been set by two distinct issues; firstly to reduce the expense of the industrialised creative process (where the division of labour made serial animation viable), and secondly the increasing need to fulfil, develop and maintain the shifting consumer expectation of what an animated image was—dually essential to the generation of a steady flow of capital. The domination of the market by the Hollywood animated shorts – Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and so on – along with little else which presented varied applications of animation available for popular consumption – meant that the term ‘animation’ actually came to signify one incarnation, that of the Hollywood animated cartoon, in the popular imagination. Economic success for an animation studio was (and is still) reliant on the fulfilment of consumer expectation, consequently leading to the generic visual styles of
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MGM, Warner and Disney; this is most clearly expressed and embodied through their respective canonical ‘families’ or ‘stables’ of characters. The CGI feature film genre plays to (and thus maintains) this popular conception, whilst progressing its aesthetic. To summarise, in the radical shift of aesthetic style that came with the introduction of the fully three dimensional digital image, John Lasseter (and subsequent contemporary North American CGI practitioners) drew upon the generic history of western orthodox animation to ensure the economic success and eventual ‘naturalisation’ of the new visual form. This meant that the ‘streetwise’ characterisation of Warner and MGM combined with the more broadly influential character ideology of Disney, in which characters were no longer subject to ‘infinite manipulation’ but were iconic figures operating within a reality that was an animated ‘illusion of [real] life’. Even the presence of human figures in these newly found ‘real-world’ spaces were mediations of the real; caricatures which did not break the perceptual reality effect of the fictional world by too great a correspondence to photographic representation. Moszkowicz quotes Bob Dormon, saying that (concerning Toy Story 2) ‘…John Lasseter of Pixar stressed that the idea wasn’t to create perfectly realistic humans. Instead the cartoon flavour is retained but the humans appear more realistic’ (Moszkowicz, 2002: 305). On Caricature The stylised realism of the pseudorealist genre refers simultaneously to the iconic modes of the cartoon and the objective physicality of the three dimensional ‘real’. A cartoon with correspondent (yet stylised) reference to an existing real is a caricature. I shall briefly expand on the notion of caricature, since it is central to the dialogue between animation and realism, in the pseudorealist genre. Moreover, perhaps the absence of caricature in Final Fantasy, a film touted as animation, ran contrary to the popular conception and expectation of animation. Thomas and Johnston cite character/caricature among the other faculties of animated film production:
Shortly after The Rescuers was released in 1977, a friend remarked, “I love those characters! I think they are probably the greatest Disney has ever done.” Undeniably the animation of the characters is what attracts the audience, but many other elements play a vital role in a successful picture: the colors, the beauty, the visual effects, the locales, and the music. The creation of our
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fantasy worlds took as much dedication and knowledge in the other departments as it did in the animation, and it occupied much of Walt’s interest as well. (Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 243)
A caricature is a form of representation, and can also be a stereotype, though not always. It is not an image produced by automatic means like photography, but is dependant on the creative interpretation of an artist. A caricature is a correspondently idealised expression of the individual or object represented; it is a depiction in which the distinguishing characteristics are exaggerated. In addition, this exaggeration is enhanced by degrees of de-emphasis. The caricature is dependant on some degree of correspondence, whereas the pure cartoon need not maintain such a connection, hence a caricature is both a perceptual cue in itself and a referential abstraction. Generally, pseudorealism can therefore be described as reality in caricature. The correspondent motifs found in a caricature – the rabbit ears, teeth and tail of Bugs Bunny for example – ‘anchor’ the character, and are integral to the intelligibility of the design. These motifs are perceptual cues which affirm the connection to the caricatured referent. Bugs is a representational conception of a rabbit, a visual configuration that (in its totality) is nothing like a rabbit, but which employs perceptual cues to anchor its correspondence to the referent animal. Further, through his wise cracking vernacular and playful use of his carrot-cigar Bugs is also a parody of Groucho Marx. This is where animated caricature transcends still caricature, the performative, ‘animate’ dimension allows for a greater complexity of exaggeration, and relates the multidimensional ‘hierarchy of perceptual cues’ of the exaggerated (e.g. simultaneously both carrot and cigar). McCloud writes:
By deemphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favour of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts…but in emphasizing the concepts of objects over their physical appearance, much has to be omitted. If an artist wants to portray the beauty and complexity of the physical world realism of some sort is going to play a part. (McCloud, 1993: 41)
When reading caricature the analysis is, as Stephen Hunter noted, ‘not even noticable’, or rather intuitive. The affective significance of colour, line, tone, shape, and juxtaposition etc. are fundamental. This is the case for any still-image cartoon; however in animated caricature we must also add the affective power of the kinetic – the 38
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movement, dynamism, agility, and ‘squash-and-stretch’ predisposition etc. of the character or object. In sum, caricature is an expressionist device, where formal attributes of the image construction carry emotional and tonal resonances. In accordance with Prince’s correspondence theory of realism noted previously, caricature need not be read solely in a formalist manner: our understanding of the ‘meaning’ or communicative intentionality behind a caricature is comprehended immediately, since the caricature-asdevice is the product of a clear mutual intelligibility between creator and spectator, the terms of which are symptomatic of its conventionality. The culturally specific perceptual cues that make distinct the character (e.g. as good or bad) are learnt, central to the historical condition of the spectator. Thus Bugs Bunny, as sign, signifies differently depending on the cultural context of his reception. Would the subtleties his 1950s wisecracking leitmotifs be taken as such in a 1980s rerun on Japanese television? Cultural specificity is the often-undermined yet fundamental issue in questions of signification and representation. A pseudorealist possible world is undoubtedly complex and, to paraphrase McCloud, since one of its primary functions is to simulate a sense of 3D physicality, then it is inextricably set into a dialogue with notions of the real. The caricature exists, like animation, in the realm of the iconic sign10: ‘The iconic sign represents its object by means of similarity and resemblance; the relationship between sign and interpretant is mainly one of likeness, as in the case of portraits, diagrams, statues…[caricature and the animated film in general]’ (Stam et al, 1992: 5). A perceptual realism in animation (manifest in the mind of the audience as a sense of immersion in which the diegesis in intelligible on its own terms) is the product of an accumulation of inter-legitimated (stylised) iconic signs, or as Prince notes perceptual cues. Caricature is historically central to the vocabulary of orthodox animation, as a mode of representation. It is primarily through a realist approach to the pathology and corporeality of caricatured characters that the modern pseudorealist film is continuous with the Disney film tradition.
10
To use Charles S. Peirce’s original definition, the live-action film would signify through the ‘indexical sign’ of the photographic image. Of course with CGI composites in contemporary cinema, the indexical and iconic sign are co-present and often indistinguishable.
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The pseudorealist genre builds upon the perceptual cues familiar to spectators versed in popular feature film animation, meaning that the genre is itself continuous with a history of the form. Conclusively, realism in animation is not a supposed product of an index, vis-à-vis Bazin, but rather a product of the historical condition of spectatorship paired with the cognitive processes of perception and sense-making. Though the naturalism and verisimilitude of the genre undoubtedly pertain to a Disney heritage, the lyrical dynamism and exaggeration are derived from Warner Bros animators Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. This dual paternity is expressed most clearly in Toy Story and Toy Story 2, when Buzz and Woody both lose an arm. As with the MGM and Warner cartoons, characters bodies are often blown apart, dissected, corrupted—in this regard the structural integrity of the body is not sacred. However in Disney, the harmonious totality of the body is central to the naturalism of the image—as a reality effect. Paul Wells writes how, apart from Disney, the popular animated short cares little for the integrity of the body:
Orthodox and developmental animation, in largely engaging with the figurative, are perpetually concerned with construction and symbolic expression of the body yet, ironically, it is in the design or narrational use of the body that most orthodox or developmental animation moves towards the condition of the experimental. The figurative aspects of the body substantially collapse into the abstract. Bodies merely become forms subject to manipulation, exaggeration and reconfiguration. (Wells, 1998: 188)
In the original Toy Story Buzz attempts to fly (whilst still unaware of his toy status) and falls, his arm coming off as he crashes into the ground. In the Toy Story 2, Woody’s arm is initially damaged as Andy plays with him, and then later comes off completely as he accidentally catches his stitching. Though Woody nor Buzz express any great alarm at the loss of their arms (akin to the characters in the surreal Avery/Jones animation) their comrades are greatly alarmed, with Mr. Potato Head exclaiming ‘Murderer!’ and Hamm muttering ‘That’s disgusting!’ at the sight of Woody holding Buzz’s arm aloft. This horror of bodily mutilation recalls the relationship to the body held by the Disney trend. Whilst Buzz’s/Woody’s indifference suggests the indestructibility of the MGM/Warner animate tradition, the other character’s response to this suggests that the toy population of Toy Story react to the disembodied arm as though they had been raised on Disney animation, rather than being 40
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animation themselves. However, they are not mistaken as to their role as toys (excluding Buzz initially), compounded by Woody’s famous exclamation to Buzz: ‘You are a Toy! You are a child’s plaything! You’re just an action figure!’ Furthermore, the villainous Sid creates an entire clan of deconstructed and wrongly reconstituted ‘freak’ toys which Woody and Buzz initially see as monsters. Contextually, since the majority of North American feature animation is touched by the hegemonic Disney relationship to the body, it is understandable to say that the audience come to the text with a reactionary view analogous to that held by the aforementioned characters. While we take pleasure in the Anvil and decapitation jokes central to the MGM/Warner films, and read such referential moments in Toy Story as such (for instance the pleasure of Sid’s dog hyperactively mauling the green spaceman won from ‘Pizza Planet’) the inherent naturalism of the style pertaining to a Disney heritage compound the reading of such moments with a sense of horror—a consequence of the ideologically realist values placed upon the body by the diegesis. When the freak toys repair Buzz’s lost arm, which Woody wrongly perceives to be a moment of cannibalism, only then are they understood to be victims of Sid’s childhood malpractice. The characters of Toy Story rehearse, albeit explicitly, the pathological/corporeal Disney emphasis on mortality, even when the parameters of their fictional realm endow them with immortality. More importantly they do not reflect the films essential status as animation. This kind of reflexivity refers to the animation within a film context, where the animated characters hold actor status, as performers with agency. This is made abundantly clear in the credit sequence of all Pixar films, where the characters are shown in ‘hilarious outtakes’, which refer to the construction of the animated film as though it were a studio based film and not entirely pro-filmic in-computer work. The films efface their material nature as animation, but do not chose to defer to an everyday ‘real’ world reality, but instead recall the situation of live-action film production, as a kind comedic realist perceptual cue. The ‘real’ that is recalled is a filmic reality or ‘lens culture’ which I shall expand upon in chapter four.
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Real Bodies, Still Lives In the previous section I noted how the body is an important characteristic in the pseudorealist genre. Here I would like to expand on that notion, with regard to Final Fantasy, which does not fit the conventions of the genre—instead operating at its idealist limits: the photoreal human figure. Final Fantasy begins with the image of a dreamscape. The land is barren and otherworldly: a red planet similar to images of Mars, or perhaps old sci-fi comics. This is not the earth we know, and it is not lifeless: in the virtual space is a virtual figure, the protagonist Dr. Aki Ross. Before we see her in full figure we see a close up of her right eye. This shot is representative of a kind of visual rhetorical strategy that runs throughout the film, and can be interpreted in many ways. Final Fantasy, an animated feature film, borrows significantly from the visual grammar of the live-action film. Indeed, though Moszkowicz sees the dialogue between CGI feature film and live-action cinema as a comparatively recent occurrence, animation in general has had such a relationship since its inception. Giannalberto Bendazzi writes:
Hollywood cinema influenced cartoons in still another way, by becoming itself a source of inspiration – in satire. Several animated shorts were parodies of famous films, others hosted the caricatures of current stars, and still others comically hinted at the current events in the world of the cinema. In some cases, animation even referred to its own internal situations; one of Frank Tashlin’s characters, for instance, ate spinach saying that if it was good for Popeye, it should work for him too. (Bendazzi, 1994: 84)
Realistic animation character designs with minimal caricature aim toward an emulation of live-action. Photorealistic human characters like Dr. Aki Ross have an important precedent in traditional animation. In the early forties the Fleischer studio made the Superman animated series (1941–43), adapted from the comics of the period (which were notably realistic detective stories). The aesthetic of the comic strip circa 1940 did not translate successfully into animation, since the figures in comic book form were only mildly caricatured, and the squareness of the characters made them harder to animate. To rotate the angular forms of the comic posed a significant challenge for
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Fleischer’s animators who were used to bendy, cylindrical characters epitomised by Betty Boop and Popeye. Transitional success was not solely hinged on the limits of the medium, since its popular reception regarding consumer expectations was fundamental to the survival of post-depression (and then subsequently wartime) studios. The generic hallmarks of the Hollywood animated shorts that were produced in the period – metamorphosis, transformation, surrealism, wholly fictional worlds – were not applicable to the Fleischer Superman translation, which sought to maintain the realist veracity of the original strip. In the Fleischer’s Superman, ‘Even though the comic strip was concerned with a fantasy character, the stories were set in a real world populated by human beings, and little emphasis was put on humour’ (Wells, 1998: 193), in much the same way as Final Fantasy. The comparably high levels of realism are what makes the forties Superman’s aesthetic unique, in the context of the popular cartoon films of the period. As I will reiterate in my later discussion of Final Fantasy, the critical reception of Superman is a telling reminder of the importance of taxonomical structures such as genre to box office and critical success; in the case of both films some scholars have not appreciated their rogue relationship to the popular form. Bendazzi notes that ‘The evolution of the American comic strips into adventure themes, with non-caricatured characters such as Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, did not influence animators, with the exception of an insignificant rendition of Superman by the Fleischer brothers’ (Bendazzi, 1994: 84, my emphasis). Of course, there was nothing central to animation – as a moving image medium – which dictated that comic book style was not viable. Rather, the consumer did not appreciate the differing aesthetic, having learnt to define animation by the cartoon standards of Disney, Warner Brothers, MGM and earlier Fleischer work. To reiterate my earlier point, Superman was also unpopular with the animators who found the realistic, angular characters hard to animate, though evidently not impossible. To create as realistic a movement as possible, the Fleischer’s invented the technique of rotoscoping, where a live-action recorded performance is traced to achieve a realistic movement. Disney used this technique far more conspicuously in its early features, most notably Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The more kinetically apparent quality of rotoscoping in Disney was due to the juxtaposition of cartoony characters
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(Dwarfs) and ‘real body’ caricature (Snow White).11 The elegant, ghostly movement of rotoscoping contributed to the reading of Snow White as affectively distinct from the Dwarfs. Likewise the elegance of the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio stems from her rotoscoped origins. Of course, this technique has direct correspondences with motion-capture technology (of the kind used in Final Fantasy), which often garners similar criticism to that originally thrown at rotoscoping. It is often labels in practical circles as quintessentially a counter-creative technique, a ‘cheap trick’ which falls short of the creative enterprise and visual splendour of animation. As Moszkowicz notes, it has an indexical dimension. The recognition of this is problematic in the creation of an immersive reality effect, since it refers to the mode of production. The objective world of indexed movement filters through and nullifies the subjective, iconic, perceptual realism of the animated world. Paradoxically, though it heightens the kinetically realist movement, it undermines the overall perceptual realism of the animated world. Dr. Aki Ross, Virtual Idol The close-up of Aki’s eye can be taken as part of an emphasised reverse shot: the extremity of the close-up suggests the great scrutiny with which Aki examines the alien landscape. This analysis stands, since grammatically the shot engages Aki in an act of looking. However, the shot holds greater significance in consideration of the context of CGI effects and film production. In the introduction I quoted director Hironobu Sakaguchi who spoke of the difficulties of making a ‘hyperreal’ synthetic actor. The minute detail, slight musculature of the eyelid, eyelashes, aqueous surface, and intricate iris are all a testament to the great achievements toward a photorealist synthetic representation. Its rhetorical function, right at the beginning of the film, is to pronounce technological achievement. The construction of a virtual performer is relatively old endeavour, given that in the mid-eighties studios were investing in development programmes with this agenda in
11
A fascinating character in this respect is the Queen in Snow White, who switches between the states of realist caricature and cartoony crone. Her narrative function and characteristics are anchored by the semiotic differences between the rotoscoped smoothness of the queen figure, and the lumbering hobble of the cartoony crone she periodically becomes.
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mind. A credible synthetic human figure has come to embody the pinnacle of CGI practice. Since the earliest three-dimensional images were generated the persistent image of the human body has been a common denominator in the varied strands of contemporaneous development ‘packages’.12 In ‘The cyberstar: digital pleasures and the end of the unconscious’ (2000) Barbara Creed speculates on the emergence and consequence of the digital performer or ‘virtual idol’, of which Dr. Aki Ross in Final Fantasy is the prime example. Though her article orients toward the psychoanalytic angle characteristic of her other work, she does make useful observations concerning the technological imperatives of virtual actors, noting that ‘These are not actors playing a part: rather they are what is known as in the industry as ‘synthespians’, ‘cyberstars’, or ‘vactors’ (virtual actors) enacting the parts of extras historically played by real actors’ (Creed, 2000: 79). Creed’s article was written just prior to the release of Final Fantasy, so is it for me to make the addition that the cyberstar now occupies not only the role of ‘extra’ but of ‘star’. Creed observes that the absence of the pro-filmic event has larger consequences than previously mentioned, notably that ‘film has been freed from its dependence on history and on the physical world…’ and further that: ‘A digitised film star is a studio’s dream: capable of performing any task, continuously available, cost effective – and no scandals, unless, of course, the digital star is given off screen life in order to keep alive other areas of the industry such as fan magazines, merchandising and promotions’ (Creed, 2000: 80). In a later more suspicious tone Creed speculates on the viability of the virtual idol being capable of giving a performance that would match that of an actor, ‘nuanced’, and ‘intuitive’. In accordance with the historical sidelining of the animated film in discourses in film studies, Creed seems somewhat neglecting of the eighty year tradition of realist animation practice which has offered palpable, affecting and emotional character performances, the credibility of which is evident in the economic success of the Disney and Pixar studios for example. Should we recall Prince’s thoughts on the correspondence means of interpreting animated character, Creed’s speculation on the potential of synthetic actors is a misnomer, since we would find in the character those
12
This refers to CGI software; including Maya™, 3D Studio Max™, Rhino™, Softimage 3D™, Lightwave 3D™ etc.
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cues which would allow us to connect our socio-historical interpretations to them. Hypothetically this is true, and it is certainly true of the sub-tradition of stylised realism, to which Toy Story and Monster’s Inc., and historically all prior feature animation belongs. However, concerning photorealism, the graphic imperative to which Final Fantasy belongs (the film most applicable to Creed’s analysis) a correspondence theory of identification is problematic. Why might an audience have problems identifying with the characters of Final Fantasy? I think that the answer lies with the relationship between plausibility and style that I had put forwards previously. To review, I noted that the realism of the CGI animated feature film – which I named the pseudorealist film genre – is the product of the production of and reception of perceptual cues relating to our understanding of the ‘real’. I noted that what makes these cues plausible as signifying a connection to realism is style, which uniformly censors all such cues so that they appear governed by a unified filmic logic. I also noted that the plausible requires affirmation by the previous discourse. In my next chapter I shall attempt to account for Final Fantasy specific to the work of the previous chapters, both in its failures as a realist film and at the box office, and its relation to the cultural specificity of Japan and America.
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Chapter 4: Pseudorealism: From Cultural Contexts to Filmic Textuality In this section I shall discuss how the pseudorealist film relates to existing notions of cultural specificity, which is most clearly expressed in film studies through the concept of national cinema (see Higson, 1988). Further I would like to suggest that a globalised rather than localised conception of the animated form has lead to the poor reception of Final Fantasy. Cultural difference is often sidelined by the dominance of the more immediate technological debate surrounding CGI, and the hegemonic discourses of globalisation. Yet as I have shown, the CGI feature film as a genre is highly culturally specific, albeit specific to the hegemony of the North American animated cartoon tradition. As a speculative case study, we can compare the European and North American promotional poster with that of South East Asia [fig.5]. When comparing the faces of Woody we see that, in the western left-hand image, the character looks speculatively up toward Buzz Lightyear, whereas in the Asian poster Woody is engaged in the same fantasy of flight as Buzz, as told through their equivalent thrilled expressions. Woody is undoubtedly the focal protagonist character of both Toy Story and its sequel. It is through his tribulations that we engage the narrative in both counts. Specifically, through the caricatural use of his face we are given the perceptual cue through which to read the scenario—the poster/cover design being metonymic of the inter-character relation of the diegetic whole (as specifically culturally promoted). Woody is representative of a core ‘Americanism’: a heterosexual cowboy and elected leader of the Andy’s room toy community. He is indicative of the ideology of the hegemonic idealised spectator. Woody is aware of the situations as they unfold (as bearer of insight/knowledge) aligning him with the position of the spectator, as compared to the deluded ‘Don Quixote’ character of Buzz. Therefore, analysing the face of Woody in the two promotional posters implicates a certain reading of the audience sensibility of east and west. The eastern face of Woody is enthusiastic, immersive, and non-critical – and engaged in an act of active fantasy in which the prospective spectator is invited to join. The western face is directly critical,
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speculative, untrusting, and fearful – though the spectator is still invited to align with this position through the perceptual cue of the ambiguously raised eyebrow. The analysis of these posters, though admittedly speculative and reductive, acts as a good ground to address to cultural difference implicit to the reception of film and animation. In the West, animation is often not criticised in terms of its filmic qualities, but is criticised instead in an internalised reference to animation history and convention—a principle arguably brought about by the diametrically opposed studios at various points in animation history. In sum, it is animation as animate, not as filmic. Moreover, the animated film is judged directly on the grounds of its connection to the hegemony of the qualitative standards of Disney (as Wells asserted) or the widespread form of the cartoon. Divergences away from this central praxis are often highly criticised in the popular media. I can only conclude that the reason for this is that the western conception of animation is that, as a whole, animation is a genre in itself. In western popular conceptions animation is a subgenre of film, within which the historical hegemony of Disney and the cartoon has become synonymous with the definition of animation. Disney cartooning and its derivatives are animation, irrespective of arthouse or underground alternative practices. However, this has been changing over the past 20 years, with the emergence of popular ‘rebel’ animators such as Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead), Matt Groening (The Simpsons) and John Kricfalusi (Ren and Stimpy). All are characterised by a ‘postmodern’ antithetical relation to the hegemonic practices of the mid-thirties to the midnineties. Regarding the development of anti-Disney television animation by HannaBarbera, Paul Wells writes:
The deliberate interrogation into the possibilities of the form beyond its application in the Disneypatented full animation style had characterized many approaches in the US and elsewhere, in attempting work which offered a model of “difference” aesthetically, and most importantly, ideologically, from that if the Disney canon. The Disney aesthetic carried with it clear connotations of “state-of-the-art” achievement that was seemingly impassable, and which was, and remains, embedded in the popular memory as one of the key illustrations of a conflation of self-evident artistry with a populist, folk, quasi-Republican, middle-American sensibility. (Wells, 2003: 18)
As the modern marker of state-of the-art animation Final Fantasy, according to estimations, lost Square Pictures somewhere in the region of twenty million dollars. With 48
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a production cost of 145 million dollars, the film’s failure led to the eventual closure of Square Picture’s Hawaii-based studio, with Japanese videogame giant Squaresoft (headed by director Sakaguchi) stating that it will not continue with future film productions and will instead refocus on videogame production.13 The fact that a videogame developer took the step to enter the film production market is a significant point concerning the relationship between media. In my next concluding section I shall analyse Final Fantasy from the perspectives of various media. Towards a Conclusion: Final Fantasy and Animated Film Criticism The division of media practices into discrete disciplines has, in recent years, become an increasingly demanding enterprise, for both the film practitioner and the academic. The advent of computer generated images and the general shift towards the digital has foregrounded the intermingling of film and animation. The humble history of the composite image in the popular media began in 1926 with Disney’s ‘Alice Comedies’, in which the eponymous Alice, a live-action girl, had various adventures in an animated world. In 1982 Chris Wedge’s Tron produced by Disney Studios similarly wove live-action performers into a ‘futuristic’ digital landscape. In retrospect, these films were textual anomalies of sorts, rogues at an adjunct to the mutually exclusive forms of film and animation. As sites of experimentation, they blurred the definition between media. The taxonomical methods central to both academic practice and film marketing still fail to accommodate those texts which blur the distinctions necessary to the definition of exclusive practices. More recently the animated pseudo-documentary Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001) has garnered a mixed critical response, many replete with a kind of ‘classification anxiety’. Historically, we know that distinctions are continually made and remade, and that rogue work is omitted since it undermines the process of classification. Texts are marginalised for the greater clarity of both academic canon and film genre. Should enough films of a certain kind coalesce at that margin, then a new genre is declared. This
13
Hironobu Sakaguchi revealed plans to ‘begin production on a second film based on the videogame franchise Final Fantasy immediately upon completion of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’ reported John Gaudiosi (Variety, 2000, December 26th available at www.variety.com).
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new classification then becomes a centre, with its own marginal practices. Here I position Final Fantasy, at the margins of the emergent pseudorealist genre. As such, progressions were able to be made in the respective disciplines of film and animation studies, where tentative definitions of each were made in reaction to the possibilities of the other. At times, the classifications between media are no more than a network of arbitrary binaries. The endeavour to make film studies a science, mostly notably by the French thinkers of the mid-seventies, meant that without a clear object of study belonging to a clear mode of practice, one could not make a rigorous analysis. The presumptions of film criticism still rehearse the differences between media to the detriment of understanding those texts which undermine such distinctions. In what follows I shall briefly discuss Final Fantasy from the perspectives evident in various reactionary accounts of the film: as American animation; as Japanese anime; as a videogame; and as a variant of live-action film. Though from the outset I suggest that no one of these interpretations will form a total conclusion on the film, I suggest that by thinking between media one is able to transcend taxonomical media determinations in order to understand these kinds of films as a nexus of influential practices. Final Fantasy as…American Animation The reason that Final Fantasy is compared to the traditions of American animation is sociohistorical. Though photoreal, it is defined as animation, and in this regard is tested against its animated predecessors. Reviewer Dustin Putnam writes that: ‘Although it is still fairly clear that they are animated figures, sometimes it isn’t so apparent…’ (available at: www.all-reviews.com). The aesthetic of Final Fantasy is certainly not a continuation of any prior contemporary aesthetic, and the jump from the other pseudorealist predecessors is significant. Earlier I suggested that animation was defined by its popular conception, and that notably in America that conception was historically set by the qualitative standards of Disney and the cartoon. To recall Metz’s definition, Final Fantasy is therefore unable to stand as ‘plausible’ animation in an American animation context, since it has no prior text to support its photorealist styling. Therefore, one could propose that the failure of Final Fantasy at the box office was one
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of primary ‘classification anxiety’. If we take Final Fantasy as animation – again taking animation as a popularly defined media – it is a rogue set amongst other stylised realist texts which do evoke the prior heritage of American animation. Alternatively, we can see Final Fantasy through an anime lens. Final Fantasy as…Anime Photorealist animation does have a precedent in the Japanese market, most notably in the culture of the ‘virtual pop idol’. Here CGI practitioners create highly realistic characters who then act as visualised stand-ins for real-worldly vocal performers. In traditional 2D anime, realist narratives are commonplace. Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue (1997) reflects the world of a pop star that is stalked by both her manager and a deranged fan. Isao Takahata’s Grave of Fireflies (1988) tells the story of a young Japanese man and his little sister as they try to survive during wartime, struggling to gather together even the most menial things. Evidently, the Japanese popular conception of animation allows for the medium to perform the same function as live-action popular cinema in the west. The variety of narratives and subject matters reflected in anime (from soccer to beatrix potter) suggests that the Japanese have a much broader and inclusive conception of what animation is, rather than it being a subgenre of film. In this regard the construction of plausibility is much more dynamic and malleable, as reflected in the face of Woody on the Asian promotional poster for Toy Story. In Japanese viewing practices, the aesthetic of Final Fantasy has many precedents, and incidentally in Japan it was a massive success. One might ask, what is anime about Final Fantasy? Most reviewers and fans recall the narrative subject as being the most Japanese element (indeed the Japaneseness has been used derogatively by certain commentators). There are indeed in Final Fantasy many perceptual cues that refer not only to realism, but also to anime conventionality. One of the most talked about elements of Final Fantasy is the hair of Dr. Aki Ross, which has been variously referred to as ‘annoyingly perfect’. Concerning hair in anime, Gilles Poitras writes:
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CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds
Hair is often an important stylistic element in anime. Again, this is due in part to the fact that so many anime are based on manga. A character’s hair is one way of making him or her instantly recognisable…Hair shape is also used to distinguish characters…The movement of a character’s hair is quite noticeable in anime. Hair flows in the breeze, moves when the character shifts suddenly, or comes to a halt. It gets wild during battle and settles during moments of stillness…”Hair action” thus adds to the atmosphere of scenes and enhances the behaviours and feelings of the characters. It requires more complex cels and makes the anime more expensive, but the effect is a powerful one and adds much to ones viewing pleasure. (Poitras, 2001: 62)
In answer to variations of the recurrent criticism, ‘why does her hair always move?’ one may demonstrate that her hair is simply governed by anime conventionality, which American viewing practices fail to recognise as a perceptual cue anchored to the grammar of anime. Likewise the centrality of a female protagonist is not the minor occurrence that it is in Hollywood. The relationship between ecological narratives (another anime trait) and female protagonists is commonplace, and often involves the female body as being ‘key’ to the recovery of the planet, like Final Fantasy. For instance, one may look at several of Hayao Miyazaki’s films, including Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind (1984), Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2002) to see the rehearsal of the convention of the heroine in the service of the earth-spirit/ecology/gaia. More significantly, apocalyptic science-fiction is a dominant genre in anime. When one looks at the genre, we see that Final Fantasy is not simply science-fiction from a Japanese perspective, but is in fact part of a subgenre of science fiction called ‘science fantasy’. Gilles Poitras explains:
Within the larger science fiction genre are all sorts of subgenres, from vigilante teams…special agents…and war-story adventures…to remakes of old classic live-action shows…bounty hunters on the frontier…and massive political epics on a grand scale. There is one branch of science fiction so fantastical that it borders on the realm of magic. The works of Leiji Matsumoto are like this: strong, allegorical, almost mythic tales and broad sweeping adventures whose conclusions take on almost cosmic significance. Visible in Matsumoto works, especially in the Galaxy Express 999 stories (animated in 1979 and 1981) is the influence of writer Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933), who transcendent fiction partook equally of Buddhism, technology, and European philosophy. Another popular example of this subgenre are the several Tenchi Muyo anime series of the 1990s that feature powers of flight, moving through walls, time travel, malignant beings with vast powers, and even ghosts. (Poitras, 2001: 36–37)
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From this perspective it is therefore totally understandable that within a Japanese audience context Final Fantasy is plausible, both in textual style and consumer contexts. Its critical failure in the US (from the perspective of the film as anime) can be accounted for as a failure of connecting the internal operations of the text with the reading practices of the audience, whom fail to recognise the intricate perceptual cues that ground Final Fantasy in the Japanese genre of science fantasy. Final Fantasy as…Videogame Science fantasy also characterised all the games upon which Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is based. Eleven in number, each subsequent episode oscillates between the technological and the mystical, and all have been designed by Sakaguchi. With regard to the photorealist aesthetic, the games have had lifelike characters in the eighth and tenth episodes [figs. 6, 7]. In Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (2002) Tanya Krzywinska and Geoff King write that:
The boundary between cinema and videogames appears to be a permeable one, with movements both ways between one medium and the other. Direct adaptations of films to games are the most obvious point of crossover. Hollywood blockbusters are routinely turned into videogames as part of the wider process of developing successful franchises. Direct movement from game to film is less common but includes many prominent examples, none more so than Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), the big-screen debut of the most famous icon of the contemporary gaming world. Synergies between film and game production are regular occurrences. Most, if not all, Hollywood studios have diversified into the games market, while the software house Squaresoft recently generated a film production arm, Square Pictures (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)). (King and Krzywinska, 2002: 1–2)
Having been an avid gamer for many years I recall many adaptations of film to game which were abysmal, since the developers had little conception of the faculties necessary to the creation of a playable game. One of the most notable was an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1991) released on the Sega Megadrive home console. The conversion of game to film is a more recent occurrence, of which I would argue Final Fantasy is the prime example. In a recent paper, Vivian Sobchack observed that Final Fantasy raised questions of animation analogous to Bazin’s ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ thesis (Bazin, 1967: 17–22) in which he speculates on the total state of a pure cinema of completely 53
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immersive experience. Sobchack put forward the question of what constitutes ‘the myth of total animation’, and whether photorealism is wrongfully positioned as the ideal to be worked towards in what is essentially a medium of subjective reflection on the world (see Moszkowicz, 2002). The photoreal does seem wrongfully placed as central to film animation when one looks to the diversity of creativity of other applications of the medium. However, we should consider Final Fantasy the movie with regard to the aesthetic lineage of its game predecessors, along the lines of a ‘myth of total gaming’ which aims to extend player-interface-control over a photorealist dimension. With reflection on these two points, the aesthetic of Final Fantasy is accounted for, should one capitalise on the films’ relation to videogames:
Digital Media such as videogames, Bolter and Grusin suggest, tend to ‘borrow avidly from each other as well as from their analog predecessors such as film, television, and photography [and animation]’. Such borrowings, termed ‘remediation’ by Bolter and Grusin, can occur in both directions. Games remediate aspects of cinema (including certain forms of plotting or point-of-view structures), while cinema, in return, remediates aspects of games (especially in the use of digital graphics and special effects). (King and Kryzwinska, 2002: 4)
Conclusively…Final Fantasy as…Live-action Film Much of the criticism thrown at Final Fantasy is due to the way in which photorealism problematises the relationship between live-action and animation, in what I earlier termed ‘classification anxiety’. In conversation, Vivian Sobchack noted that such an anxiety might stem from the co-existence of the dual presence of the iconic and the indexical sign in the aesthetic of Final Fantasy. The figures are literally ‘overloaded’ by the co-presence of the two signifying systems, problematising how the viewer might position them in the imaginary.14 Andrew Darley has referred to this overloaded realist presence as ‘second-order realism’: ‘The look of the imagery ‘exceeds’ that which is normally associated with its model(s). There is an intensification or exaggeration (a certain kind of foregrounding) at a level of the (moving) image of the analogical or mimetic aspect of these image models (i.e. of live action cinematography and photo-
14
Vivian Sobchack, ‘Final Fantasy and the Dis–Illusion of Life’, Animated Worlds Conference, Farnham Castle 10–12th July, 2003, commented on prior to publication by kind permission of the author.
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CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds
realist cartoon)’ (Darley, 1993: 22). Though they hardly need mentioned, Final Fantasy is, like the pseudorealist genre in general, replete with many perceptual cues which refer to a ‘lens culture’ rather than profilmic reality. Hence lens-flares, shaking ‘hand-held’ camerawork and classical cinematic grammar (most notably continuity editing) permeate the genre as a perceptual cue which blurs the distinction between the films animation status and the perceptual cues reference to live-action. Though this is in no way a conclusive thesis, considering the magnitude of its various topics, I hope to have foregrounded many issues which are infrequently discussed in film and animation studies. The role of perceptual cues, possible worlds, the index and the icon, and intermedia or ‘remediation’ approaches are swiftly becoming the vocabulary of the next phase of theory, particularly in animation studies: a discipline in its infancy. Final Fantasy is a tremendously important film in the history of film and animation. Though it may not be the finest example of narrative fiction and hence has not been discussed as such, it is exemplary of the modern film practice which unifies many media practices into one form, irrespective of the essentialism of the belief in a correct or ‘true’ incarnation of a particular form. By demonstrating how style relates to realism, I hope to have shown that plausibility and realism are not exclusive to the photographic moving image and are, instead, a product of an entirely different set of criteria than are commonly assumed. In this respect animation has a continuing role in cinema studies which has historically neglected it, as it undermines the assumptions of scholars whom neglect that alternate world in which the impossible arise and are taken as laws to which that place is governed. I also hope to have shown the recurrent and ongoing importance of cultural specificity in the consideration of often ahistorical terms such as realism, through a close and at times necessarily extensive analysis of Disney practices and its offshoots. Final Fantasy is no one exclusive media, but a nexus of many: most notably of animation, anime, videogame, and live-action cinema. To textually analyse Final Fantasy (which could not be incorporated in this paper due to the limits of space) would mean being aware of the plurality of practices that go into the creative conditioning of not only the text, but the interpreting mind of the contemporary spectator as well. © David Surman 18884 words
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