Tuesday, December 3, 2013

'The CG Story' chronicles a remarkable sea change in movies

Toy Story presents a remarkable feature breakthrough: characters so three-dimensional-looking you feel like you could grab them off the screen, but existing wholly within the confines of a computer-generated world.”


That was me in 1995, marveling at the wonders of Pixar’s feature debut in my review for Film Journal International. But who could have predicted that this movie breakthrough would lead to a sea change in the animated world, with every year bringing huge new advances in the art of computer-generated visuals and the near-elimination of 2D, hand-drawn imagery from movie screens?


The debut of Toy Story is just one key moment in The CG Story, the handsome new coffee-table book from The Monacelli Press, written by Christopher Finch, the author of The Art of Walt Disney. CG Story final Cover Hi-Res
Finch declares that the development of computer animation is as important to the history of motion pictures as the introduction of color and sound, and the copious illustrations and blockbuster examples in his 368-page volume make a persuasive argument.


The CG Story traces the roots of this technology in the computerized motion-control photography of movies like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner, leading to true CG imagery in the groundbreaking Tron (1982) and the stained-glass knight sequence in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). Around the same time, the Lucasfilm Graphics Group, which included future Pixar co-founders Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, unveiled the first fully computer-animated short, The Adventures of André and Wally B. A decade later, after achieving success with commercials and a series of delightful shorts, Pixar unveiled the massively popular Toy Story.


BTS (Before Toy Story), there were other breakthroughs in the live-action realm, chiefly Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park and Jumanji, to be followed in the second half of the ’90s by such landmarks as Titanic, The Matrix, and George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I, in which every one of its 2,000 shots incorporated some kind of CG imagery. Meanwhile, Pixar was creating its string of hits, with PDI-DreamWorks following closely behind.


With the turn of the millennium, computer-generated imagery became an essential tool of one giant film franchise after another: Harry Potter, Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Chronicles of Narnia. The new era of digital 3D that hatched with 2005’s Chicken Little led to stunning 3D visual-effects spectacles like Avatar, Hugo, The Avengers, Life of Pi and Gravity (the latter too recent to be included in this volume).


And let’s not neglect Pixar’s brilliant series of popular and critical hits in the 2000s: Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3. And the very fine output of other animation studios like DreamWorks and Blue Sky, particularly the blockbuster Ice Age series and the gorgeous How to Train Your Dragon.


All this recent history and more are covered in enlightening detail in The CG Story. We’ve all been living through a remarkable period in movie history, during which the wildest visions of filmmakers can be realized and made palpable with enough money, personnel and data storage, so that the adage “The camera doesn't lie” simply doesn’t apply. Many will argue that since so much of what we see onscreen today is computer-animated, a human element and the believability of real-life situations have been lost. Will young moviegoers ever be charmed again by the stop-motion artistry of a Ray Harryhausen or awed by spectacles that employed actual casts of thousands? It’s a different era now, ruled by a different sensibility, but there’s no denying the “Wow” factor still lives in countless modern movies. The CG Story is a valuable account of one seismic transition.



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