The Incredibles
The wife and I just got back from seeing Pixar's latest oeuvre, The Incredibles. I'll tell you upfront: the story line sucked. It was tedious and predictable. The dialogue and humour was clearly written for children. I kinda felt like an ass being there without kids.
What saved the movie, and made it worth seeing, was the animation. My, but it was beautiful. It was better than anything Pixar's done to date (including the fantastic underwater backgrounds in Finding Nemo), better than the computer enhancements in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, better than any movie I've ever seen. I'm not into spoilers, so I'll keep this as vague as possible: the action, especially the chase scenarios, had incredible depth without visual incoherence. The lighting (such as it appears in animation) was exceptionally good. And of course, being completely animated meant that sequences could be portrayed that are physically impossible without having to mesh live action footage. No matter how good the effects guys are, there's always an element of, I don't know, wonkiness to those scenarios in live action. In this film the effects were, of course, absolutely air tight. And I felt that it made a difference.
I'm starting to think that the with way things are going in animation, it won't be long before people just stop making action movies trying to blend live action with graphics, because the animated stuff is just so much better.
A final note: One scene involves a bomb going off that is forshadowed by a beeping noise. I would expect an adult, whose seen Die Hard and other such movies, to understand what that beeping sound might mean. But I was a little surprised to hear the four-year-old boy in front of me pick up on it and whisper it to his mother. Trust me when I say that the audio cue wasn't obvious right off the bat, and I was only just thinking to myself that there was a bomb when the kid said it out loud. I just thought it was interesting, the things that kids know about at such an early age.
What saved the movie, and made it worth seeing, was the animation. My, but it was beautiful. It was better than anything Pixar's done to date (including the fantastic underwater backgrounds in Finding Nemo), better than the computer enhancements in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, better than any movie I've ever seen. I'm not into spoilers, so I'll keep this as vague as possible: the action, especially the chase scenarios, had incredible depth without visual incoherence. The lighting (such as it appears in animation) was exceptionally good. And of course, being completely animated meant that sequences could be portrayed that are physically impossible without having to mesh live action footage. No matter how good the effects guys are, there's always an element of, I don't know, wonkiness to those scenarios in live action. In this film the effects were, of course, absolutely air tight. And I felt that it made a difference.
I'm starting to think that the with way things are going in animation, it won't be long before people just stop making action movies trying to blend live action with graphics, because the animated stuff is just so much better.
A final note: One scene involves a bomb going off that is forshadowed by a beeping noise. I would expect an adult, whose seen Die Hard and other such movies, to understand what that beeping sound might mean. But I was a little surprised to hear the four-year-old boy in front of me pick up on it and whisper it to his mother. Trust me when I say that the audio cue wasn't obvious right off the bat, and I was only just thinking to myself that there was a bomb when the kid said it out loud. I just thought it was interesting, the things that kids know about at such an early age.
posted by Marty at 10:20 PM
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