Martin Scorcese makes a cameo appearance in Hugo.

Right off the bat, let me say that Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is a wonderful film which I cannot recommend too highly. In a sense,it’s one of those generic, loving homages to the movies that come along every so often; though Hugo is in a class all by itself. While a “family film”  like this may seem off the beaten track for the director of Taxi Driver and executive producer of Boardwalk Empire, it also appears to fit in with much of what he’s been dong throughout his career; in fact, I would venture to say this sort of sums up what he, as an artist, is all about.

Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès and Asa Butterfield as Hugo.

Hugo is about a young boy who encounters the elderly and forgotten film pioneer, Georges Méliès, who has been reduced to running a toy stall in the Montparnasse train station in Paris and  helps spur his rediscovery. (In fact, his rediscovery was prompted by an article published by filmmaker René Clair and Paul Gilson  in the October 15, 1929 issue of La Revue du cinéma; the two are represented in Hugo by the character of René Tabard.)  In the process, Scorsese gets to  show us Méliès at work in his Montreuil studio;  along the way, we also get to see clips from the recent restoration of the hand-colored version of Méliès‘ Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902).

Helen McCrory as Mama Jeanne (Jehanne d’Alcy), Méliès’ second wife, acting in A Trip to the Moon.

In a number of his films, Scorsese has been concerned with various, often unsavory aspects of his and America’s history/identity, such as Gangs of New York  and Mean Streets, while several of his documentaries, especially A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy — have concerned themselves with film history itself. Thus, it seems only natural and fitting that he should make Hugo, a film which seems to sum up how Scorsese sees himself as an artist.

Hugo sort of replaying a scene from Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, which figures in the film’s story.

In terms of production, I was initially a bit put off by the film’s use of 3D stereo, which seemed a bit off-putting with its sometimes obvious multiplane effects; but I soon realized Scorsese, cinematographer Robert Richardson and production designer Dante Ferretti were trying for a style evocative of illustrations for a children’s book; though it does have some resemblance to Brian Selznick’s illustrations for his The Invention of Hugo Cabret, from which the movie was made from, it also had more than a passing resemblance to the look of Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express, which works better than you might think. Anyway, go see it.

P.S.:  December 2nd — The always useful fxguide website has a nice piece on Hugo’s visual effects here (which is actually the first of two parts), which also lists a number of filmic references made in the movie beyond Safety Last. Incidentally, one of the tasks the effects team had to do was to convert some Méliès footage to 3D, which brought to mind something that Serge Bromberg (whose Lobster Films was responsible for the restoration of the color version of Méliès‘ Le voyage dans la lune noted above) did something quite similar and more interesting. As Kristin Thompson reported last year:

Méliès’s early shorts were often pirated abroad, and a lot of money was being lost in the American market in particular. After the Lubin company flooded that market with bootleg copies of a 1902 film, Méliès struck back by opening his own American distribution office. Separate negatives for the domestic and foreign markets were made by the simple expedient of placing two cameras side by side. The folks at Lobster realized that those cameras’ lenses happened to be about the same distance apart as 3D camera lenses. By taking prints from the two separate versions of a film, today’s restorers could create a simulated 3D copy!

Two 1903 titles–I think that they were The Infernal Cauldron and The Oracle of Delphi–triumphantly showed that the experiment worked. Oracle survived in both French and American copies, and the effect of 3D was delightful. For Cauldron only the second half of the American print has been preserved. Watching the film through red-and-green glasses, you initially saw nothing in your right eye, while the left one saw the image in 2D. Abruptly, though, the second print materialized, and the depth effect kicked in. The films as synchronized  by Lobster looked exactly as if Méliès had designed them for 3D.

The Bioscope, Luke McKernan’s invaluable blog, notes that tomorrow the Cannes Film Festival is presenting “what may be the film restoration to beat all other film restorations — the colour version of Georges Méliès‘ Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902).” While the film is far from being lost,  all known hand-colored prints of the film were considered lost until 1993, when a copy, in very poor shape, was turned up by Filmoteca de Catalunya in Barcelona. The print was then acquired by Serge Bromberg’s Lobster Films, who overcame great odds to restore the film in time for Méliès’ 150th birth year celebration.

Further information on the restoration can be found at the Technicolor Film Foundation website, where you can also download a pdf of a gorgeous 192-page book,  La couleur retrouvée du Voyage dans la Lune/A Trip to the Moon Back in color, in both French and English, from whence came the illustrations for this post.

Bromberg, whose Lobster Films (along with Dave Shepard’s Film Preservation Associates) is one of the most respected brands in classic films on DVD, also serves as Artistic Director of the Annecy International Animation Festival. I only met Bromberg once, during one of his visits to Los Angeles, when he paid a call on animator and film collector Mark Kausler. At the time, Bromberg was elated over his recent discovery of a different cache of Méliès films, which I believe he had turned over to the La Cinémathèque française. Thank God, his enthusiasm for Méliès and his films has not wavered.

After seeing How to Train Your Dragon and The Secret of Kells back to back, I noticed that both films finished with rather elaborate and visually complex climaxes. Such sequences have become commonplace in animated films these days, and can be seen in movies ranging from Astro Boy to  Shrek Forever After, a trend that seems to have been  facilitated by the introduction of digital technologies. It is a development that can most easily be explained by what I call (for lack of a better term) Deneroff’s Law, which is admittedly a variation of Parkinson’s Law and applies to both pre- and post-digital animation and live-action filmmaking.

In 1958, C. Northcote Parkinson, famously stated in Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, that, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” And Deneroff’s Law basically states: Given more powerful and complex tools, filmmakers will inevitably use them to make more complex films.”

This rather simplistic observation is by no means original and in fact was inspired by a comment John Lasseter made during a phone interview about Toy Story 2. If I remember correctly, he said something like when presented with a computer 10 times more powerful, rather than using the added power to produce animation 10 times quicker, animators will usually opt to make their animation 10 times more complex and expensive.

I then noticed something similar in Michael Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age that

When Disney ordered the switch to rough animation [around 1932], that procedure made it possible to pass down much more work to the lowest — and lowest-paying rungs — and so greatly increase the animators’ output.

In fact … everything indicates that the animators’  footage actually declined sharply as they delegated more work. Although the Disney studio’s staff more than tripled between 1930 and 1932, the number of films changed hardly at all. In 1930, the studio completed nineteen cartoons; in 1931, twenty-two; and in 1932, twenty-two again. … As Disney pursued an ever more refined division of labor, breaking the work into smaller and smaller components, each worker’s output did not rise — as could be expected in a normal manufacturing operation — but fell. (104)

In other words, Disney expanded his staff in the early 1930s for some of the same reasons that companies like Pixar or Weta Digital will add additional computing power. I would also, for instance,  argue that Willis O’Brien, Ub Iwerks, Max Fleischer and Walt Disney adopted the multiplane camera (first developed in Europe by Lotte Reiniger and Berthold Bartosch) in the 1930s for some of the same reasons. (See my earlier post on multiplane technologies here.)

For O’Brien, the multiplane setup he devised for King Kong enabled him to create imagery far more complex than he could previously do using traditional stop motion techniques, as well as more credibly blend it in with live action than was possible with his earlier work on The Lost World.

For Iwerks, Fleischer and Disney, their multiplane systems similarly enabled them to expand beyond the limits imposed by traditional cel animation technology. Up until the introduction of the multiplane camera, drawn animation was constricted by the use of 12 field animation paper (10½" x 13½"), though Disney termporarily trumped his rivals by using 16 field paper (13½" x 16½"), which was over 50% bigger, thus allowing for more detailed drawings.

For instance, the following image from Fleischer’s Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (Dave Fleischer/Willard Bowsky, 1936) in which Sindbad’s Roc is about the fly off to kidnap Olive Oyl, was done as a traditional cel setup, though possibly using 16 field paper.

Now compare it with a frame from the next shot using Fleischer’s Stereoptical Process which used three-dimensional instead of painted backgrounds that resulted in a sharper sense of perspective and detail.

But with the introduction of digital ink and paint, multiplane effects were much easier to implement and also allowed the introduction of computer animation into the mix. But in accordance with Deneroff’s Law, one could point to the ballroom scene in Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise’s Beauty and the Beast as a way of using technology to increase the scene’s complexity.

As time went on and digital imagery became more prevalent, so did the complexity of what passed for traditional drawn animation, as seen in this shot from the climax of Ron Clements and John Musker’s Treasure Planet.

The same effect could also be seen in live-action movies. Once upon a time, studios could boast of films with huge sets and cast of thousands, and actually mean it, as in this recreation of ancient Babylon in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance.

Visual effects could substitute to a certain extent, but were limited by pre-digital technology (though not as limited as those available for traditional drawn animation). The following shot from Stanley Kubrick’s widescreen epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, while perhaps breathtaking in its splendor, is nevertheless rather static.

George Lucas’ Star Wars (Episode 4: A New Hope) pushed the technology a bit further and got more dynamic results, creating a greater sense of depth and detail, as seen in the film’s opening shot.

With digital technology, you could create vast vistas and populate them with both people and/or creatures, as seen in the scene where Forrest Gump addresses an anti-Vietnam War rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (the size of the crowd was grossly inflated) …

or in this scene from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers populated by an endless numbers of alien insects.

Of course, the development of more powerful digital technologies need not always lead to increased visual complexity, but clearly the temptation is there.

(By the way, could the increased number of shots in movies in recent years be related to the introduction of  such non-linear editing systems such as The Avid?)

I just became aware of the British Film Institute’s YouTube Channel which is featuring the first screen version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which was directed  by  Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow. The BFI, which is touting its restoration in conjunction with the release of the new Tim Burton film, notes that, at around 12 minutes (of which only 8 survive), it “was the longest film yet produced in Britain.” It also features “an early appearance by the [Hepworth] family dog, Blair, who would become famous as the star of Rescued by Rover(1905),” one of the most famous of early British films.

All this and the attempted fidelity to John Tenniel’s original illustrations, is all well and good; but what interested me most was the film’s use of Georges Méliès-style special effects, which I found quite delightful.

From the for what it’s worth department: In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle on his work on The Twilight Saga: New Moon, special effects maestro Phil Tippett (seen here accepting the 2009 Georges Méliès Award for Artistic Excellence), was asked:

Q: What’s the last movie you’ve seen with no special effects or visual effects in it?

A: I don’t think they make them anymore. Probably “The Informant,” although I bet you there were visual effects and I just didn’t notice it. I thought that movie was terrific.

I went to see Joe Wright’s The Soloist mainly because it was based on the book by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez; I haven’t read the book, but I do recall reading his initial column about Nathaniel Ayers, the homeless cellist which the film is about. (Lopez’s  columns were one of the things I missed most after I left Los Angeles in late 2003.) Though I think the film suffers from a sometimes rather self-conscious technique, in the end it has more pluses than minuses; and one of the surprising and unexpected  pluses is an abstract sequence depicting  Ayers’ synesthesia when he listens (pictured above) to the opening movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3.  Here are three images from the sequence:

The sequence was the work of Double Negative, the London-based special effects house which also worked on Wright’s Atonement. Although the film’s credits give Andy Hague sole credit, Double Negative’s website notes:

[Steve Wright] was inspired by the abstract films of the 1970′s, in particular the work of Stan Brakhage and Len Lye when it came to the Synesthesia sequence, where musical genius, Ayers, visualises music as colour.

Double Negative’s VFX Supervisor, John Moffatt, supported by VFX Producer, Emma Larsson and Executive Producer, Melissa Taylor, conceptualised a simple [approach] using coloured lights, crystals and glass. Elements were shot in a dark tent on a parking lot and Moffatt worked closely with VFX film editor Andy Hague, to create a sequence that seemed to be moving and changing colour with the music.

The Life archive notes: "Electronic sight gag created by comic Ernie Kovacs in which he appears to be peering thru head of actress Barbra Loden as part of his TV special ‘Ernie Kovacs’."

This and the photo below (which shows how the effect was done) were by Ralph Morse and done in March 1957, which were probably included in the cover story on Kovacs. Kovacs created something of a sensation with his half-hour NBC special, The Ernie Kovacs Show. Usually, NBC specials were 90 minutes, but Jerry Lewis was only willing to do a hour-long show and Kovacs very willing stepped into the breach to fill the allotted time slot. He took this opportunity to experiment with a show done entirely in pantomime; he also showed his penchant for experimenting with the medium, including doing visual effects. These type of "electronic" effects by Kovacs and other early TV pioneers in many ways anticipated today’s digital effects.

Anyway, as The Ernie Kovacs Website describes notes:

The 30-minute show Ernie did was devoid of any dialogue, and featured the silent character Ernie had been developing, Eugene, as well as the Nairobi Trio. The show’s centerpiece was an extended series of surreal sight gags following Eugene, a mute, meek character as a fish out of water in a stuffy men’s club. The sketch included the famous gag involving the gravity-defying olives and thermos of coffee.

"Comic Ernie Kovacs pasting black patch on forehead of Barbra Loden before posing her against black background which will create the illusion of a hole in Loden’s head for sight gag to air on his TV special."

Eric Brevig’s version of Jules Vernes’ Journey to the Center of the Earth is not a film I would usually comment on, but several things piqued my interest. First, I’ve always been something of a sucker for stereoscopic films ever since seeing Bwana Devil, the film that started the first wave of 3D films,  when it came out in 1952. Its recent resurgence is something I look on with interest, though I’ve limited my recent viewing to animated films such as Meet the Robinsons and Beowulf. And as I’ve recently taken up teaching the history of visual effects, it was also time for me to check up on what’s happening in the “live-action” side of things when special effects are involved.

The film, which has a modern scientist  discovering that Verne’s book is science fact and not science fiction, is a rather pedestrian affair. As expected, it has the usual, ill-conceived money shots, in which objects and fluids of all sorts are aimed or thrown at the viewer, which have plagued 3D movies since Bwana Devil. Better is a sequence of a roller coaster ride in a mining shaft straight out of Ben Stassen’s Devil’s Mine Ride, an early CGI ride film.

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Then there are the visual effects, which is interesting since the film is Eric Brevig’s feature directing debut, especially given that  most of his recent credits mostly were as visual effects supervisor on such films as The Day After Tomorrow. (Are visual effects, like TV commercials and music videos to be the new path to directing movies?) Though most people will focus on things like the mine ride and prehistoric beasts, including the obligatory T-Rex, I was intrigued by the problems involving the film’s use of matte paintings.

Matte paintings have been around movies from its very earliest days and continue to be an effective (and economical) means for creating environments ranging from simple houses to vast panoramas (as in the scene above). Matte artists have effectively adapted to digital technology in recent years, but stereo imagery seems to have posed a something of a problem in Journey. The thing is that the matte paintings sometimes look like paintings or backdrops better suited to a stage play than to a dimensional environment. I suspect this is not as evident in the 2D version of the film, but the film’s matte artists have not been able to effectively adapt to 3D. I would think matte artists will eventually overcome this challenge, but it’s always interesting to see how the film world copes with new technologies.

By the way, if you do see the film, stick around for Bruce Schluter’s animated  end title sequence, which makes much better use of the mine ride material than the film  itself.

This post is by way of a posing a possible historical question. In reading Richard Rickitt’s book, Special Effects: The History and Technique, I was brought up short by the following illustration (on page 184) of the miniature rear projection setup created by Willis O’Brien for the original King Kong (1933):

O’Brien created this setup to allow him to add live action footage using rear projection with his stop motion puppets; the latter, as can be seen, performed in what can only be called a multiplane space. I was immediately struck by the resemblance between it and Ub Iwerks’ multiplane camera and the Fleischer Stereoptical Process (aka Setback) created by Max Fleischer and John E. Burks. The resemblance is all the more intriguing given the fact that the Iwerks and Fleischer devices were finalized soon after King Kong premiered. (The Disney multiplane camera would not be ready until 1937.) As such, I wonder what influence, if any, O’Brien’s work had in their development?

Leslie Iwerks and John Kenworthy, in their biography of Ub Iwerks, The Hand Behind the Mouse, note that his multiplane camera had a horizontal orientation, much like O’Brien’s setup, and was first used in the 1934 cartoon, The Headless Horseman. In addition,

Because Ub’s multiplane camera was horizontally oriented, it was well-suited for experiments in stop-motion animation as well as for the studio’s typical cel animation. A stop-motion film entitled The Toy Parade was filmed but never released using the new multiplane technology. (pages 130-131)

When I asked Kenworthy about the Iwerks-O’Brien connection, he wrote that,

… what I gleaned was that Ub had read descriptions of Disney’s prospective Multiplane and understood fully how to use it. Being that they were physically located on the second floor of a building … they could not of course build a vertical one. Having the Fleischers vets there may have [led] them to [a] discussion of what Max was doing there, but no discussion ever came up about O’Brien. … However, and this is what I found really interesting, the tests were done using stop-motion figures. There were rumors that a stop-motion film was made called The Toy Parade, but I could not confirm that. Ralph Somerville remembered animating in stop-motion there, but didn’t recall on what. … So to make a real link, I don’t think so, but there is no reason to think that Ub wasn’t aware of what others were doing. I just never heard Obie mentioned at all.

I’m not sure that necessarily settles the question. Even so, what then about a Fleischer-O’Brien connection? The Stereoptical Process involved did not really involve distinct planes of action, but a 3-dimensional set in back of a platen for the animation cels as illustrated in this detail from the patent drawing:

Again, like the O’Brien and the initial Iwerks design, Fleischer/Burks used a horizontal orientation. If Iwerks was aware of what Disney was doing, one must assume Max Fleischer was as well. But who influenced who is not that simple.

The first known multiplane camera was developed for Lotte Reiniger’s marvelous 1926 silhouette feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed illustrated on the left. The purpose was not to create a sense of depth per se, but to give the capability of animating different types of action at the same time. For instance, the main characters might be animated on the top level with animated backgrounds done on another level; the latter included some abstract animations by Walter Ruttman,

Berthold Bartosch, who was also part of the film’s small crew, used a similar multiplane setup to add depth to his his 20-minute cutout film L’Idée, whose production began in France in 1930 and was finished in 1932.

In any case, O’Brien’s role in the development of the multiplane animation camesell and the Stereoptical Process remains is an intriguing possibility.

The Oscar for Best Animated Feature went to Brad Bird’s Ratatouille from Pixar, beating out Persepolis, which was my favorite. In so doing, the members of the Academy went against the trend to honor smaller independent films in the Best Picture category, as opposed to blockbusters like Ratatouille.

The Best Animated Short Film went to Suzie Templeton’s wonderful version of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter & the Wolf, which was my favorite among the contenders.

Although the Visual Effects Oscar is not one usually embraced by the animation community, this year’s winner, The Golden Compass (which I have not seen) seems to have earned its statue because of its digital character animation. (One should remember that Ray Harryhausen, an animation icon if there ever was one, made his mark in special effects.)

Visual Effects Oscars seem to go to movies where the effects are of the How did they do that category. In the process, they ignore work which may be amazing in its own way, but does not try to call attention to itself. For instance, I was particularly impressed by the Dunkirk sequence in Joe Wright’s Atonement done under the supervision of Mark Holt. One would hope both types of visual effects would get equal visibility, but that’s not likely to happen much outside the effects community itself. (The producers of Atonement, I’m sure, were more concerned about getting a Best Picture Oscar than trying to compete against giant polar bears.)