Sherry Chandler

may be the key to why it is I’m so disenchanted with computer animation (see below).

As defined by Stephen Hunter in his Washington Post review of Beowulf:

In “Beowulf,” director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called “motion capture” to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn’t mastered and what the technique can’t do is this: emotion capture.

The nuance of the dilated nostril, the licked lip, the involuntary swallow, the unwilled tear — all gone. Is that a loss? Hard to say.

What you are seeing is the process by which actors’ movements are recorded electronically, transformed into imagery, then inserted into a meticulously realized, computer-generated Dark Ages (it’s A.D. 506 on the screen). Zemeckis, of course, has used this technology before in “The Polar Express.”

This is the increasing reality of movies, this is the ‘wulf that’s at the door. Old dinosaurs like me can rant about pointy-headed issues like the diminishment of performance, the absence of chemistry in the cast (can electrons have chemistry? wouldn’t they have valence?), but this is the future and it smirks.

Neil Gaiman or no, I have no intention of seeing this movie. I’ll stick with Seamus Heaney’s 1999 translation. To quote Manohla Dargis in the NYTimes:

For the poet Seamus Heaney, whose gorgeous translation of the poem became an unexpected best seller after it was published in 1999, Grendel “comes alive in the reader’s imagination as a kind of dog-breath in the dark.” The reader’s imagination, of course, has long been one of the banes of cinema.

Dargis doesn’t care much for performance capture either:

Neither wholly animation nor live action, it is a sophisticated visual technique, and true believers see it as the future of movies, though really the most interesting thing about it is that it’s not intrinsically interesting.

To be honest, I don’t yet see the point of performance capture, particularly given how ugly it renders realistic-looking human forms. Although the human faces and especially the eyes in “Beowulf” look somewhat less creepy than they did in “The Polar Express,” Mr. Zemeckis’s first experiment with performance capture, they still have neither the spark of true life nor that of an artist’s unfettered imagination. The face of Mr. Hopkins’s king resembles the actor’s in broad outline, in the shape and curve of his physiognomy. But it has none of the minute trembling and shuddering that define and enliven — actually animate — the discrete spaces separating the nose, eyes and mouth. You see the cladding but not the soul.

Although the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home this morning, the temperature is frosty and the gloomy rain of the last two days have just put me in the mood to steal this fragment of a Thomas Hood poem, November, from Lance Mannion.

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member–
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!

If you have any interest in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, you might want to check out Lance’s post on the subject of My dark materials.

The only person in my family, as far as I know, who has read Pullman is my son, who is a fantasy writer himself and who finds Pullman well-nigh unreadable. As does Mannion, apparently. For myself, all I know is what I see in the trailers of the upcoming movie adaption of The Golden Compass, and they lead me to believe that I won’t be able to tolerate the computer animation.

Still the recent kerfluffle over Pullman’s Dark Material has aroused my curiosity somewhat and, if you’re interested at all, you may find Mannion’s take refreshing. Here’s just a taste:

The movie adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the first in the His Dark Materials series, is coming out in time for Christmas and the fake Catholics of the Catholic League are thrilled because it gives them a chance to rant and rail against another secularist assault on religion and to feel discriminated against and persecuted while they go about the business of bullying folks into shutting up and accepting the League’s Right Wing authoritarian heresies.

It’s probably people like Bill Donohue that Pullman had in mind when he made God the villain of his novels.

Before we go any further, a note to any members of the Media who may be reading. The Catholic League is not a religious group, it is not a Catholic group, it is a political pressure group pushing a reactionary political agenda that has virtually nothing to do with the teachings of the Catholic Church. If you feel you need a Catholic to give you a good quote for your story, the Church has people on their payroll who’ll be glad to talk to you, and none of them is Bill Donohue.

Alternately, you can call up the theology departments at one of the many Catholic colleges and universites and ask somebody there to explain things to you.

You don’t need Donohue and his minions for anything.

But that’s just an appetizer. You need to read the whole post to get to the main course.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a fantasy novel that deals with man’s need for a bit of the dark side and that isn’t “muddy with failed attempts at lyricism,” I recommend Hope Mirrlee’s Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926. But I must point out that Lud-in-the-Mist is adult fantasy, so the comparison perhaps isn’t fair. Still, I have to wonder why it is that those who write these young adult fantasies are such poor stylists.