Haiku Thursday: Wrong AGAIN!
For our next trick, the
entire cast will cover their
heads with panty hose.
This whole situation is getting a little alarming, isn’t it? The Information Super-Highway has failed us again! Come on, Al Gore! Is this what you wanted for us?! (Note: For big fun, click on that link and see what a scrawny young pup Al used to be. It’s like his high-school yearbook picture, or something. “Most Likely to Bore People Out of the Young Environmentalists’ Club.” Poor Al.)
It seems that Angelina Jolie will be CGI in Beowulf. Here’s the catch, though: she’ll be CGI…as herself. And so will everyone else. Robert Zemeckis is using his new toy, performance-capture animation, to make perfectly normal-looking people into soulless animated onscreen droids. It’s not so much the process that’s problematic here as it is the product: if you’ve seen the creepy humans in The Polar Express, you know what I mean.
Maybe it’s all intentional. Maybe Zemeckis is taking a beautiful cast and using technology to render everyone totally unnerving on purpose. It’s a statement, see? Technology makes us flat and weird, and not really like people at all! We are Scandinavian monsters, people, ravaging the tiny villages of Web 2.0! And it’s all the programmers’ fault.
At least, that’s what I’m going to believe until Zemeckis a) says otherwise, or b) gets bored and finds a new technology with which to freak us all out. Arthroscopic animation, anyone?
Beowulf, Beowulf movie, motion-capture animation, Angelina Jolie, Robert Zemeckis
September 1st, 2007 at 4:22 pm
M’kay, am I the only one that thinks it’s funny that there are like six pictures of Al Gore on his wikipedia site and one is of his head in a jar in Futurama? Of all my contributions to the world, I hope appearing as an animated head doesn’t rate among the top six.