NY Times-Artikel über THE INCREDIBLES

T-Bone · 03.10.2004, 10:31

Die NY Times hat es nunmal so an sich, in englisch zu schreiben, nichtsdestotrotz ein sehr lesenswerter Artikel:

http://nytimes.com/2004/10/03/movies/03cane.html

A Part-Human, Part-Cartoon Species

Published: October 3, 2004

EMERYVILLE, Calif.

FROM the marble carvers of ancient Athens to the painters of Renaissance Florence to the students in the nearest life-study class, artists have always struggled to render the human form with its subtleties intact. The pliant weight of flesh. The warm luminosity of skin and hair. The liquid brilliance of eyes. And, above all, the unending variability of expression inherent in a raised eyebrow, a curved finger, a tilted head.

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For artists working in animated film, these challenges are multiplied many times over. They must capture all the nuances that make us human, and then put them in motion. And mostly, they've failed to do so. Even the great Disney animators couldn't make Snow White as compelling as her dwarfs, who have a blobby believability that she is entirely lacking. Cinderella is never quite as lovable as her mice, and not one of the human characters in the world of animation has the poignant humanity of Dumbo or the lively spark of Bugs Bunny. If to err is human, to animate humans is to err almost every time. In fact, human animation is so vexing a problem that the makers of "The Polar Express," the Robert Zemeckis movie opening on Nov. 11, have chosen to people their painted backdrops with live performances captured digitally. Based on Chris Van Allsburg's popular children's book, it uses a live performer - Tom Hanks, say, who plays five roles - to act each scene on a mock set. Steve Starkey, the movie's postproduction producer, says that the actor wears hundreds of digital sensors that transfer the movements rippling through his body and his face to the computer-generated character he's playing.

For a long time Pixar, the phenomenally successful pioneer of 3-D, computer-animated feature films, simply avoided the issue. Toys, dolls, insects, monsters and fish have been the heroes of Pixar's unbroken series of hits. When people do appear in "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life," "Toy Story 2," "Monsters Inc." or "Finding Nemo," they are mere supporting players - the dentist in "Finding Nemo," the children in "Toy Story." The emotional weight of these films rests with their nonhuman characters. And it's a good thing: although they manage to look persuasively three-dimensional, computer-generated animated figures tend toward a cold, metallic sheen that works well enough for fish, toys or insects but defeats any resemblance to living, breathing people. On screen, computer-generated humans have often seemed stiff and plastic - one animator described it as "a marionette-made-out-of-glass" quality.

But now Pixar is gambling for the first time on a film anchored by humans. When the newest Pixar animation, "The Incredibles," opens on Nov. 5, Bob Parr and his family will be front and center. Reluctant superheroes trying to live incognito in a quiet suburban neighborhood, the Parrs will have to blow their cover to save the world. "There's no getting around it," said Brad Bird, the film's writer-director. "They're the main deal." With no monsters or animals to distract from the human characters, Mr. Bird knew he would need to lift the 3-D animation of people to unseen levels of sophistication and expressiveness. Bob, the once and future Mr. Incredible, and his family and friends, would have to look better and move more convincingly than any of their computer-generated forebears; most important, they would have to convey emotion believably.

Mr. Bird, a Disney animator in the 1970's, a creative consultant on "The Simpsons" and the director of the critically acclaimed animated feature "The Iron Giant," was well aware of how tricky this would be. "Everybody is familiar with humans," he said recently at Pixar's new, hangarlike studio in this small town across the bay from San Francisco. "There's a certain way a person's weight shifts, how expressions go down, and little 'tells' - visual cues as to what people are actually thinking as opposed to what they are saying."

Our knowledge of animal behavior, he said, is more generalized and impressionistic, which is why animal characters dominate in both traditional, hand-drawn 2-D animation and in contemporary, computer-generated 3-D work. Animators have the freedom to endow animals and other fantastic characters with human characteristics that would seem grotesquely overwrought in a person but that elicit the desired emotional response from audiences. Mr. Bird's "Iron Giant" made adults cry - but they cried for the mechanical robot, not the boy who was his friend.

The three-dimensional forms created on computers do indeed enable animators to simulate the details and volumes of the real world in ways undreamed of in Walt Disney's day. But as a visit to Madame Tussaud's proves, masses of highly specific visual information don't necessarily result in a higher degree of believability- in fact, the results can be downright creepy. The exceedingly detailed Dr. Aki Ross, in the disastrous 2001 film "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," looks more like a puppet than a woman. The fully rounded parents in "Toy Story" have a weightless, floaty quality that explodes any resemblance to actual people. And while the ogre Shrek has an appealing warmth, the royals he interacts with seem embalmed.

The trick, says Pixar's president and co-founder, Ed Catmull, is knowing the difference between the way things look and the way things actually are. "Anyone who thinks that emulating reality is the Holy Grail is not a great animator," he said. "Because the goal isn't to emulate humans. The goal is to create works of art and to tell stories."

To that end, Mr. Bird decided that to make the characters in "The Incredibles" more real, he would have to make them less so. Computer animators can now program pores and facial hair into a character's skin, but the outcome isn't necessarily more convincing. Mr. Bird said he wanted to do more with less, "capturing the essence of reality" rather than "recreating reality." His technique borrows and refines the idea of caricature. "A lot of people," he said, "use 'caricature' in a disparaging way. But to me it means selectively choosing to accent certain features or movements or body language. I think it's the heart of the matter in character animation."

Because of his winnowing approach, the 3-D computer rendering of humans has finally come of age. In "The Incredibles," which displays a level of psychological nuance and razor-sharp timing that recalls Billy Wilder and Chuck Jones at their best, the characters have an amazing flexibility, a looseness and malleability that enhance their emotional expressiveness. They are cartoonish, yet completely acceptable as living, breathing, flawed humans with a range of feelings and problems. "Jeopardy is one of the hardest things to do in animation," Mr. Bird pointed out, referring to characters who, say, fall off a building, dust themselves off and continue. "But if the audience cares about the caricatures you've put in trouble, then jeopardy becomes more easily attained."

Advertisement

The nail-biting intensity of the action sequences in "The Incredibles," which may garner Pixar its first PG rating, is a credit to the mix of verisimilitude and "caricature," in Mr. Bird's sense, achieved by the animators. Using new technology, they were able to squash and stretch shapes without losing the essential anatomy of the characters, a freedom familiar to hand animators but hard to achieve with computers, says Tony Fucile, a supervising animator on the film.

"We wanted to mimic the 2-D looseness," he said, "the ability to manipulate arm shapes when they swing, get a nice shape out of it in action scenes. We wanted to get away from the dead-puppet quality."

The answer was separating body parts into individual components with their own computerized controls, allowing them to move independently. Other controls let the animators enlarge a hand or head for a few frames to underline a particular move. "Now we have more flexibility than ever before," said Alan Barillaro, another supervising animator.

Mr. Bird's demand that the characters be both highly flexible yet simplified led to other technical breakthroughs. Characters were built from the inside out. Instead of hanging a character's skin on the computer's abstract gridwork, the animators could now create an underlying structure of muscle and bone on which to "paint" the skin. Woody and Buzz, the toys in "Toy Story," have three dimensions, but their skins are attached only to computer renderings of solid geometry. The Parrs have bone and muscle beneath the skin, lending the characters a solidity that has eluded computer animations before. Special proprietary software also allowed the Pixar animators to see the skin of the characters as they manipulated them, not just their abstract frameworks, giving the filmmakers a better sense of how the characters would actually look on the screen..

Not all of the "Incredibles" characters are animated with the full range of technical complexity applied to the leads. In a scene in which the police converge on a crime scene, for example, the extras are considerably less lifelike. The reason is money - depending on the requirements of the scene, animators using this technology can complete only two to four seconds of animation per week.

Pixar's mastery of computerized 3-D animation techniques is undisputed - it essentially invented the form. And much of the technology used to create "The Incredibles" was already in place. But never before has the computer's ability to mimic the look of actual human beings been combined with the will to distort it.

"I'm not going to pretend we're the first studio to figure out how to move skin and muscles around," said Rick Sayre, the film's supervising technical director. What's new in "The Incredibles," he said, is the expressive potential of caricature underlying physically accurate depictions of bone, muscle and skin. Pixar's coup in "The Incredibles," he said, is to capture "the best of both worlds."

03.10.2004, 10:31	#1
T-Bone Mitglied Ort: Paderborn Beiträge: 315	NY Times-Artikel über THE INCREDIBLES Die NY Times hat es nunmal so an sich, in englisch zu schreiben, nichtsdestotrotz ein sehr lesenswerter Artikel: http://nytimes.com/2004/10/03/movies/03cane.html A Part-Human, Part-Cartoon Species Published: October 3, 2004 EMERYVILLE, Calif. FROM the marble carvers of ancient Athens to the painters of Renaissance Florence to the students in the nearest life-study class, artists have always struggled to render the human form with its subtleties intact. The pliant weight of flesh. The warm luminosity of skin and hair. The liquid brilliance of eyes. And, above all, the unending variability of expression inherent in a raised eyebrow, a curved finger, a tilted head. Advertisement For artists working in animated film, these challenges are multiplied many times over. They must capture all the nuances that make us human, and then put them in motion. And mostly, they've failed to do so. Even the great Disney animators couldn't make Snow White as compelling as her dwarfs, who have a blobby believability that she is entirely lacking. Cinderella is never quite as lovable as her mice, and not one of the human characters in the world of animation has the poignant humanity of Dumbo or the lively spark of Bugs Bunny. If to err is human, to animate humans is to err almost every time. In fact, human animation is so vexing a problem that the makers of "The Polar Express," the Robert Zemeckis movie opening on Nov. 11, have chosen to people their painted backdrops with live performances captured digitally. Based on Chris Van Allsburg's popular children's book, it uses a live performer - Tom Hanks, say, who plays five roles - to act each scene on a mock set. Steve Starkey, the movie's postproduction producer, says that the actor wears hundreds of digital sensors that transfer the movements rippling through his body and his face to the computer-generated character he's playing. For a long time Pixar, the phenomenally successful pioneer of 3-D, computer-animated feature films, simply avoided the issue. Toys, dolls, insects, monsters and fish have been the heroes of Pixar's unbroken series of hits. When people do appear in "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life," "Toy Story 2," "Monsters Inc." or "Finding Nemo," they are mere supporting players - the dentist in "Finding Nemo," the children in "Toy Story." The emotional weight of these films rests with their nonhuman characters. And it's a good thing: although they manage to look persuasively three-dimensional, computer-generated animated figures tend toward a cold, metallic sheen that works well enough for fish, toys or insects but defeats any resemblance to living, breathing people. On screen, computer-generated humans have often seemed stiff and plastic - one animator described it as "a marionette-made-out-of-glass" quality. But now Pixar is gambling for the first time on a film anchored by humans. When the newest Pixar animation, "The Incredibles," opens on Nov. 5, Bob Parr and his family will be front and center. Reluctant superheroes trying to live incognito in a quiet suburban neighborhood, the Parrs will have to blow their cover to save the world. "There's no getting around it," said Brad Bird, the film's writer-director. "They're the main deal." With no monsters or animals to distract from the human characters, Mr. Bird knew he would need to lift the 3-D animation of people to unseen levels of sophistication and expressiveness. Bob, the once and future Mr. Incredible, and his family and friends, would have to look better and move more convincingly than any of their computer-generated forebears; most important, they would have to convey emotion believably. Mr. Bird, a Disney animator in the 1970's, a creative consultant on "The Simpsons" and the director of the critically acclaimed animated feature "The Iron Giant," was well aware of how tricky this would be. "Everybody is familiar with humans," he said recently at Pixar's new, hangarlike studio in this small town across the bay from San Francisco. "There's a certain way a person's weight shifts, how expressions go down, and little 'tells' - visual cues as to what people are actually thinking as opposed to what they are saying." Our knowledge of animal behavior, he said, is more generalized and impressionistic, which is why animal characters dominate in both traditional, hand-drawn 2-D animation and in contemporary, computer-generated 3-D work. Animators have the freedom to endow animals and other fantastic characters with human characteristics that would seem grotesquely overwrought in a person but that elicit the desired emotional response from audiences. Mr. Bird's "Iron Giant" made adults cry - but they cried for the mechanical robot, not the boy who was his friend. The three-dimensional forms created on computers do indeed enable animators to simulate the details and volumes of the real world in ways undreamed of in Walt Disney's day. But as a visit to Madame Tussaud's proves, masses of highly specific visual information don't necessarily result in a higher degree of believability- in fact, the results can be downright creepy. The exceedingly detailed Dr. Aki Ross, in the disastrous 2001 film "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," looks more like a puppet than a woman. The fully rounded parents in "Toy Story" have a weightless, floaty quality that explodes any resemblance to actual people. And while the ogre Shrek has an appealing warmth, the royals he interacts with seem embalmed. The trick, says Pixar's president and co-founder, Ed Catmull, is knowing the difference between the way things look and the way things actually are. "Anyone who thinks that emulating reality is the Holy Grail is not a great animator," he said. "Because the goal isn't to emulate humans. The goal is to create works of art and to tell stories." To that end, Mr. Bird decided that to make the characters in "The Incredibles" more real, he would have to make them less so. Computer animators can now program pores and facial hair into a character's skin, but the outcome isn't necessarily more convincing. Mr. Bird said he wanted to do more with less, "capturing the essence of reality" rather than "recreating reality." His technique borrows and refines the idea of caricature. "A lot of people," he said, "use 'caricature' in a disparaging way. But to me it means selectively choosing to accent certain features or movements or body language. I think it's the heart of the matter in character animation." Because of his winnowing approach, the 3-D computer rendering of humans has finally come of age. In "The Incredibles," which displays a level of psychological nuance and razor-sharp timing that recalls Billy Wilder and Chuck Jones at their best, the characters have an amazing flexibility, a looseness and malleability that enhance their emotional expressiveness. They are cartoonish, yet completely acceptable as living, breathing, flawed humans with a range of feelings and problems. "Jeopardy is one of the hardest things to do in animation," Mr. Bird pointed out, referring to characters who, say, fall off a building, dust themselves off and continue. "But if the audience cares about the caricatures you've put in trouble, then jeopardy becomes more easily attained." Advertisement The nail-biting intensity of the action sequences in "The Incredibles," which may garner Pixar its first PG rating, is a credit to the mix of verisimilitude and "caricature," in Mr. Bird's sense, achieved by the animators. Using new technology, they were able to squash and stretch shapes without losing the essential anatomy of the characters, a freedom familiar to hand animators but hard to achieve with computers, says Tony Fucile, a supervising animator on the film. "We wanted to mimic the 2-D looseness," he said, "the ability to manipulate arm shapes when they swing, get a nice shape out of it in action scenes. We wanted to get away from the dead-puppet quality." The answer was separating body parts into individual components with their own computerized controls, allowing them to move independently. Other controls let the animators enlarge a hand or head for a few frames to underline a particular move. "Now we have more flexibility than ever before," said Alan Barillaro, another supervising animator. Mr. Bird's demand that the characters be both highly flexible yet simplified led to other technical breakthroughs. Characters were built from the inside out. Instead of hanging a character's skin on the computer's abstract gridwork, the animators could now create an underlying structure of muscle and bone on which to "paint" the skin. Woody and Buzz, the toys in "Toy Story," have three dimensions, but their skins are attached only to computer renderings of solid geometry. The Parrs have bone and muscle beneath the skin, lending the characters a solidity that has eluded computer animations before. Special proprietary software also allowed the Pixar animators to see the skin of the characters as they manipulated them, not just their abstract frameworks, giving the filmmakers a better sense of how the characters would actually look on the screen.. Not all of the "Incredibles" characters are animated with the full range of technical complexity applied to the leads. In a scene in which the police converge on a crime scene, for example, the extras are considerably less lifelike. The reason is money - depending on the requirements of the scene, animators using this technology can complete only two to four seconds of animation per week. Pixar's mastery of computerized 3-D animation techniques is undisputed - it essentially invented the form. And much of the technology used to create "The Incredibles" was already in place. But never before has the computer's ability to mimic the look of actual human beings been combined with the will to distort it. "I'm not going to pretend we're the first studio to figure out how to move skin and muscles around," said Rick Sayre, the film's supervising technical director. What's new in "The Incredibles," he said, is the expressive potential of caricature underlying physically accurate depictions of bone, muscle and skin. Pixar's coup in "The Incredibles," he said, is to capture "the best of both worlds."