Iron Giant
Feb. 18th, 2016 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinThe UK's arthouse cinema chain has been running matinees of The Iron Giant this week, as it's a school holiday and someone out there has high standards. Even though it's crunch time, and every hour of my day ought to be spoken for, I had to make the exception – the last time I had the chance to see it on the big screen was in 2000, and who knows when I'll ever get another one. Iron Giant has mythic status in animation: an awesome film with adult depth and integrity, which got scuppered by the studio on its release, robbing it of its just acclaim (and box office) and rendering it The Greatest Film Nobody Saw. Watching it with animation people is almost a religious experience; being a studio of one here, attending a screening felt like connecting with that community in a funny sort of way, and that was even before the credits rolled and I saw how many of those people I've now met, worked with, and moved on from. It made me think ...
People use the phrase 'it was another life...' fairly liberally, and those were the words that came to mind upon touching base with the Hollywood feature animation scene. I haven't seen any big animated films since moving here in 2014, so there's a pretty wide moat between this reality and my reality in LA, which makes it seem all the more like an entirely discrete existence. But in thinking this, I realised the idea was bigger than that.
My life has been one of fairly regular upheaval. I've never lived anywhere more than eight years, and there's been very little correspondence between one 'life' and the next. I had always seen this as being robbed of continuity, for better or worse, and as a lesson in how lightly people hold their friendships. But by labelling LA, and by extension Vancouver and elsewhere, 'another life', I saw the reverse of the mirror: I have lived, in my one life, five lives so far; believe what you like about reincarnation, but these are five lives I can actually remember and take with me to the next – lives long enough to settle into a 'normal,' to get to know a place and its people and break in my niche like a new pair of shoes, yet short enough that I've already got a decent collection of them. How much of a gift is that?
I'm still glad I left LA – a little regretful I didn't do it sooner – but seeing those names in the credits made me grateful for the time I had there, in more than just a cerebral way. It didn't feel like living, but it was a life: for some people that sort of half-life is all the life they'll ever know, but because I'd had other lives I knew it for what it was, and was happy to move on. Nevertheless, laughing over Paperman overtime dinner with Rachel Bibb, and watching Dean Wellins' Mansley-ish Facilier tests when he joined the Frog crew after Rapunzel collapsed, are pages in a book that I will always have on my shelf, even if I didn't like the ending much and don't want to read it again. And that's a good thing, all told.
Anyway, in the sixteen years since I last saw The Iron Giant on the big screen, I have learned a few things:
People use the phrase 'it was another life...' fairly liberally, and those were the words that came to mind upon touching base with the Hollywood feature animation scene. I haven't seen any big animated films since moving here in 2014, so there's a pretty wide moat between this reality and my reality in LA, which makes it seem all the more like an entirely discrete existence. But in thinking this, I realised the idea was bigger than that.
My life has been one of fairly regular upheaval. I've never lived anywhere more than eight years, and there's been very little correspondence between one 'life' and the next. I had always seen this as being robbed of continuity, for better or worse, and as a lesson in how lightly people hold their friendships. But by labelling LA, and by extension Vancouver and elsewhere, 'another life', I saw the reverse of the mirror: I have lived, in my one life, five lives so far; believe what you like about reincarnation, but these are five lives I can actually remember and take with me to the next – lives long enough to settle into a 'normal,' to get to know a place and its people and break in my niche like a new pair of shoes, yet short enough that I've already got a decent collection of them. How much of a gift is that?
I'm still glad I left LA – a little regretful I didn't do it sooner – but seeing those names in the credits made me grateful for the time I had there, in more than just a cerebral way. It didn't feel like living, but it was a life: for some people that sort of half-life is all the life they'll ever know, but because I'd had other lives I knew it for what it was, and was happy to move on. Nevertheless, laughing over Paperman overtime dinner with Rachel Bibb, and watching Dean Wellins' Mansley-ish Facilier tests when he joined the Frog crew after Rapunzel collapsed, are pages in a book that I will always have on my shelf, even if I didn't like the ending much and don't want to read it again. And that's a good thing, all told.
Anyway, in the sixteen years since I last saw The Iron Giant on the big screen, I have learned a few things:
- A deep and heartfelt appreciation for a kickass cleanup team (and the crew on this film were superhuman)
- How to make espresso in a percolator, and hence that a) Dean is not making instant, and b) he's doing it wrong. You don't pour it in the top, Dean!
- How underappreciated, and in some cases underutilised, some of the talent in those credits is
- That the compositing software used on this film – and in the 2D films from Dreamworks and James Baxter's studio – was developed here in Cambridge!!
- That there is always, always more to learn ... when this crunch time ends, I'll be going back to Iron Giant and soaking up a lot of art direction and cinematography that I had respected but not properly appreciated before. I'm sure I don't really fully appreciate it even now, but I hope my appreciation will appreciate. Here's to the future ...
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Date: 2016-02-20 03:08 am (UTC)