I was absolutely startled to see the Robert Zemeckis film Beowulf. For one thing, the animation was so spot-on after a little while you forgot you were actually looking at a cartoon, something I never forgot in the supercreepy Polar Express, where after coming out from the theater with the kid I was math tutoring I got a delayed attack of the heebie-jeebies.
What's even more extraordinary is that the actor that played Beowulf was Ray Winstone, a great Shakespearean stage actor in his forties with a great Lorne Greene-esque "Voice of Doom" perfect for a mythical hero. Thanks to computer technology, they could take an older actor with an ordinary physique and make him look exactly like Beowulf ought, with powerful muscles, the appropriate age, and a suitably heroic height (when the real Ray Winstone is average, around 5'10" according to IMDB).
Does anyone else realize the potential of this animation technique?
Now you can have a well-trained and skilled actor with a great voice play a heroic, muscular character regardless of piddling little details like age, height or the actual shape of their physique. I for one would love to hear Patrick Stewart's sexy voice come out of Hercules, Tarzan or other mythic heroes; nobody else could be quite as vivid. This is a problem that goes back to the beginning of Peplum: Steve Reeves had to have his voice dubbed because he had a rather un-Greek Montana accent. And let's face it, none of those Hercules, Goliaths or Macistes from the peplum boom were great actors (with the possible exception of Mark Forrest, who I have always thought was extremely underrated as an actual actor).
Ask any casting director and they'll tell you that it is all but impossible to find a Meryl Streep or Anne Hathaway type that is beautiful, intelligent and can act! Those three Venn diagram circles very rarely meet together, after all. Nowhere is this problem more obvious than in the camp-classic Flash Gordon, which featured Topol and Brian Blessed, two of my favorite actors of all time, not to mention Timothy Dalton and Max von Sydow, all of whom were perfectly cast and brilliantly acted. The one standout terrible performance is the actor who played the title character, a Playgirl model meathead that was clearly given the part on the basis of his physique, and who couldn't hold his own against the international all-star cast. It's somehow a tribute to what a nonentity he was that right now I just can't remember his name.
In fact, name me one good actor, the kind you can imagine playing Hercules, Beowulf or Flash Gordon, with large muscles. Even the very handsome Dwayne Johnson (the only good-looking professional wrestler in the entire history of that sport) is not that great an actor, though he makes up for it with a ton of personality and charisma that makes him very, very watchable. Still, I can't see him saying "I come for the woman...and your head!" without cracking a smile a little bit.
A good actor is as rare as a good physique, and both are as rare as a good sports star. In fact, come to think of it, that's part of why the WNBA has marketing problems: they want a talented athlete that is also extremely camera-friendly, telegenic and attractive to be the symbol of their league, sort of like how the very beautiful and personable Venus and Serena Williams are to women's tennis or the rugged Joe Namath was to the struggling NFL. But the trouble is, their WNBA players look like...well...WNBA players. Amazing how, in something like ten years, that just hasn't worked out for them. It just goes to show how very rarely talent, personality and looks come together.
As a big fan of Tarzan, I've never found an actual actor that was ever as entirely buyable as the big, bad Mr. T, as almost any given illustration of the character. This isn't a problem anymore with the Beowulf motion-capture technology.
People that talk about CGI near-constantly always say it's the "next big thing" and the next step for film, but I've never been convinced. CGI has a big limitation: no matter how good it gets, you can always tell that it isn't a physical object. It doesn't have a sense of solidity. In fact, the best CGI using blockbuster was the first to use the technique, Jurassic Park, because computer imagery was their last choice and not their first and it was supplanted with traditional techniques like puppets and claymation. Beowulf on the other hand, because everything was animated, no one thing stood out as "fake." It actually did live up to the promise the special effects people offered when they started to use computers for special effects.
Beowulf came out two years ago, and in that time I'm a little astonished that the real significance of this film hasn't entirely been acknowledged, not just technologically (since then no other movie has been made with this technique) but also in the history of animation as well, and how Beowulf represented a shift in the way animation is discussed, something I don't think anyone else noticed. Here's what I mean by that: you can't ever read a book about Fritz the Cat's Ralph Bakshi without them going on about how darn shocking Bakshi's adult and counterculture themed animation was, especially in cartooning "best identified with Disney-style wholesomeness and kids movies." Heck, if you need another example, look at how badly Nelvana's animated Rock n' Rule crashed at the box office.
Whenever anybody does an animated movie that handles very adult themes, almost all discussion of the movie focuses in on that to the exclusion of everything else, the shock that an animated film isn't a "kid's cartoon." But here was Beowulf, a movie that is animated every bit as much as the Pixar stuff, which nonetheless features drinking, debauchery, violence and a naked Angelina Jolie, and yet you don't get the usual shocked expression from the critics or nonsensical statements like "animation has finally grown up!" (I'd like to strangle any journalist that ever typed that phrase.) Yet nobody noticed this. It was absolutely extraordinary, a real turning point for those of us that like sophisticated animation.
My friend and regular blog reader ManofSteel spends his time using a computer to create his disturbingly specific idea of the perfect man, who despite his best protestations is a dead ringer for Christopher Reeve. Personally, I don't have a single perfect man (though Ulisses Jr. comes close), but a range of twenty or thirty guy types, a series of male fantasies that would be absolutely perfect for me: some sweet, bookish and shy, some hunky, dangerous and masculine, some that are black and others tanned or Asian, some curly haired and others straight, some blue eyed and others brown, and so on. But regardless, if you want to have a "perfect guy" in a movie, the Beowulf technique would be the way to do it. Even Matt Damon gets zits sometime, but a computer model doesn't have to.
For all these reasons, I think Beowulf is worth a second look, not just for its vast potential, but for no other reason than it might have started another boom in muscleman movies. Another thing I find extraordinary about Beowulf is that for the first time, people were talking about Steve Reeves again. One really sarcastic New York Times review said that "somewhere, I hope Steve Reeves is watching this and smiling down from beefcake heaven."
(And incidentally, on the subject of traditional animation, I just saw the promo for the Princess and the Frog. Great idea, guys: do the exact same kind of ubertraditional movie that tanked that kind of film in the first place. Apparently it's supposed to be different because the princess here is black, but as my hero Mr. Spock once said, "A difference that makes no difference is no difference." This particularly smarts on a personal level, because I originally started to go to college to study animation and design. I left to study mathematics because incredibly enough, Disney closed its cel-division, an act even then seemed both temporary and shortsighted. With that, I just changed my major...as, by the way, half of my classmates did when they heard the news. I always thought they'd bring their cel-department back by doing something edgy and unexpected the way studios do when they don't have anything left to lose, and I'm extremely disappointed to be wrong here.)
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