Anymotion. Animation.

In a previous blog post I had mentioned how I don’t really know much about animation. And I’d also mentioned how I was yet to see an animated movie with a tragic ending. For lack of any other source of entertainment, I did my homework in this regard. I finally got down to watching A Scanner Darkly this weekend and reading up on effects and techniques and all that jazz. So this post is really just about the movie based on Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel. However, this is not going to be a movie review. So you’re not really going to be reading stuff like “The screenplay turns choppy in places” but something more like “So they do all these weird things and then it ends up looking super cool”.

Wiki says that the movie was first shot digitally and then animated using interpolated rotoscope (this is where the “cool” bit comes in for us low-lives). Apparently, each minute of animation took approximately 500 hours to complete. Now for a 100 minute long movie, that’s a lot of work for something that wasn’t necessary in the first place. By which I mean the plot didn’t really call for any animation except for maybe the creation of the scramble suit (which is some science-fictional thing these undercover agents in the movie wear and it goes through a whole series of changes by the second… which again is a lot of work when it comes down to creating it). So the director, Richard Linklater, was basically just indulging his whims when he decided he wanted to animate this film simply because there wasn’t enough animation for adults out there. This again takes me back to my previous post where I said there’s no hope for you if you’re not cuckoo in the head. Given the fact that the story is set in this Orwellian, dystopian society, the movie might have turned out well enough even without all the animation. But then again, maybe well enough was not good enough.

In an interview with The New York Times, Linklater says how the whole process meant making the movie twice, literally. Things like just getting Keanu Reeves’ beard right took a whole lot of attention to detail. This meant creating a “Style Bible” for each of the characters for the sake of consistency in style and features. And to think Dick’s daughters weren’t exactly kicked about having Linklater make a “cartoon version” of the book which dealt with the serious issue of drug addiction, something Dick had undergone himself.

Although the technique used in the animation process of the film isn’t exactly new, the results achieved went on to create a style that digital artists would now try to mimic just to get the “Scanner Darkly effect”, which is probably a big deal in itself. This reminded me of a conversation I had with our animation director the other day who was really depressed about the state of affairs in the Indian animation industry. Even with all the optimism about the animation movies we have lined up in the near future, it makes you wonder if they’ll ever achieve the cult status of A Scanner Darkly. Or if they would at least initiate something new that is to stay. If it does, then there’ll be that much more to know and learn about animation. If it doesn’t, then it’s going be animation dystopia of a completely different kind for us.

The Afterword: Apologies to Sal who was more offended about being called an Englishman than he was about being called flaky.

Shikha Gupta