AudioShocker

Eager to hop on the recession-era 3-D movie craze, I ran out over the weekend to see the recently-released stop motion feature Coraline. The movie had enough cred going for it in the first place, being stop-motion in the first place, and based on a book by Neil Gaiman (killer of Batman extraordinaire), but the fact that it was being projected in 3-D at my local theater made it a must-see. It may be the case that the resurgence, after a decades-long dormancy, of 3-D movies is unrelated to the current globo-economic travails (this, anyway, seems to be the commonly held opinion; that it was simply a technological breakthrough that facilitated the current craze--something to do with being able to watch 3-D for a prolonged period now without getting a headache (I did, in fact come out of the movie with something of a headache, but I also hadn't had much caffeine that day, so I can't with 100% assuredness blame the 3-D for it)), but it seems to me that a recession-era audience is primed for a ridiculous atavistic fad. But, then again, the digital 3-D thing was already happening a couple of years ago, in a time of relative prosperity (relative to post-9/11, Iraq debt times). Though, before I let my language get too jaded there, I will take a step back and appraise my own movie-going experience. There was one major pro, and one major con to the viewing experience.

The pro: The world-building of Coraline was really pretty stunning. This was the most welcome aspect of the movie, that it wasn't going for straight-up crowd-pleasing 3-D effects, but rather had truly embraced the 3-D medium to improve the look of the world. There is one particular shot (which the filmmakers them selves clearly recognized for its awesomeness, since they returned to it three times) where Coraline is walking on a path at a top of a cliff and the house where she lives can be seen down below that best exemplifies the benefit of digital 3-D, as the depth of field greatly enhanced the experience of the animation. I oftentimes found myself most drawn to these types of aspects; the stars through windows, the ability of one character to truly stand in front of another. My memory of childhood 3-D experiences (few and far between, back in the '80s), recalls only that the 3-D happened only every-so-often, and mostly then in the form of those out-of-the-screen kind of effects (this is related to that technological breakthrough, I think, that we can now sustain 3-D worlds without making the audience sick). If Coraline had moved much slower and taken more time in moving through its plot, I wouldn't have minded, given the joy of just looking at what they had made.

The con: The action, I felt, as much as it might have been enhanced by the 3-D looked blurry and ill-defined to me. The main affect of this was that only in one or two places did I feel like the stop-motion was truly featured. This may be fine for some folk, but given that without it's obvious stop-motion-ness, the movie might as well have been computer animated, this strikes me as a major drawback. I'm not sure if this has to do with the 3-Dification--that the viewer just can't see the shit as well when it's stereoscopic, or if it's a result of the additional depth of field; that is, in a normal 2-D viewing experience, the direction of the action on screen is quite clear, and the viewer is guided by the action to follow it where it goes. With the illusion of the additional dimension, the viewer loses this guide and is confused into an inability to follow the animation as well. I'd have to go back and watch Coraline a second time to see whether or not I could follow it better, knowing, at least to some extent, what was happening, but I would guess that it was as much to do with the projection as the viewing.

This brings up a larger point, as to whether or not the stop-motion animation should have been more apparent. There's something intentionally atavistic about making a movie in this way--essentially any animation can and therefore should be made on a computer. There is, of course, a spectrum of techniques, from the good-old-fashioned hand drawn, cell animated cartoon, to the hand-drawn but digitally animated, to the all-out computer animated cartoon. And, of course, good and bad examples of each. Before I make a judgment on Coraline, though, I think I also need to appraise whether or not it was intended as an animation for-adults or not. "All audiences" strikes me as something as a misnomer, as most kids' movies contain a certain number of jokes-for-guardians, since they're the ones footing the bill. There are some movies that are just not adults-only; that is, not containing any aspects which will cause the moral police to warn people against it. So "all audiences" doesn't fit there, as the film isn't necessarily "for kids" either. Most animated features are immediately pegged as being kids' movies, but, along with this 3-D craze, I also sense a greater demand for cartoons-for-adults brewing as well (this is a similar sort of calling-back to earlier times (in this case, say, 1930-1945) as the 3-D thing, since it is well known that cartoon-movies used to be as much for adults as anyone else).

There is a famous article by the great paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, where he looks at the "neoteny" of Mickey Mouse, showing how Mickey Mouse swiftly evolved over the years to look more and more child-like (and therefore approachable, lovable, and most importantly, marketable). Of the many evils of Walt Disney, this can perhaps be seen as one of the worst; that Disney, in a manner similar to, and pre-conditioning the later Happy Meal innovations of McDonald's, aggressively sought a young audience, realizing that the then-booming American bourgeoisie, post-World War II, would have a new amount of wealth with which to coddle their increasingly spoiled children. What this did was significantly alter the perceived audience of animated fare from the historically broad (or even specifically adult) audience to a set of middle-class parents-and-children. In more recent decades, finally, several auteurs, or also groups of dedicated animators, most notable Miyazaki (if you need a specific example, I'd say Porco Rosso may be the best obviously-for-a-grown-audience that he and his studio has made), and Pixar (granted, this is a bit more complicated since they have always been producing films under the funding-umbrella of Disney, though I would argue that neither Ratatouille nor Wall-E were intended as a "childrens'" movies as such), have re-pioneered the notion that an animated film is as legitimately filmic as any live-action venture.

It is, of course, often quite difficult to identify the intentions of any given film, re: its ideal audience, but it can be done. I can already imagine the counterargument to my claim here, though, in that it will be said that any movie that I claim is "not for kids" is more accurately a movie-for-kids that I happen to like and think is good. Maybe so, but given that I'm an adult, and a highly discerning one at that, I think maybe this isn't so bad; it is not so great a misstep for a culturologist to presume that he is as good example of a cultural audience as anyone else. The argument pro-adult-audience for Coraline is that the mood of its world-building relies on a sense of the uncanny--with the alternative world being an eerily "better" version of Coraline's actual house--which is a mainstay of the horror genre. Horror-for-kids is generally non-existent, as it would scare the shit out of them. And the book it was based on was a "YA" book, not a kids' book, so that counts for something as well. Which is not to say that I mean to say "this shit was scary, therefore it's not for kids," but rather that the uncanniness which abounds in the middle-third of the movie is a characteristic of more sophisticated fare than that of more common kids' movies.

However, the final act of the movie, where it switches gears from an uncanny discovery narrative to a find-the-bobbles action sequence betrays the sophistication of the first two acts of the film, and gives serious fuel to the argument that Coraline is, you know, for kids. Especially given that the bobble-hunt is not at all of a puzzling variety, nor a caper, but much simpler. It is hard to imagine any "sophisticated" viewer not being disappointed by this. After all of the careful world- and mood-building, Coraline is given a jewel which allows her to "see through" the artifice of the other-world, and thereby very easily gather up the magic baubles which she needed to get. There is little tension through this sequence, as the "riddle" which is presented barely lives up to the concept of trickery. It is as though the makers of Coraline realized that, given the fact that their demographic was still going to primarily be parents-and-children, they could make two-thirds of a good movie, and the parents would just be relieved that it was going to get to its ending quickly once the final sequence was started, and the kids would hardly notice (if at all) the shift anyway.

So, until an even-better 3-D animated movie is made, it will be hard to come to any final judgment on the issue. But of course, given that 3-D will almost certainly still just be a fad, we may never see it reach its full aesthetic potential. The only way, as I see it, that it will be reached, is if a studio gives backing to a filmmaker who is more thorough-goingly willing to make an animated film for a grown audience in 3-D; it strikes me that the subtler aspects of that 3-D world, which must be more appreciated by the grown audience which has the wherewithal to compare it to that which came before, are the aspect which will need to be more thoroughly refined. Maybe someone will make a 2001: A Space Odyssey style, slow-paced animated film, and then we will truly be able to see whether or not anything good will come of the current 3-D resurgence.