It’s been  a bit of a monster-fest around here lately. I promise to write something about Bela Tarr, and a piece on Shinoda’s Double Suicide will follow shortly. In the meantime, let’s all enjoy the spectacle of Boris Karloff hanging out with a family (does anybody know who they are?) on the set of 1939’s Son of Frankenstein. I love these backstage portraits, especially when they show such an iconic figure with his guard down. So complete is Karloff’s physical performance, and so distinctive the make-up that completes the character, that it is strange to see him acting loose and cool. These shots (there’s another one I’ve seen of him taking a cup of tea and cigarette break with Colin Clive) demonstrate the totality of his onscreen presence – all it takes is a bit of slouching or an incongruous prop and all of a sudden he’s just some guy again, albeit one with some apparent cranium issues.

[Picture sourced from Dr Macro's incomparable gallery of high quality movie scans.]

By the time you get to the 9th in the series of Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies, the ideas, in contrast to the leading man’s waistband, are beginning to thin. The isolated escarpment that is home to Tarzan, Jane, Boy and Cheeta doesn’t seem all that isolated – there’s always a plane or a boat arriving, bringing new visitors from civilisation to act as fodder for Tarzan’s prejudice against the outside world (at no point does he acknowledge or reflect upon his own arrival as a baby from a distant land). In this installment, it turns out there’s a nearby race of female warriors, sworn to destroy any man who enters their kingdom. Nobody noticed this massive city of Amazons before, except for Tarzan, who kept it secret from his family.

The plotlines are nothing special, though the arrival of Nazis in Tarzan Triumphs was relatively diverting, with Tarzan revealed as the “perfect isolationist” until he decides to intervene and kick some fascists right in the swastikas. (Incidentally, there are plenty of these rallying cries towards interventionism in Hollywood’s wartime output (Casablanca, anyone?), and I’m wondering how many films plead for the reverse: were there any films made urging Americans not to support the nation’s joining WWII?) To watch the Tarzan films is to observe a gradual depletion of a star’s grace over time: supposedly playing an ageless paragon of physical perfection, Weissmuller is prey to the aging processes that don’t afflict fictional beings, but he is always an engaging and amiable presence. I’ve enjoyed spending time with these characters, but what has regularly impressed me has been the process photography, including some superb composite shots and matte paintings.

I’m not sure who did the special effects on this film, but earlier Tarzan films boasted a credit for Warren Newcombe, a prolific director of photographic effects who also oversaw the amazing matte paintings on The Wizard of Oz. A lot of the time, the Tarzans are plainly shot somewhere out in California, but every now and then there’s a sequence of composites that remind you this is a fantasy world of hyperbolic mountain ranges and deep chasms. The escarpment on which Tarzan has established his family reveals itself to be far more capacious, far less isolated with every movie.

Because it’s Friday, here’s a new quick n’ easy regular feature, showing off an interesting image that has crossed my path in the last seven days. Tuesy really enjoyed the new adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which she watched in preparation for a visit to Matthew Bourne’s production in Cardiff tonight, though I’m not there to join her for either show, alas. We were both reminded of Ivan Albright’s painting of Dorian Gray that was used in the 1945 film adaptation. We saw it at the Chicago Institute of Art last year, and it’s really a standout, not least for its garish grotesquerie. It certainly looks pretty striking even here on my little blog.

It was interesting to see in a gallery a painting that had been designed to have a particular impact onscreen; the black and white movie switches to three-strip Technicolor just for two shots of the painting, first in its original form, then in Albright’s aged and corrupted version. The painting is round a corner in one of the galleries, so you can’t see it from other rooms – it’s a real jolt to the eyes when it appears in front of you. Above is the photo I took of it in Chicago, hopefully preserving most of the colour. The blistering effect reminds me of the way film decays.

Albright’s twin brother was originally asked to paint the earlier picture of Dorian, but in the end Henrique Medina came up with this:

John Coulthart has more about these paintings, including a picture of the Albright twins preparing their portrait from a dummy of the decayed Dorian at his blog. Well worth a look.

[This post follows up on an earlier one which you can read here.]

In an earlier post, I quoted from an interview with Tristan Oliver, director of photography and Mark Gustafson, animation director, on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox. They were bemoaning Anderson’s like of feeling for the medium of stop-motion animation, and the ill-feeling that bubbled under the surface of their back-handed complements was palpable. Quite a few other sites picked up on this as evidence of a “troubled shoot” (see, for instance, here, here and here);  doesn’t everyone like to hear tales about a “troubled shoot”? It’s one of those terms that hints at  exciting tantrums and passionate disagreements over a project’s creative direction. Either that, or celebrity gossip about a diva refusing to come out of her trailer, a leading man disguising his tranquiliser addiction etc. It’s all part of the lead-up to that moment where you find out whether a film is actually any good or not. It elongates the experience of a film, because you get the chance to think about it and speculate about it even before it’s finished, but backstage gossip is rarely a good indicator of the quality of the finished product.

My original post was not supposed to be a gleeful prediction of Wes Anderson’s exposure as some sort of charlatan (though I would like to see more prominence given to the animators in the film’s promotional material – I couldn’t see Gustafson’s name on the UK poster at all), though I’m aware that some were looking for ammunition against him. There’s no need to take sides, and however it got there, Fantastic Mr Fox turned out to be a delight, the best film Anderson has made since Rushmore. As many reviewers have noticed, it manages to retain many of the director’s trademarks: a retro rock soundtrack, for example, and louche dialogue delivered by a cast of favoured performers. These casual line-readings are a nice contrast to the mannered perkiness that characterises so much voicing of kids’ animation, and make a surprisingly perfect match with the sometimes coarse stop-motion visuals. Anderson’s love of lateral tracking shots and cross-section compositions (remember the set of the ship in The Life Aquatic?) are also present and correct.

The film looks beautiful in its autumnal colours (you can almost smell the scrumpy!), and the roughness of the characters’ movement is not evidence of a sloppy or demoralised labour force, but a natural side-effect of a process that requires fingers and thumbs to tease out expression and nuance from inert models. There are some superb close-ups of the puppets that have been made to respond to the subtleties of the voice cast: Meryl Streep’s Mrs Fox has an aching, wistful yearning for a quiet life with her husband that is being slowly extinguished by his self-absorbed, wayward behaviour; you can hear it in her voice, and see it in “her” eyes”. Jason’s Schwartzman’s surly son Ash, desperate to please his illustrious dad, acts out a series of furious looks in close-up, his body tight with pent-up frustration – these are keenly felt, fierce emotions that are effortlessly conveyed by the delicate work of the animation team, who know when to use big gestures, but are trusted to deliver character information without too much arm-waving.

The comedic high points are those moments where the animals suddenly slip back into their animalistic ways, scarfing down their lovingly-prepared dinner with maximum noise, mess and lust. It’s a nice commentary on the anthropomorphisation of critters for our amusement, a quick reminder that beasts are beastly, even if the ultimate message of the film is that humans are even more so for their ruthless greed, their comparatively joyless need to consume and control their surroundings. Mr Fox is a suave hero figure, good in a fight and deft with words, but like so many Anderson protagonists, he’s prone to self-doubt and bouts of melancholy. I’ll be interested to see how kids respond to this stuff, but I was rather enthralled by it. I should say that the Roald Dahl book was never read to me as a child, so I can’t comment on the adaptation. Maybe in a later post, when I’ve got round to the audio book.

Posted in Animation Tagged: Animation, Bill Murray, Fantastic Mr Fox, fox, Roald Dahl, Stop Motion, Wes Anderson ]]> http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/fantastic-2/feed/ 0 Dan North Fantastic Mr Fox Fantastic Mr Fox Fantastic Mr Fox http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/lotte-reinigers-cinderella-1922/ http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/lotte-reinigers-cinderella-1922/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:30:29 +0000 Dan North http://drnorth.wordpress.com/?p=2787 ]]>

One of the first films by the silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger was Cinderella (1922). Fairy stories comprise much of Reiniger’s output, most notably in the 15 shorts she made in the UK between 1953 and 1955. Her Cinderella (she made another version in 1954) is quite a faithful, if fleeting adaptation of the story, but its form and style are extraordinary.

It all begins with a pair of scissors cutting out Cinderella from a piece of black card before placing her into the world of the story. In many shots, the action is vignetted by jagged edges, reminding us of the sharp edges that have crafted the materials of this tale. Animation is already well suited to fairy tales, which have provided story material for Reiniger, Jiří Trnka, Ladislas Starevich, Ray Harryhausen, Jan Švankmajer and that Disney bloke (Disney also released a cartoon of Cinderella in 1922, and a feature film of the same story in 1950, four years before Reiniger’s own remake). Animation allows the construction of a completely fabricated fantasy space that is bracketed off from the real world, evoking the enclosures of memory and imagination (though I might argue that Disney’s approach was less to do with evoking the imaginative and ephemeral experience of fairytales, and more about reshaping those tales in order to fit into the house style of his company). Animated figures provide archetypal rather than definitive renderings of fairytale characters, and particularly in Reiniger’s monochromatic stories, the images allow space for the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Her silhouettes make the gestures of the characters and carry out the actions that comprise each tale, but they are a partial conjuration, a world into which we peer rather than disappear. This is not meant to sound like an insult to Reiniger; her films are evocative and engrossing without pretending to present a definitive reading of the fairy tales. The shadows seem more like the ghostly accretion of many different versions pushing to the surface of memory.

On the other hand, Reiniger inscribes the film with her distinctive signature. Nobody else has defined a form of animation as authoritatively as she did, and the opening section, where scissors make the first cuts into the main character, conjuring her out of simple raw materials, displays the means by which the story is fabricated and marks it out as a product of her labour. Just as any storyteller provides an introduction that bridges the gap between the real and story worlds, so Reiniger draws us in by showing how she brings her figures to life. The power of enchantment exerted by the tale is also the power of an animator. That perfect fit between subject matter and form might go some way to explaining why so many animators have made fairy tale films.

In illustration of this final point, but mainly because I’m proud that I managed to time the frame grab just right, here’s a shot from her subsequent short, The Death-feigning Chinaman (1928), in which Reiniger’s hand is accidentally caught on camera, a blink-of-an-eye imprint of the animator that reminds us of her presence as the vivifying force operating in the interstices between the frames of the film itself: