Rise of the Guardians
Dec. 16th, 2012 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinThe internet was in love with it! People of my acquaintance were kind of so-so!
In keeping with my recent theme of being unable to follow through on anything, I kept finding it inconvenient to go see Rise of the Guardians in the theatre, regardless of how much I wanted to support it. But on Thursday the ASIFA screener landed on my desk so there were no more excuses, and Friday night I finally watched the thing.
It wasn't bad.
I just want to say that, before I say anything else, so that people don't take my niggling criticism the wrong way. It's not even criticism, it's just a complicated verbal shrug. But it wasn't bad.
It was just ... not for me. I think it falls into the same category as the work of Neil Gaiman, Guillermo del Toro, and Robin McKinley: other people see something magnificent in it, and I get that they see it, and I respect that, but I just don't have the key to that door. I can see there's something there – as if the door has textured security glass in it – but it's just out of my reach. I think it plays better to people who have more imagination than me: there are a lot of building blocks set out for your brain to play with, and lots of space around what you're given to make up stuff, but not necessarily so spacious as to be internally inconsistent. And it really provides an opportunity to people who are really good at constructing a character from very few clues, or talented at projecting a character on an undefined surface. There's been a lot of Guardians fanart on Tumblr and I really like it! The awkward thing is, I like most of it better than the source material. I'm not complaining, because I like enjoying fanart, but it's an ambivalent sort of enjoyment ...
I think a big part of it was that it was kind of ... rickety? It was an ensemble movie but the ensembleyness of it didn't hang together as well as, say, The Avengers or Micmacs à Tire-Larigot. I don't know if it was because it couldn't decide whether it was an ensemble piece or the story of Jack Frost with the rest of the Guardians as supporting cast ... or if it was just poorly organised ... or if I was just missing something.
I was rather relieved that the Teeth thing didn't turn out to be as colossal a ripoff of Hogfather as I was expecting it to be – the basic concept was the same, but the 'science' behind it was completely different, and because of that the teeth themselves turned out not to be as central a driving force of the plot (except in Jack's case) as they would have been if Hogfather's conceit had been preserved. That said, I think there were things about Hogfather that were much more compelling to the imagination: the criminal underworld meeting the world of fairy tales, the targeted manipulation of belief for selfish ends (which was present in Guardians but not as effective), the juxtaposition and interplay of mortals and anthropomorphic personifications ...
The one comment I heard consistently from people who liked it a lot – and people who didn't – was that it was very pretty. I don't know if it was the screener copy (though you'd think they'd put their best foot forward on that) or my osmotic familiarity with CG production, but I was surprised how raw a lot of it looked, like it hadn't had a final lighting/comp pass or the shaders were hastily slapped together. There is definitely such a thing as too much emphasis on the Look department, but I guess I'm spoiled working at a studio who puts opulent cutting-edge Look development as a high priority. I can forgive some 'ugliness' if the film and characters carry me (coffMegamindcoffcoff)* but ... they ... didn't, so much, and the occasional scene that looked like an autorender was distracting. But probably only to me, or people who know about such things, so YMMV.
*I actually found a lot of the production design of Megamind to be quite nice, but occasionally I can see why people found aspects of it 'ugly,' mostly to do with eyelashes.
Not being completely absorbed in the story and characters left dangerous room for my brain to get involved, and it kept chewing on things like:
What's the deal with the Australian rabbit? I guess what they're going for is 'defying your expectations of the Easter Bunny' by making him a badass, and they just had a movie with Scottish badasses so they had to go for a different dialect ... But Australia has a thing with rabbits being a destructive invasive species; I kept trying to think how this was intentional and being played up ironically, but it was a puzzle piece that just didn't fit with the context and this bothered me. And then he started going on about springtime and new life and hope and all that, and all I could think was but in Australia, Easter is in the autumn ...
And then there was the Christmas/Easter thing, and how in their attempt to be secular they stripped the holidays of their Christian significance, but ironically this brought the pagan/folkloric aspects of them to the fore? Only very very few people actually understand the significance of that anymore? So they're still religious, only I don't think the filmmakers realised this? Or if they did, they did a good job of looking ignorant about it. And is Christmas/Solstice actually more important than Easter/Equinox-related-holiday in pagan terms? Because it seemed to me North's argument about Christmas always being more important only held true in the most modern, secular, commercial sense. And it seemed there ought to have been more to the holidays, in the Guardians' world, than the seasonal cycle of junk mail flyers ...
And: Did someone at Dreamworks go to the John Frame exhibit at the Huntington in 2010? (Was it 2010? Time does not exist here.) Because Pitch's(?) bed rather powerfully reminded me of this** (you don't have to watch the whole thing, it's at the beginning) which was a central image therein.
**This was an animated film the artist made with his mannequins and sets; the exhibit was awesome in a way I don't think the film really captures, but this is the best way of showing you what I mean. I'd be ecstatic to see what would happen if you got a trained stop-motion animator together with those finely-articulated puppets – apparently this exhibit toured to Portland; did they make any connections with Laika? If it comes your way, wherever you are, I really highly recommend going to see it, it's a kind of special you can only really appreciate in person.
And then there was the part where all the kids ran out into the snow at night without their shoes and didn't seem to mind at all, for upwards of ten minutes. But it was a bit late by then.
But I repeat: it wasn't bad. There was good stuff in it ... some interesting ideas ... some acting that was quite good (even if it was heavily live-action-referenced it was still good) and some really nice animation ... and as I said before, a lot of room for imagination ... I really wish it had 'caught' for me the way it seems to have for a lot of other people, but I guess I'll just sit this one out and enjoy the fanart.
In keeping with my recent theme of being unable to follow through on anything, I kept finding it inconvenient to go see Rise of the Guardians in the theatre, regardless of how much I wanted to support it. But on Thursday the ASIFA screener landed on my desk so there were no more excuses, and Friday night I finally watched the thing.
It wasn't bad.
I just want to say that, before I say anything else, so that people don't take my niggling criticism the wrong way. It's not even criticism, it's just a complicated verbal shrug. But it wasn't bad.
It was just ... not for me. I think it falls into the same category as the work of Neil Gaiman, Guillermo del Toro, and Robin McKinley: other people see something magnificent in it, and I get that they see it, and I respect that, but I just don't have the key to that door. I can see there's something there – as if the door has textured security glass in it – but it's just out of my reach. I think it plays better to people who have more imagination than me: there are a lot of building blocks set out for your brain to play with, and lots of space around what you're given to make up stuff, but not necessarily so spacious as to be internally inconsistent. And it really provides an opportunity to people who are really good at constructing a character from very few clues, or talented at projecting a character on an undefined surface. There's been a lot of Guardians fanart on Tumblr and I really like it! The awkward thing is, I like most of it better than the source material. I'm not complaining, because I like enjoying fanart, but it's an ambivalent sort of enjoyment ...
I think a big part of it was that it was kind of ... rickety? It was an ensemble movie but the ensembleyness of it didn't hang together as well as, say, The Avengers or Micmacs à Tire-Larigot. I don't know if it was because it couldn't decide whether it was an ensemble piece or the story of Jack Frost with the rest of the Guardians as supporting cast ... or if it was just poorly organised ... or if I was just missing something.
I was rather relieved that the Teeth thing didn't turn out to be as colossal a ripoff of Hogfather as I was expecting it to be – the basic concept was the same, but the 'science' behind it was completely different, and because of that the teeth themselves turned out not to be as central a driving force of the plot (except in Jack's case) as they would have been if Hogfather's conceit had been preserved. That said, I think there were things about Hogfather that were much more compelling to the imagination: the criminal underworld meeting the world of fairy tales, the targeted manipulation of belief for selfish ends (which was present in Guardians but not as effective), the juxtaposition and interplay of mortals and anthropomorphic personifications ...
The one comment I heard consistently from people who liked it a lot – and people who didn't – was that it was very pretty. I don't know if it was the screener copy (though you'd think they'd put their best foot forward on that) or my osmotic familiarity with CG production, but I was surprised how raw a lot of it looked, like it hadn't had a final lighting/comp pass or the shaders were hastily slapped together. There is definitely such a thing as too much emphasis on the Look department, but I guess I'm spoiled working at a studio who puts opulent cutting-edge Look development as a high priority. I can forgive some 'ugliness' if the film and characters carry me (coffMegamindcoffcoff)* but ... they ... didn't, so much, and the occasional scene that looked like an autorender was distracting. But probably only to me, or people who know about such things, so YMMV.
*I actually found a lot of the production design of Megamind to be quite nice, but occasionally I can see why people found aspects of it 'ugly,' mostly to do with eyelashes.
Not being completely absorbed in the story and characters left dangerous room for my brain to get involved, and it kept chewing on things like:
What's the deal with the Australian rabbit? I guess what they're going for is 'defying your expectations of the Easter Bunny' by making him a badass, and they just had a movie with Scottish badasses so they had to go for a different dialect ... But Australia has a thing with rabbits being a destructive invasive species; I kept trying to think how this was intentional and being played up ironically, but it was a puzzle piece that just didn't fit with the context and this bothered me. And then he started going on about springtime and new life and hope and all that, and all I could think was but in Australia, Easter is in the autumn ...
And then there was the Christmas/Easter thing, and how in their attempt to be secular they stripped the holidays of their Christian significance, but ironically this brought the pagan/folkloric aspects of them to the fore? Only very very few people actually understand the significance of that anymore? So they're still religious, only I don't think the filmmakers realised this? Or if they did, they did a good job of looking ignorant about it. And is Christmas/Solstice actually more important than Easter/Equinox-related-holiday in pagan terms? Because it seemed to me North's argument about Christmas always being more important only held true in the most modern, secular, commercial sense. And it seemed there ought to have been more to the holidays, in the Guardians' world, than the seasonal cycle of junk mail flyers ...
And: Did someone at Dreamworks go to the John Frame exhibit at the Huntington in 2010? (Was it 2010? Time does not exist here.) Because Pitch's(?) bed rather powerfully reminded me of this** (you don't have to watch the whole thing, it's at the beginning) which was a central image therein.
**This was an animated film the artist made with his mannequins and sets; the exhibit was awesome in a way I don't think the film really captures, but this is the best way of showing you what I mean. I'd be ecstatic to see what would happen if you got a trained stop-motion animator together with those finely-articulated puppets – apparently this exhibit toured to Portland; did they make any connections with Laika? If it comes your way, wherever you are, I really highly recommend going to see it, it's a kind of special you can only really appreciate in person.
And then there was the part where all the kids ran out into the snow at night without their shoes and didn't seem to mind at all, for upwards of ten minutes. But it was a bit late by then.
But I repeat: it wasn't bad. There was good stuff in it ... some interesting ideas ... some acting that was quite good (even if it was heavily live-action-referenced it was still good) and some really nice animation ... and as I said before, a lot of room for imagination ... I really wish it had 'caught' for me the way it seems to have for a lot of other people, but I guess I'll just sit this one out and enjoy the fanart.
