Jethro Tull never stood on one leg while playing a flute. However, Ian Anderson, the leader of the band Jethro Tull, does all the time (even now that he's in his 60s).
QFT.
Which Trek novel would make the best film and why ?
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Jethro Tull never stood on one leg while playing a flute. However, Ian Anderson, the leader of the band Jethro Tull, does all the time (even now that he's in his 60s).
Reminds me of how, when I was a kid, I thought my sister was a fan of a comedian named Monty Python.
Jethro Tull never stood on one leg while playing a flute. However, Ian Anderson, the leader of the band Jethro Tull, does all the time (even now that he's in his 60s).
You got me! LOL!
I'm actually a huge Ian Anderson fan, of course. Jethro Tull invented farm implements. He may have stood on one leg, but probably didn't play flute.
There's material for a comedy sketch in there somewhere.
"Yeah, it's a great tractor, but why does he insist on playing that flute and standing on one leg?"
"Yeah, it's a great tractor, but why does he insist on playing that flute and standing on one leg?"
I vote for Joe Flanagan as Captain Calhoun!
The "Avatar" books never really struck me as movie material. They seem designed more to restart the story than to tell a complete one of their own. It's more 2-hour season premiere than movie.
Personally, I've been wanting to see a Star Trek movie that eschew's the traditional captain & his crew aboard a starship format in favor of something more unconventional. I like the Dr. Bashir secret agent stuff in "Section 31: Abyss." Plus, ever since I'd heard that Tom Hanks is a big Trekkie, I've tried to think of a good role for him. I think he'd be pretty good as the evil scientist in this one.
While an all-Klingon movie might give Hollywood pause, I think that Klingons are iconic enough and relatable enough to sustain a movie. "The Left Hand of Destiny" could be the Lord of the Rings of Star Trek movies!
If I could go back in time to the mid-late-1990s, I would strongly encourage Paramount to adapt William Shatner's "The Return." Sure, it's a little fanwanky in places. But still, it's the goddamn Shatna', muthafucka!
Jethro Tull never stood on one leg while playing a flute. However, Ian Anderson, the leader of the band Jethro Tull, does all the time (even now that he's in his 60s).
You got me! LOL!
I'm actually a huge Ian Anderson fan, of course. Jethro Tull invented farm implements. He may have stood on one leg, but probably didn't play flute.
Maybe ol' Jethro was in a band called Ian Anderson ...
Works for me. It would probably have the added benefit of drawing a good chunk of the SG:A crowd as a built-in fan-base.
If I could go back in time to the mid-late-1990s, I would strongly encourage Paramount to adapt William Shatner's "The Return." Sure, it's a little fanwanky in places. But still, it's the goddamn Shatna', muthafucka!
I'm a big supporter of the Shatnerverse, and I think Ashes of Eden would've made a great movie. But if they were gonna even think about The Return, I think Shatner would've needed to do his part and lose some weight, if he's gonna play the nanite-juiced super-Kirk. People less forgiving than you and me had enough trouble reading about Kirk beating Worf in a bat'leth duel. Imagine if they had to watch an out-of-shape Shatner doing that. Don't think it would play so well on screen.
amen! i've been calling for that type of treatment for the existing trek series for the same reasons though at the time when i first proposed that i said to copy the final fantasy style treatment. however, a clone wars style treatment would suit me just fine.
i think this way is about the only way we'd get a continuing story of the modern trek series on television as a mini-series or tele-movie.
Traditional animation. Pure CGI doesn't work. Unless you're James Cameron.
what's Kung Panda?
But then, those are all comedies, which makes the standard for the visuals a little less important. I've never watched the Clone Wars, so I can't comment on whether it worked there or not, but I don't think you can prove the validity of CGI for serious action/adventure by the evidence of a different genre.
The Clone Wars works very well, now that its production team has worked the bugs out. And The Incredibles, although something of a comedy, was also very successful as a serious action/adventure/drama (the "missile lock" sequence remains one of the most harrowing, emotionally intense action sequences ever committed to film).
It's never valid to say that a given art form is incapable of telling a given kind of story. 3D animation isn't fundamentally different from 2D; they're both largely created by human hands, with the computer serving as their instrument (and yes, even "traditional" 2D animation is done mostly on computers these days rather than inked and painted on cels). It's like painting vs. sculpture. Neither one is better than the other, they're just different avenues for artistic expression.
That said, 3D CG animation generally doesn't look its best on a TV budget. The Clone Wars looks so good because it's got the wealth of Lucasfilm behind it. Other 3D-animated shows like Iron Man Armored Adventures look okay -- a lot better than they would've a few years ago -- but still somewhat limited. So my preference for a Trek animated series would be 2D/traditional.
It's never valid to say that a given art form is incapable of telling a given kind of story. 3D animation isn't fundamentally different from 2D; they're both largely created by human hands, with the computer serving as their instrument (and yes, even "traditional" 2D animation is done mostly on computers these days rather than inked and painted on cels). It's like painting vs. sculpture. Neither one is better than the other, they're just different avenues for artistic expression.
That said, 3D CG animation generally doesn't look its best on a TV budget. The Clone Wars looks so good because it's got the wealth of Lucasfilm behind it. Other 3D-animated shows like Iron Man Armored Adventures look okay -- a lot better than they would've a few years ago -- but still somewhat limited. So my preference for a Trek animated series would be 2D/traditional.
It worked fine in the comedies, as RookieBatman said. (Wall-E was a very disturbing film, although I'll grant not because of the CGI.) You can get away with ridiculously abstracted CGI funny animals and humans in comedies--just like you can get away with it in crude cel animation animations.
Dramatic pure CGI productions usually doesn't work: Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within; Advent Children was better--looked retarded in many ways although much of it was by design; the Clone Wars in either iteration (ymmv) looked pretty goofy; almost any serious video game cutscene is an example of CGI failure in some respect; Reboot worked, but because it was supposed to be stiff and weird-looking.
I mean, would Prince Valium or whatever his name was from Shrek look comfortably in place in a dramatic production?
Christopher, I don't want to say I'm dismissing the medium entirely. With serious talent and money behind it, all-CGI does look fine. For a TV show, I'd rather see traditional animation because I don't believe the tools and financing are there to make Anything: the CGI Adventures actually look good without seriously abstracting the design.
Which is where Incredibles lie--it is a fine film, but it's important not to ignore that severe abstraction in the character design that pushes them out onto the other side of the uncanny valley. I don't want to see a severely abstracted CGI Star Trek. Indeed, personally, I think the Incredibles would have been better looking as a traditionally animated feature, but those don't sell for some reason.
It's not a movie, but IMO if you want to see what a serious realistic CG production can look like you should check out the game Heavy Rain. It's basically an interactive movie in video game form. I haven't played it yet, but I plan to get it first chance I get.
That's spurious. Look at Batman: The Animated Series and the rest of the DCAU. Look at Avatar: The Last Airbender. Look at serious, adult-oriented anime from Japan. It's certainly possible to tell quite potent and moving dramatic stories with highly abstracted, cartoony character designs. That's been proven with 2D animation, so it makes no sense to say it can't work with 3D animation. As long as the writing, acting, music, and animated performances are effective at conveying the needed emotion and humanity, audiences will accept the use of caricatured designs. If anything, caricature can heighten the audience's identification with the characters, because it reflects how the human brain processes faces. There's nothing "crude" about caricature. It's an art form that's been an important part of human creative expression since prehistory.
It's hardly valid to judge on the basis of productions from years ago when the technology was far less sophisticated. And despite George Lucas's odd desire to emulate Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation shows in the look of the characters in The Clone Wars, the animators have learned how to put a lot of nuance and expression into them and the writing just keeps getting better.
What captivates me about The Incredibles is how real and human the characters' expressions and body language are despite the caricatured designs. These hand-animated characters felt far more like real people to me than the stiff, photorealistic motion-capture characters in Robert Zemeckis's CGI films, because of the brilliance with which the animators worked nuance and expressiveness into their performances. Animation is acting -- it's just acting by proxy and doing it very slowly. A well-animated character is a well-acted character, and its humanity comes across regardless of how realistic or unrealistic its design is.
I wouldn't prefer to see a highly abstracted 3D-animated Star Trek either, but that's not because I think such a thing couldn't work in general. Highly stylized character designs can be entirely successful in a dramatic context, and it's a prejudice and a complete falsehood to claim otherwise.
Chris, thank you. I think you might've made my point better than I did. It has been proven with 2D animation. Which is not to say that the production values don't need to be there, as well (the yen-savers anime often indulges in will frequently impact the work quite disproportionately)--but based on the sample size of "things I've seen," the desired effect, that is an immersive abstracted world, appears much easier to acheive with traditional animation than with CGI. I found Batman: TAS or Ghost in the Shell: SAC to be much more immersive, based on visuals alone, than the Incredibles or Shrek.
You can call it spurious, although I'd prefer "idiosyncratic." Aesthetic judgments can be either--to me, traditional animation always tends to lend itself to more serious storytelling than the current level, and possibly any level, of CGI.
At the same time, I think I have a pretty solid basis for my opinion--traditional animation is sufficiently abstracted for its visuals not to distract. 3D animation either is not sufficiently abstract to tell a serious story without distracting with either three-dimensional cartoons who move in spacetime like big goofy aliens (Incredibles, Clone Wars), or pulls back on the abstraction and enters the uncanny valley big time and is distracting in that regard (Final Fantasy, Shrek), or the CGI is so fully realized that is very nearly or completely indistinguishable from live action (Avatar, Star Trek).
If one prefers that sort of thing, it's hardly my place to say you can't--but I don't think an opinion on how something looks is "falsifiable" in any objective sense, Christopher.
But now you're shifting the goalposts. In the comment I was responding to, you didn't say you were making an exception for 2D animation in your "it works in comedies but not dramas" argument -- indeed, if anything, you made a very dismissive and insulting comment about abstracted 2D animation being "crude." Now you're claiming you were saying something else all along, but that's not what you actually said.
I'm the complete opposite here. As much as I love traditional 2D animation, I've found CG to be much more immersive, even if it is done in a more abstract style like The Incredibles or The Clone Wars. I've just always found it easier to get into the characters when they are more realistic looking, even if it is abstract.
No, no, I specifically meant the cruder examples of 2D animation. Why would I advocate a 2D animated Star Trek show if I didn't like 2D animation?
The entire argument was about the superiority, especially for dramatic stories, of traditional animation to 3D CGI animation at abstraction-levels lower than that of complete realism.
Now I won't argue that I might have not carried that across in that one line, but what I meant were specifically, often deliberately cruder 2D works, like your Aqua Teen Hunger Forces and Space Ghost Coast to Coasts, which intentionally look a bit like shit and are not ideal vehicles for carrying serious storylines. Nevertheless, these are funny programs which achieve their goals despite, sometimes because of, their cruder aesthetic. Like crude, heavily abstracted 2D animation, heavily abstracted--but not necessarily technically crude--3D animation works for comedy.
There's a reason Venture Bros. is one of the best-animated Adult Swim programs, if not the best; while it is the funniest, it is also the one exploring the most serious themes and ideas, which it would be hard-pressed to do in Flash. I assert that, from my own point of view, it would also be hard-pressed to do so in 3D, regardless of the caliber of the 3D, because of the distracting nature of 3D outlined above.
I'm comparing crude 2D and 3D of any competence in their ultimate effect, not in their styles.
Edit: On the other hand, Home Movies used pretty crude animation, yet explored some serious themes from time to time, and the animation quality did not distract. Then again, it's a show about childhood, so the animation style went in hand with Brendan Smalls' view of the world as a child. Maybe the real, generalized conclusion to reach is that animation style must be in harmony with its content to "work."
JD said:
Well, it's one of those things that you can't really argue beyond "I like this/I don't like this," I think.
Didn't stop Chris and I from writing 1000 word essays, but I think it's our natures. 
And to be clear, animation style is never or rarely a complete show-wrecking factor. As always, it is the quality (or lack thereof) of the stories which matter.
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