Mined from the notebooks, Saturday morning, August 25, 2018. Posted Saturday morning, September 1.
Settling the question which is the better cartoon: ‘'”Despicable Me 3” or “Thor: Ragnarock”. What do mean, you didn't know that was a question? Of course it's question!
Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo as cartoon versions of Thor and the Incredible Hulk in the live-action cartoon “Thor: Ragnarock”. Yes, Hemsworth’s playing a cartoon. He’s just doing it without benefit of CGI. Ruffalo does the same when he plays the Hulk’s human alter-ego, Bruce Banner.
“Despicable Me 3” is a much better cartoon than “Thor: Ragnarock”.
I know. “Thor: Ragnarock” isn’t a cartoon.
Except that it is.
A pretty good cartoon, in fact.
It’s not just that it’s a CGI wonder from start to finish, to the point that it’s doubtful the actors ever worked in front of any actual set pieces or against any backdrops but green screens and you can count on your hands the scenes where they did, if they did. But the actors themselves play cartoon characters. I don’t mean that their characters are cartoon characters because they’re based on comic book characters. I mean the actors act like cartoon characters. They make cartoon characters of themselves. They play cartoon versions of themselves. Jeff Goldblum first, foremost, and funniest, although he has the advantage of being a living cartoon. But Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo (when he’s playing Bruce Banner. When he plays the Hulk, he is a cartoon), Tom Hiddleston, Tessa Thompson, Cate Blanchett, Karl Urban, Benedict Cumberbatch (who like Goldblum has the advantage of being a living cartoon) and even Anthony Hopkins and Idris Elba do excellent jobs playing it straight---the best way to play for laughs---and underplaying their parts so that they don’t come across as cartoonish. But, really, subtle about it as they usually manage to be, they might as well have worn motion-capture suits to create templates for the animators to draw on top of.
Jeff Goldblum, a living cartoon, as the Grandmaster. With Rachel House as his chief hench-living cartoon character.
(And of course the best and most lovable supporting character, Korg, the affable and gentle-souled gladiator made of rocks---voiced by director Taika Waititi, who joins Brad Bird in the distinction of being one of the best voice actors in his own film---is another actual cartoon.)
Then, “Ragnarock”, more than any previous movie in the Avengers series except “Black Panther”, is shot, framed, paced, colored, and designed to look like a comic book come to life. It’s as if Waititi and his cinematographer and team of designers were working from storyboards drawn by Marvel’s best and most freewheeling artists and colorists if not from an actual comic book. In fact, I haven’t read that they were, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Other way round, actually. So it is a comic book brought to life. And comic books are made up of series of drawings that are by textbook definitions cartoons.
Like the New Yorker, comic book publishers call their cartoons drawings. The New Yorker doesn’t want its readers to associate its humor with the funny pages. Comic book publishers don’t want their readers to associate their books with Yogi Bear and Scooby Doo.
Like I said, “Ragnarock” is a comic book brought to life and that’s to say it’s a cartoon. I said it’s a pretty good one. Actually, I think it’s a very good one.
Just not as good a one as “Despicable Me 3”.
Which isn’t to say “Despicable Me 3” is a better movie. I’d have to watch it again and pay closer attention this time than I did this morning [Saturday, August 25, 2018] to make the case one way or the other.
Thanks to Oliver Mannion and his employee discount at his big box store place of employment, we now have Chromecast, and last night we inaugurated it, watching “Thor: Ragnarock” on Netflix for last night’s {Friday, August 24] Mannion Family Movie Night. More on Thor in a bit. Chromecast worked like a charm. But we used Oliver’s computer to stream it. I haven’t explained how Chromecast works sufficiently to myself to completely understand it but as I do understand it, your computer or “device” is a supporting component of the system and as such it doesn’t need to be the most up to date piece of technology. This morning I decided to test it using my netbook. My old, failing, never that powerful to begin with netbook.
The netbook can handle some streaming on its own. YouTube clips and the like, for the most part. Whole movies are beyond its capacity though. I don’t even try to watch TV episodes. Attempting to binge watch would be an exercise in futility. And the banes of my online existence are autolaunched videos and commercials on news outlet websites. But I gave it a try and---wonder of wonders, miracles of miracles---”Despicable Me 3” streamed beautifully from start to finish. No buffering. No freezes. No crashing. I intended to watch just a few minutes just to see. But the longer I watched, the more caught up I got. I was impressed. Not just with Chromecast. With “Despicable Me 3”.
When you’re a Minion, you’re a Minion all the way…
I still only watched it with half an eye. There was a lot going on here this morning. But what I saw was funny and charming and well-written, well-paced, and very well-drawn. I got a big kick out of the parts I saw, especially the sequence in which the minions from their own gang and take over the prison. I can’t say if it’s as good as the first two “Despicable Me’s” but it seemed that the filmmakers avoided the curse of the third movie in a series. What really impressed me though was how clean it was. (I mean cleanly drawn not how family friendly, although it is that.) It was impressive on its own merits as a cartoon but particularly in comparison to “Ragnarock”.
“Thor: Ragnarock” is much more than a live-action (well, partly live-action) cartoon. It’s a great superhero movie, and the only thing that prevents it from being a great movie is too much of its comic and narrative effect depend on the audience having seen at least a few of the Avengers movies. Its greatest strength lies in how different it is, visually and in spirit and tone, from the previous movies. Its flaws aren’t due to its being to much of a cartoon but to the moments when it is too much like too many of the previous Avengers movies.
It’s gotten way beyond the point where I can confidently rank the Avengers movies. I keep changing my mind and resolving to watch some or all of them again before I make my list. I still think “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is the best, but you have to take that with a grain of salt. Nostalgia is definitely compromising my judgment. A close second is the first “Guardians of the Galaxy” and then, an even closer third, “Black Panther”. After that, it’s all up for grabs, except for “Iron Man 2”, which I put at its well-earned place at the bottom of the list. But if “Winter Soldier”,“Guardians”, and “Black Panther” aren’t the top three (But are you really going to argue?), they are my own three favorites. And right now “Thor: Ragnarock” is number four. (Back last November when it came out, before “Black Panther” was released, it was number three.) But still it’s like too many of the other Avengers movies in that the action scenes are too action-packed and the thrills are only sustained by piling up even more---more action, more bodies, more debris---until they collapse into big noisy messes. The heroes and the plot and the point get lost in the noise and confusion. And Waititi even includes what has become a standard feature of the final battles, an anonymous crowd running this way and that trying to escape the carnage but somehow just finding their way into more of the same sort of trouble and confusion. And it’s too busy.
Apparently Waititi can’t look at a piece of empty screen without eyeing it as opportunistically as a graffiti artist eyeing a blank brick wall instead of using it for its own beauty and effect. He fills every available space with whatever the GGI wizards can come up with. It’s great that he uses so many more colors than other Avengers directors have (the less said about Zack Snyder over making his joyless movies set in the DC universe and his allergies to light and color the better), but in too many scenes there’s too much color (He seems aware of it and even lets Thor---or Chris Hemsworth. There’s a lot of improvised dialog---make a joke about it) and characters, the Hulk in particular, often blend into the background. And he hasn’t learned how to stage a fight scene. The fight scenes look as if he just let the stunt people loose to see what they’d come up and then liked everything they did.
Clear skies ahead: Villain turned hero Gru and his partner in crime-fighting and in life, Lucy Wilde, fly into battle against a bright blue sky left beautifully empty by the animators who understand the how to use blank spaces to artistic effect.
Meanwhile the makers of “Despicable Me 3” like to keep bits of screen empty both of detail and action. Their color palette is bright and varied but they don’t feel a need to use every crayon in the box in every scene, so to speak. The action scenes are action-packed but keep within strictly set bounds. And even though the minions essentially look and sound and act alike, they’re well differentiated. Even in their group scenes, you can pick out all the individuals. And this is done through the drawing and lighting and not by over-writing and comic business and busy-ness. Finally, the animators and the writers have taken W.C. Fields’ lesson to heart. Whenever you feel like doing more, Fields said, do less!
Ultimately, though, what I admired most was “Despicable Me’s” economy of visual storytelling.
The film’s creators have learned a lot from Pixar and 1990s Disney. But I think they’ve learned more from...Chuck Jones, and he was a visual storyteller all filmmakers can learn from, even makers of live-action movies that aren’t live-action cartoons.
Marvel doesn't necessarily have the best stories, though they definitely have good ones. What they have is lots and lots of stories. The movies are based on the worlds created by guys like Kirby, Lee, Sterenko, Ditko and a host of others. Kirby was the great visualizer. I know people who have worked with and for him. Kirby thought and worked and told stories in an overblown visual style. Having long been a fan, it was wonderful seeing that CGI has caught up with his style. He hated empty space, especially when his mind was so full of detail. He could draw a complete page with the same effort as you or I could click an OK button. If you saw the movie Argo, where the rescue team needs a full length feature movie storyboard in 36 (or was it 48) hours. That part was real. Kirby delivered, and that sounded like one of his plots. Yes, they are cartoons or comic strips or bandes designee, but they are among the best of the genre.
(Kirby was the Erdos of comic books. They were both massively prolific.)
Posted by: Kaleberg | Monday, September 10, 2018 at 09:31 PM