fucking tragic
so today i happened across a story that filled me with righteous indignation and frustration, and a wistful taste of what could've been. apparently, in the early 1980's, brad bird and john lasseter - two of the big brains at pixar and most innovative voices in animation in the past ten years - among other up-and-comers, attempted to create a full-length animated feature of "the spirit," a title soon to be completely sullied and misrepresented by frank miller.
the story can be found here.
while i've been an outspoken detractor of "the incredibles," i still think brad bird has created a surprising amount of revolutionary animation, and the pixar crew has completely revolutionized feature-length animation, if they do rest on their laurels and traffic in cliche at times. but this adaptation, considering its time-frame, would have altered forever the course of american animation. imagine if north america had the serious, legitimate view of animation seen so often in other countries? i would love to see the storied brad bird "spirit" pencil test. from all accounts, it sounds like the kind of treatment that the comic canon deserves.
so anyway, here's where the indignation comes in: frank miller.
frank miller understood comics for about ten minutes in the eighties. miller's incredibly kinetic work on daredevil, both as artist and artist/writer (with many thanks to klaus janson, without whom his art would have probably been completely obtuse and impenetrable), really made full and effective use of the comic book medium. and this understanding, as best i can tell, came from mining heavily from the will eisner treasure trove. this can be seen in his panel structure, the use of multiple forms to suggest movement, the implied passage of time from panel-to-panel, dynamic splash pages, shocking use of positive and negative space, and the expressive distortion of forms. the same can be seen in miller's work on sin city. while the content of his sin city stories were, again and again, regressive and noir-inspired, the style was still heavily informed by the medium.
which is why i can't understand for the life of me why frank miller would become so devoted to the live-action film adaptation of his comics, and the ones that inspired him, into a medium where the chief limitations are a single rectangular frame structure, the mandatory and continual movement through time, the cause-and-effect nature of lighting and shadow, and the physical limitation (in expression, in motion, in mutability) of the human form. it's clear that miller was so informed by noir and exploitation films that they leached into his content. i don't think anybody can dispute that. but what creates a profound logical disconnect for me is that he wouldn't just revert back to film noir convention when the strengths and weaknesses of the comic book format were yanked out from under him. instead, he uses green-screen digital backlot techniques, which take away the tactile nature of film noir's grit and the believability of live action, digital effects which use unreality as their ideology and method, and facial prosthetics to simulate the distortion of forms initially intended as caricature.
the world's fans of animation were robbed by history. the world's fans of comics and film are being robbed by frank miller.
the story can be found here.
while i've been an outspoken detractor of "the incredibles," i still think brad bird has created a surprising amount of revolutionary animation, and the pixar crew has completely revolutionized feature-length animation, if they do rest on their laurels and traffic in cliche at times. but this adaptation, considering its time-frame, would have altered forever the course of american animation. imagine if north america had the serious, legitimate view of animation seen so often in other countries? i would love to see the storied brad bird "spirit" pencil test. from all accounts, it sounds like the kind of treatment that the comic canon deserves.
so anyway, here's where the indignation comes in: frank miller.
frank miller understood comics for about ten minutes in the eighties. miller's incredibly kinetic work on daredevil, both as artist and artist/writer (with many thanks to klaus janson, without whom his art would have probably been completely obtuse and impenetrable), really made full and effective use of the comic book medium. and this understanding, as best i can tell, came from mining heavily from the will eisner treasure trove. this can be seen in his panel structure, the use of multiple forms to suggest movement, the implied passage of time from panel-to-panel, dynamic splash pages, shocking use of positive and negative space, and the expressive distortion of forms. the same can be seen in miller's work on sin city. while the content of his sin city stories were, again and again, regressive and noir-inspired, the style was still heavily informed by the medium.
which is why i can't understand for the life of me why frank miller would become so devoted to the live-action film adaptation of his comics, and the ones that inspired him, into a medium where the chief limitations are a single rectangular frame structure, the mandatory and continual movement through time, the cause-and-effect nature of lighting and shadow, and the physical limitation (in expression, in motion, in mutability) of the human form. it's clear that miller was so informed by noir and exploitation films that they leached into his content. i don't think anybody can dispute that. but what creates a profound logical disconnect for me is that he wouldn't just revert back to film noir convention when the strengths and weaknesses of the comic book format were yanked out from under him. instead, he uses green-screen digital backlot techniques, which take away the tactile nature of film noir's grit and the believability of live action, digital effects which use unreality as their ideology and method, and facial prosthetics to simulate the distortion of forms initially intended as caricature.
the world's fans of animation were robbed by history. the world's fans of comics and film are being robbed by frank miller.
