There's a McDonald's in the hospital where I work, and I must pass the thing a hundred times a day, so I see the posters cross-promoting the new Shrek movie a lot. And every time I do, I'm struck by how utterly ugly the character designs are.
Yeah, I realize shrek himself is an ogre, and supposed to be ugly, but all the characters look bad, especially the humans, with rubbery, disjointed limbs and creepy dead eyes. With the massive production team needed to produce this movie, wasn't there anybody on staff with a working knowledge of anatomy? Why were characters designed by people with no appreciation for aesthetics?
Of course, Shrek The Third is already claiming the largest opening ever for an animated film, as if a movie's worth is somehow determined by how much money it makes. (And that's why Happy Gilmore is a better movie than The Magnificent Ambersons.) All this proves is that people love fart jokes. Nobody's going to this because of its visuals.
Which is understandable--after all, your average Abbott and Costello movie looked cheap, but it would still make you laugh. But wouldn't it be nice if the people behind the Shrek series (or most other non-Pixar CGI efforts) actually tried anyway? If they gave as much thought to the visuals as they gave to the gags? Oh, I know every digital leaf in every digital tree is painstakingly rendered, but this is the work of techies, not artists. If the goal is merely to simulate reality, why not shoot reality?
Animation should open up a variety of possibilities, to stylize reality, to bend it to a filmmaker's will, to express what can't be otherwise shown. But Shrek, like Madagascar, like Open Season, like even many of Pixar's efforts (particularly the mostly dreadful Cars), is depressingly literal--grass looks like grass, wood looks like wood, skin looks like...well, they haven't quite perfected that one yet.
For crimes against art, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson should be shot for their announcement last week that they intend to make movie's based on Herge's comic strip character Tintin. Herge's work is justly celebrated for its clean, elegant line drawings, so naturally Spielberg and Jackson think the best way to interpret this is through the use of motion capture. Herge's work is deliberately stylized, deliberately flat, but the press release these two esteemed filmmakers issued stressed their determination to make the characters "real", to allow us to see every pore of their skin. That this is a blatant violation of everything Herge's work stands for seems simply to have not occurred to them.
It almost sounds like a joke, but they're serious. And like the fart gags in Shrek, it's not funny at all.
