Movie Reviews

[gare]

Narnia: Two Paws Up [righton] [righton]

I went into the theater yesterday expecting The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to be a travesty. After all, it had the Disney Kiss of Death on it. But to say I was pleasantly surprised would be like saying Bill Gates has a few bucks to spare. Apparently, Disney bankrolled and distributed and little else; the director was the executive producer.

The linchpin is this: Aslan the lion was a success--he works as CG. Better still, all the CG animals work, and their presence is subserviant to the human actors (Lucy is the real star of the film, played by a 10 year old with no acting credits to speak of), and the story is complimented at the same time unfettered by the state-of-the-art special effects. Interestingly, the Christianity allegory was played down to a broader Good against Evil tale.

Just go see it.

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Interesting technical stuff:

?? ?Director Andrew Adamson directed Shrek. He appears to be quite talented at medeival tales and is as comfortable with humans as CG characters.

?? ?Jim May was one of two lead editors; he worked on Shrek also.

?? ?Liam (SW Qui-Gon Jin) Neilson was the voice of Aslan, cast late in production. Thank goodness they didn't cast Leslie Neilson...

?? ?Motion capture was used extensively to get animal walks done right.

?? ?Lighting capture was used on location to match animated sequences.

?? ?A laser device was used to sound the valley in New Zealand where the Narnia camp scene was done. The info was then used to 3D model it for CG extras, to match terrain.

?? ? The centaurs were a bigger problem than creating Aslon. The actors wore green-screen tights, and in distant shots, they wore furry pants because you couldn't see that the legs were jointed wrong for a horse torso.

?? ?Rhythm & Hues has been doing 3D photorealistic animation since the early 1980s, and they won the contract for LW&W. They have a lot of animal and fur rendering experience: "Cats and Dogs", and "Garfield 2" (they're in production with "Superman Returns" now). They use proprietary software (no Maya, Houdini, or Brazil). Aslan had 5 million rendered hairs and collision detectetion and wind simulation had to be used.

?? ?Industrial Light & Magic was called upon about halfway through production with sheer manpower at an ebb; it had nothing to do with R & H's competence. ILM basically did a lot of digital matte painting and the compositing work on the centaurs and the faun. Rhythm & Hues' biggest problem was data sharing; ILM uses different rigging setups for models, but the finished film has an overall consistent look.

?? ?Sony Pictures Imageworks was called in to do the London bombing opening and the beavers (the only cutesy homage to Disney in an otherwise dramatic film, but the beavers were cutesy in the book, too). The beaver models needed two different muscle riggings--one set for animal behavior and one for anthropomorphic stuff--they simply switched off one set depending on the action, thus saving on additional modeling. Sony had previous experience with fur and anthropomorphic behaviour with "Stuart Little".

?? ?Something called a manque, a sculpture that gets digitized for later modeling and animation was used for Aslon's facial expressions, quite startling and believable.

?? ?364 animators were employed for over a year; much animation wasn't completed until this September, and the teaser trailer in theaters in March used a lot of down 'n' dirty test renders. A crowd rendering system called Massive (used in LOTR) was used for the battle scenes: physical actors were in the foreground, prosthetic costumed actors with some CG replacement was in the midground, and Massive (low polygon modeling for the teaser) was used to complete the scenes.

?? ?Color correcting was done in a jury-rigged fasion. The CG animation was muddy in the midtones when test rendered to film when compared to location footage, so they changed most of the lighting in the modeling program. Gee, they should have just pressed Ctrl+L...

?? ?The kids in the river was done in an indoor tank, but they had to weather a lot of winter location scenes in Poland.

?? ?There were 1,400 CG scenes and Sony had to rent 40 Terras (4,000 GB) online for storage.

?? ?C.S. Lewis was a big-time evangelist and even pursuaded the leader of the Black Panthers to turn Christian in the early 60s.

My Best,

Gare

...anyone see King Kong yet? Wanna write it up here?

[p?tr?]

Thanks, gare! That was very interesting and after seeing it, I was kinda curious about what went in to creating it.
Oh, and btw, it's Aslan not Aslon. ;) I've read the book...acually all the books (the whole chronicles)
The only part in the movie that wasn't true to the book was the scene crossing the river. }:\ I don't know why they thought they needed to put that in there because it was about the lamest scene in the movie. Definately disneyfied. Besides that, I thought it was great! :} Definatly worth seeing.

[gare]

Aslan...got it. I'm bad with fictional names (it's taken me a month to spell Aragon correctly...which might make a good "Big Movie" in the future after the author completes the trilogy). I, too read the whole Chronicles, but only last year. Doesn't this film (book three I believe...C.S. Lewis did not write them sequentially) beg for a prequel, book one, where the legend of the time/space portal, the creation of Narnia, and the origin of the White Witch are unfolded? Clue for those who haven't dived in yet: the dottering Professor was the first to visit Narnia when he was a child.

Yep, liberties were taken in the movie, but none of them ruined the book, IMO. Stuff was a tad out of sequence, but that's what screenplay writers are supposed to do to: to get the tale complete in most senses within 2 hours. The river scene was okay, but not great, but incidentally explained the end of winter in Narnia.

I thought the latest Harry Potter movie wasn't faithful to the book, personally. I thought the screenplay was unbalanced, some characters were ditched and the darned thing took over 2 hours to tell. My idea of a bad screenplay is The Titanic, a nearly three-hour film with 1 hour of story to tell, while although Men In Black II was a rehash of the original, Barry Sonnenfeld and his editor made an 80-minute film feel like it was 2 hours; no fat, just the meat (as it was).

Timing is everything and I felt Narnia's screenplay was composed very well, despite the inaccuracies.

My Best,

Gare

[ronmatt]

Gare, your technical reports simply shouldn't be missed. GOOD READING and most informative. Do you write for any publications?

[gare]

Thanks, ronmatt--

I'm a career author and I've written magazine articles for the trade publications such as photography mags, but don't really gather industry tidbits as well as http://cgw.pennnet.com/ does.

My Best,

Gare