THREE DEE THRILLS

Dick Pountain/14 August 2005/15:53/Idealog 133

The most memorable film I saw in the last the 12 months was Hayao Miyazaki's animated feature 'Spirited Away'. Filled with truly unexpected images - rare enough these days when even Pot Noodle ads have gone Dada - every single frame was so beautiful that you'd have liked to hang it on your wall, yet it still managed to convey a political/ecological message without rubbing your nose in it. Most remarkable of all though, it was executed in 2D, which surprises me because 3D animation is currently taking over the industry quite as thoroughly as colour once displaced black-and-white TV, or the talkies displaced the silent movie.

Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against 3D animation: on the contrary, as the old excuse goes, 'some of my best friends are 3D animators'. George, my old friend and neighbour in Italy, makes a living teaching masterclasses in Maya to advanced animation students. Despite being a science nerd myself, I became surrounded by animators from an early age when in the late '60s I moved into a Ladbroke Grove flat full of them - some of them then working on 'Yellow Submarine' - and I've failed to shake them off ever since. That's probably why I believe that 3D animation will be *the* artform of the 21st century (assuming you include in that category CGI effects added to live-action movies, since they all use the same software tools).

If you discount the far-from-popular squawkings of 1960's Musique Concrète, then 3D animation is the first instance of a wholly new artform, made possible only by computer technology - it would have been inconceivably difficult to create 3D cartoons using hand-drawn cel animation techniques, and people were still using physical models even as late as the first Star Wars movie. As the authoring tools for 3D animation gain in power, which they're doing at an incredible rate, it becomes possible to more and more closely emulate, if not the real world, then at least a live-action film of the real world, and as user interfaces get more sophisticated, the techniques are becoming available to non-technical artists and illustrators. If you ever get a chance to try Maya's Subdivision Surfaces tool, do have a go: it's just like squeezing and pulling on virtual  Plasticene. As a result 3D now falls within the budgetary constraints even of dodgy TV car insurance adverts, which is one way to take the magic out of it...

And that's where a doubt starts to creep in. Back in 1987 John Lasseter's 'Luxo Jr' inspired amazement and pleasure, as did Toy Story later on, but the recent flood of 3D features, from Shrek, through Monsters Inc. to The Incredibles, Shark Tale and Madagascar has rather disillusioned me. It's not just that plots and characters are often naff and sentimental - that's just as likely to happen in a live-action movie or a 2D animation, as a result of beancounter infection. The problem is that the illusion itself is starting to wear thin. All the characters, however much texture, environment- and bump-mapping they slap onto them, still ultimately look like stuffed toys to me. I'm beyond the initial amazement and, despite myself, becoming overcritical of the realism, something that never ever happens with 2D cartoons like the Simpsons or South Park.

I suspect that what's going on is actually physiological. The human visual system has a special function dedicated to recognising faces, and it's this ability that enables the art of caricature to flourish (2D cartoons are really just moving caricatures). We can recognise a person from a couple of well-drawn wiggly lines (and some of us see Mother Theresa in a slice of pizza). This effect is largely two-dimensional, based on the layout of eyes, nose, mouth and hair, and most importantly, recognition is immediate, without requiring any more detail. However once we decide something is a real three-dimensional object, we start to analyse it using a different brain region and want all the detail we can get about it. Look at any plastic Homer Simpson toy, or at that episode where Homer gets rendered in 3D in a 'Lawnmower Man' parody - it's no longer Homer, because there's actually too much information. So are 3D animators on a treadmill, forced to supply ever greater levels of realism as the audience develops a 'tolerance' to their product's appearance? Certainly Alias, the developer of Maya, thinks so because it continues to devote enormous resources to new plug-ins that model the dynamics of hair and fur, cloth, fluids and other fine-detail substances.

 I'm not sure this development toward ever-greater realism - toward being indistinguishable from live-action - is what 3D has to be about though. What interests me far more is its potential to depict worlds quite unlike this one, worlds with different physics and textures. Animators could try taking on board the deeper legacy of surrealism, not just the easy bits like shocking juxtapositions. They could seek inspiration in Max Ernst, de Chirico, even Krazy Kat. And they need to loosen up, to discover some three-dimensional equivalent to the sketchiness of the 2D cartoon, some kind of fuzziness and ragged-edgedness that can combat the tendency of everything to look as if it's moulded out of matte plastic. If they can do that then it will become a medium suitable for grown-up stories.