By Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.com
Monsters, Inc." director Pete Docter sighed, long-distance."I keep picturing sunny tropical islands as a good place to work, to create characters in. And to research in, right?"
The last feature-animation company to try that, Square's "Final Fantasy," had a mysterious death at the box office.
"I didn't see that -- no time! -- but I wanted to," said Docter. "I heard there were problems with the script. It was hard for audiences to, um, access. And what's the point of recreating reality with computers? Animation is animation, not a substitute for live-action."
Docter's film is likely to be the next -- excuse me -- monster hit for Pixar and Disney, in the wake of the "Toy Stories" and "A Bug's Life." It is mind-boggingly animated and tremendously well-crafted, but what is most striking about it is the clever, classic script, with memorable characters and situations and wild, wild concepts.
"The story is always tricky. You have to take audiences on a journey and convince them that the drawings on the screen are people too. We have a little more time than feature films to prepare, and of the five years it took to make 'Monsters, Inc.,' about three and a half were spent solely on the screenplay," said Docter, who came up with the original concept while toiling as a major domo for Pixar veteran John Lasseter.This is his first film as director.
"Unlike a feature director, we're working one layer at a time -- angles, characters, objects, backgrounds -- compositing it bit by bit. As director, I make it fit smoothly. We videotape the actors as they make the audio tracks, and that helps a lot, but we hire animators based on their acting ability. Anyone can learn to use a computer; not many can use one to breathe life into a character. Animators are a certain personality type. Too shy to take up acting, perhaps, but talented enough to do so.
"We all have that common attitude. We all made flip books in 4th grade and ruffled the pages and watched the drawings come alive. Later, you work at making the drawings look like they're thinking and feeling. It's magic."
Although the technology has leaped forward since "Toy Story," it's apparent in the details -- the way clothes move, a face contorts, shaggy purple fur rippling in the breeze, that sort of thing."The technology gets faster, but we don't make the movies any faster," said Docter. "Instead, we ask more of it. "
Computers likely will never replace the all-too-human voice tracks. Docter experimented with having John Goodman and Billy Crystal record together and improvise, instead of the usual pattern of having each track recorded separately. The result was a natural interplay between the two that's a key to much of the film's heart.
"By the time the voices are cast, the characters are pretty well designed. Sometimes we'll take recorded lines of dialogue from big-name actors and try them on the characters to see what kind of voice fits."
Because Pixar's films are so visual, the script is storyboarded to death.
"We'd do enough storyboards for five or six feature films. That's where the humor and timing come from. You'd have a really talented, funny guy pitching a storyboard that wouldn't normally seem that funny, and we'd see where the humor is."
And don't think that because Pixar is a groundbreaking computer-animation company, the old methods fail to apply.
"We use pencils and paper all the time. The place is littered with it," sighed Docter.
Just when things are looking gloomy, thanks to the 9-1-1 War, along comes a piece of work like "Monsters, Inc." that reaffirms the resiliency and buoyancy of human nature. There's something about animation that cuts right to the heart, a kind of pure, emotional shorthand, which is why animation is so disappointing when it's done poorly, and so thrilling when it's done brilliantly, as it is here. There's no middle ground with animated features. No just-OK. ‘Monsters, Inc.’s’ critters
will have audiences
screaming with delight
Review by Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.comDuring World War II, the Nazis and fascists decorated their weapons with Disney characters, and Stalin regularly unwound after a day of apparachik bloodletting with cartoons in his private screening room. Want to really undermine the Taliban? Air-drop cartoons like "Monsters, Inc."
Like most great animation, there's a darkly serious undercurrent in "Monsters, Inc." On the surface it would seem to be the daily business of the monsters themselves. You see, the monster world is a kind of parallel universe. The monsters live, love, work and sleep in company towns just like ours. They clock in, they clock out, they work the production lines and flirt with the secretaries and avoid the scary personnel-resources grunts, just like we do. They wonder whether to walk to work or drive, just like we do.
The main source of energy in this world, however -- and this is a great, twisted idea -- is capturing the screams of human children. The monsters work in teams at the scream factory; the big, scary ones dashing through closet doors into our world and scaring the bejeezus out of kids, and smaller, goofy monsters manipulating the controls and capturing the screams in pressurizes containers. Without those collected screams, the city would go dark.
And there's an energy crisis. Human kids aren't as gullible as they used to be, and scream totals are tapering off.
The star team at the factory are best friends and roommates James P. Sullivan -- voiced by avuncular giant John Goodman and depicted as a kind of swimming-pool colored bear -- and Mike Wazowski, lime-green and all eye, with legs, arms and a fast, smart mouth attached, and voiced by Billy Crystal.
The laid-back "Sully" and the high-octane Mike are a memorable screen team. They sing well, too, thanks to another thoroughly Yankee score by Randy Newman.
Sully and Mike work like well-oiled and experienced athletes, and the scream-results are totaled on the factory charts with all the hoopla of an Olympic box score. But then a fearless little human girl accidentally winds up on the monster-side of the closet door, and we discover the other great joke of the film -- the monsters are more afraid of us than we are of them.
A fair amount of Lucy-and-Ricky slapstick ensues, all of it expertly timed and hilarious -- a side benefit of being able to endlessly tweak computer animation -- but all of it has to do with character development and story arc, instead of visual noodling. It is expertly crafted entertainment by people at the top of their game, and who love what they're doing.
More importantly, it's actually about something -- the bonds of friendship, the ability to trust, the fear of the unknown, unreasonable prejudices, tolerance of those who are different, joy in small things, not sweating the big things, the importance of honesty, the pain of personal loss. It's unlikely to be shown anytime soon in Afghanistan.
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