Word: cgi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Animated feature is the official name these days, but the old tag cartoon suits the sort of CGI movie - your Shrek, your Ice Age - that goes for big laughs extracted from outlandish situations. Nothing wrong with that; cartoon comedy is an honorable, entertaining and often artful confection and has been since the days of Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and the sublime Daffy Duck. But animation can go deeper, have higher stakes. You see that impulse in parts of nearly every Pixar picture: the first sections of WALL-E and Up have an ambition, a gravity that stretches the format close...
...pair of orphans in pursuit of a floating island; My Neighbor Totoro, in which two girls meet some agreeable forest spirits; and Kiki's Delivery Service, about a 13-year-old witch who starts her own business. All are artistic triumphs and certified delights - close kin to Lasseter's CGI wizardry and Nick Park's stop-motion Wallace and Gromit films. These are Miyazaki's animation amigos: "My comrades in arms," he says, "in trying to keep good quality and commercially viable animation going...
...feature-film novice director sells his vision of Johannesburg as a dusty sump hole, a place of sapping heat and blinding glare. The creatures aren't caressed with the moody lighting of most monster films; by sticking them out in the sun, Blomkamp demystifies them and shows off their CGI sophistication. (Virtually all the aliens were created digitally; he used very few puppets.) "I wanted the image to feel incredibly raw and unmanipulated," he says, "almost like it came straight from the camera sensors right onto the screen. So instead of setting the shot up and really making...
...Sony, the film's distributor, might want to reposition Year One's marketing to emphasize its pedigree as a Judd Apatow comedy (from which The Hangover was clearly spawned), and to sell the primitive wilderness that Black and Cera wander through as Vegas without the neon. And maybe the CGI techies could quickly black out one of Jack's teeth...
Like everything Abrams does, Star Trek will be a savvy, glossy, professional operation, tricked out with clever writing and grand set pieces and the kind of CGI that looks just like the real thing except that it smells like money. And I, for one, plan to enjoy it richly. I'm expecting the most exciting Trek in years...