May 29, 2005|As far as I'm concerned, by and large, when the conversation turns to animation, you have Brad Bird and Pixar in the United States and Satoshi Kon, Hayao Miyazaki, and Yoshiaki Kawajiri in Japan. Animation has a long way to go in the U.S., not in terms of technology but in terms of a willingness to see it as a medium for mature storytelling rather than as a ghetto for sub-par children's entertainment. Stuff like Shark Tale and Shrek make overtures to an "adult" audience with sexual innuendo, disturbing violence, and pop cultural riffs that may raise unsettling questions about existential substance (does any of this stuff exist outside of its own reflectivity?), yet do little to stimulate real excitement. They're failures, sometimes outrageously popular ones, trapped in amber.
I met Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, the duo behind the latest DreamWorks animation Madagascar, in a conference room in the bowels of Denver's Hotel Teatro. I knew of CU alum Darnell--the spitting image of the squat penguin commando he voices in his current film-from his fine work on Antz (still the only DreamWorks animation worth a conversation) and McGrath--the spitting image of Canuck funnyman Harland Williams--from his short tenure on the post-John Kricfalusi "Ren & Stimpy". The two came off a little canned, with Darnell all business and McGrath a little dreamy; I tried to draw them out of their comfort zone in a way that their film, alas, seldom did for me.
FILM
FREAK CENTRAL: What does the second chimp sign when the first
one suggests that they go see Tom Wolfe?
ERIC DARNELL: (laughs) He signs, in basic
American Sign Language, "Are we going to throw poo at his ridiculous
white suit?"
Which segues into my
question of whom you see as your audience.
ED: We were mostly just looking to satisfy our own
sensibilities.
TM: Which are really
juvenile.
ED: (laughs)
We were hoping that the animation would be really appealing to kids and
that the references would sort of attract grown-ups like us, knowing
that it would be over the heads of a lot of our audience but wanting
to, as much as we could, make a film that we would enjoy seeing, that
would make us laugh.
TM: Most people perceive
animation as being a kid's venue and parents, after all, have to take
kids to the movies and we love animation...
Who are your
favourite animators?
TM: For
this movie we really looked to Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Chuck
Jones--people who really did what we loved about animation, which is
sort of the caricatured or exaggerated reality. I mean, duplicating
reality is okay if that's what you want to do, and computers are
especially good at that, but we wanted to break through that a little
bit, push things beyond into fantasy. What is it, how does it move in
that world?
Cell vs. computer
animation?
ED: I
always think of whenever there's a new technology--like photography:
photography will be the death of oil painting! And then film will be
the death of photography! No, I think that it's not so easy as to say
that traditional animation is dead. You say that and then Spirited
Away comes out and wins the Oscar...
TM: I
dunno, our goal in the whole thing was to combine the best of what we
loved the most about both mediums. Eric has a stronger computer
background than I do, but we both have roots in each... Computers can
make whole tactile worlds, but the type of motion that traditional
animation has, that's something we wanted to preserve.
It's hard, in fact,
to separate the two disciplines oftentimes.
ED: It
is, yeah. Another analogy is watercolour and oil painting: a painter is
a painter, they may prefer one medium or another, but most can work
with either or both together. You get a lot of 2-D artists reluctant to
cross over to computer technology out of allegiance to tradition or
whatever, but when they do it--a lot of times out of necessity--they
discover that it doesn't hurt, that, in fact, it makes a lot of things
a lot easier.
TM: Things that you can't
do with
paper you can suddenly do in these virtual environments, right? A lot
of the best talent that worked on Madagascar were
guys who were coming to this technology for the first time.
ED: All of us were coming
to some of this technology for the first time.
Is ease a good thing
in this creative process?
ED: Well,
listen, so much of animation is repetitive process--this obsessive
reproduction of nearly identical images--and to do all that by hand...
TM: Not ease in the
creative process, you know, but that it makes the actual elbow grease
part of it a lot quicker.
See, but my
affection for forms like stop-motion and traditional animation is that
the artist's hand is apparent in every frame.
ED: There's
definitely something to be said about traditional modes of animation,
of actually getting in there and getting your hands dirty and there's a
lot of that in what we do.
TM: Right--people have
this idea that you wave your hands at a computer and suddenly
everything just appears in the mainframe, but it's all just tools.
ED: Characters
are drawn on paper, the whole storyboard process is on paper--story
artists, models, all of these things go into it first before we
introduce it into the 3-D world. People confuse the real work of
animation for the bells and whistles of CGI.
Isn't that a danger?
ED: Sure,
it's a big danger, limitations sometimes are a good thing. We had to
constantly say, "Let's not move the camera around just because it's
easy." We needed to have it clear in our heads that when the camera
does move, it edifies the story.
TM: Sometimes
the creative does drive the technology--we knew we wanted hundreds and
hundreds of lemurs on the screen at one time and when we started the
project, the technology was able to provide four--and then there's the
water that's always difficult. The whole wave shot was a monumental
undertaking.
ED: And it's not all just
algorithms
and routines, you plug in the numbers and let it run--no, the place
where that wave breaks is controlled by hand. Not only does it have to
look and feel like water, but it also has to fit into the design of the
world. It's not photo-real water, it's Madagascar
water. But
the point I want to get back to is that it's all rooted in a drawing
and the creativity to imagine it in a different environment.
Why the gulf between
American animation and Japanese anime?
TM: It's
hard to know where the differences necessarily come from... So much of
it is a cultural attitude, I guess I'd say, the kind of stories that
people are told and will tolerate from the animated medium. What anime
does so well is present worlds never seen before as matter-of-fact--it
leaves an impression on you even after you've watched it and it frees
you, liberates you from what you know. Animation should be that, I
think: liberating. We're late coming to the recognition, I think, that
this medium can be as much for adults as for kids.
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ED: We never had it in our minds that it was going to go in that direction. Chris Rock, he brought so many things to Marty that we never imagined and that's part of the beauty of working with a guy like Rock.
TM: "Crack-a-lackin."
ED: (laughs) Yep, that's all Rock. Look, like we said before, we wanted Madagascar to be fun for both kids and their parents--it's reflected in the style of the piece and in the way that we present the situations. We wanted a Looney Tunes effect: the violence more cartoony, and the moral as simple as friends are friends no matter where they're from or where they go.
What I'm asking, I
guess, is if you pulled back from thornier subtext in respect to
potential box office.
ED: No,
not at all. It didn't have that kind of intentionality, and we didn't
have any interference from DreamWorks. We just wanted to make a movie
that would make us laugh.
When do you think
American audiences will be primed for a grown-up animation?
TM: Listen, in the United States it's always been Snow
White on one side and Fritz the Cat on
the other and I think that's the kind of perception that we're fighting
against. If it's not for kiddies, it's for adults--you
ask most people on the street and they'll tell you that they think that
Japanese anime is all about sex and alien rape and stuff. But you look
at stuff like the old Looney Tunes and we all grew up watching that
with dad and he'd be laughing at stuff that was right over your head
but it'd be just as entertaining to both of you and then, as you get
older, that stuff maintains its charm. So I think those old guys really
hit on a balance.
Lots of
cross-dressing.
ED: (laughs) There is that, indeed.
Tom, you mention
Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat--I know that you
worked on his Cool World.
TM: Ralph
gave me my first job in animation. Although the film didn't do well by
any means and wasn't a great film--I think he'd tell you that--there
were budget and time problems and a changing of the guard at Paramount
at that time. I owed my roommate a load of money and went to Paramount
for a job doing anything, basically to pay back my roommate. Just had
my portfolio and met Ralph and he's this intimidating presence, sitting
on a coach looking at my work, eating a bagel--"This is pretty good,
kid!" and all these bagel crumbs are flying all over my stuff. But he
gave me the job, real early on, my foot in the door. In my career
there's been Bakshi and Jeffrey Katzenberg--both so passionate about
animation, I've been really lucky.
Compare DreamWorks
with Pixar, Blue Sky, Disney...
ED: Well,
we don't work at those other companies so I can't comment on what they
do, but I do know that at DreamWorks, what's great about making movies
there is that there isn't necessarily a house style. There's no
rulebook when you're developing a film that you have to follow. That
means that every movie can be different, can have its own style.
There's no way we could have taken a coffee table from Shrek
and stuck it in Madagascar--and that's great.
TM: Every
time out it's something that you haven't seen before. What was
important for me in going to DreamWorks is this idea that we could tell
stories that could only be told through animation. At the end of the
day, we want everyone to succeed. We don't want to see any bad animated
movies you know, we want to be able to build that momentum of "Oh that
was great, I'm excited to see the next animated film," so that
hopefully we can push animation into increasingly daring places for
every audience.
Porn.
ED: (laughs) Exactly!
For the record, I'm
just glad that Madagascar doesn't feature threats
of gang rape like Home on the Range, gangland hits
like Shark Tale, or disturbing racism like Brother
Bear. You don't have to comment on that.
ED: (laughs) Thank you.
TM: (laughs)
Yeah, phew.
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