Thompson On Hollywood

Petersen Museum Hosts the Art of Cars

I snuck out of work this afternoon for a peek at the Petersen Automotive Museum's new Pixar exhibit, which opens here in Los Angeles tomorrow (March 29). To be honest, I'm not that hot on cars (in general) or Cars (the 2006 Pixar film), but this show really is a perfect marriage: The museum cleared out most of its upstairs Hollywood Room (where the Batmobile, Herbie and the Mach 5 are normally parked) to display the paintings, sketches and maquettes created for the movie Cars.

It's a rare treat for animation fans. Apart from the Museum of Modern Art's big 20th anniversary tribute to the studio (this was back in 2006), much of this art hasn't been displayed off-campus. And as Elyse Klaidman, dean of art and film for Pixar U., explained, those "Art of ..." promo books Pixar releases for each film are compiled and printed too early to include the full spectrum of great work that goes into all these designs.

Elyse further explained that preparation breaks down into three stages — story, characters and environments — and the Petersen arranges them accordingly (it would be fair to add "marketing," the stage that explains the attractions most likely to interest the kids: "life-size" fiberglass replicas of Lightning McQueen and Mater).

Seeing the work divided up this way explains a lot about my reaction to the film: The story felt rather uninspired (a Doc Hollywood redux), the character designs leave the most fun to minor characters, but those Route 66 landscapes, with their hood-ornament-shaped outcroppings and retro Americana flair, totally steal the show.

Watching Cars, you can't help but be distracted by all that gorgeous, high-concept scenery, and an installation like this allows you to take all the time you want exploring the world John Lasseter and company created (maybe a "24-Hour Cars" screening, like the Hirshhorn Psycho exhibit). But there's a tremendous amount of thought that goes into every stage, as we uncovered when Variety first speculated about moving the eyes from the headlights (a la Herbie) to the windshield.

For the MoMA show, Lasseter and Ed Catmull wrote:

Many people don't realize that we have almost as many artists at Pixar working in traditional media — hand drawing, painting, pastels, sculpture — as we do in digital media. Most of their work takes place during the development of a project, when we're working out the story and look of the film. The wealth of beautiful art created for each movie is rarely seen outside the studio, but the finished film we send around the world would never be possible without it.

And now Angelenos have a chance to see some of that great work firsthand.

(Peter Debruge)

ShoWest: Summer Preview

Every year ShoWest screens an honor reel of movies that grossed over $100-million the year before. Which of the 2008 ShoWest promo pics will be on next year's reel?

Based on what I saw and reactions gleaned, here's my best guess:

Movie that could pass $300 million: the sequel The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which will likely improve on its predecessor with more action and more mature protagonists.

Movies that could go well past $200 million: sequels The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, starring Harrison Ford and Shia LeBeouf, Rob Cohen's China-shot Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, and Guillermo del Toro's epic-scale actioner Hellboy II: The Golden Army; plus non-sequels Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman as assassins training rookie James McAvoy, the invulnerable Will Smith as a homeless hero in Hancock, Judd Apatow's dumb male comedy Step Brothers, starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Marvel's Iron Man, which boasts femme appeal via Robert Downey Jr. and co-star Gwenyth Paltrow, and animated family originals Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks Animation) and Wall-E (Disney/Pixar).

Movies that could break $100 million: a remake of Marvel's The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton as a thinking man's Bruce Banner; for the femme audience, a remake of the HBO classic Sex and the City, a remake of the boomer TV show Get Smart, starring Steve Carell and Ann Hathaway, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's surrogate nightmare comedy Baby Mama, and a movie version of the Broadway musical Mamma Mia (also for musical fans); Judd Apatow factory comedies Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Pineapple Express; Ben Stiller's starry R-rated action comedy Tropic Thunder, starring Stiller, Downey, Jack Black and Steve Coogan; the frere Wachowski's adaptation of the anime classic Speed Racer, starring Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci; and George Lucas's animated sequel Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (Am I the only one who feels a shock that the film is going out through Warners? Even though Lucasfilm controls and markets the movies and collects the lions' share of the take, I feel like all Star Wars movies are supposed to have the Fox fanfare in front of them.)

Oscar Watch: Animation Tempest Over Beowulf

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
It's never too early to start debating Oscar, and over at the Gold Derby, Tom O'Neil is stirring up trouble by quoting Jeffrey Wells' thoughts on the animation category (which happens to be my beat over here in the Variety features department). Tom reports:

Jeff saw a reel of footage yesterday and it "may not, according to the Academy's 'Rule Seven,' be an animated film," he warns. "It's a real eyeball-popper and clearly something else in the realm of animation — each and every frame is, in fact, animated by the standard of digital animation — but the Academy seems to be saying that any film that starts with live action footage and then uses digital animation to enhance or augment that footage (like Richard Linklater's 'Waking Life' and 'A Scanner Darkly') is not eligible."

This is a non-issue. Beowulf isn't "animated over" traditional footage, the way Oscar-eligible "Waking Life" and "Scanner Darkly" were. It's a performance capture-based film, just as "Polar Express," "Monster House" and (Savion Glover's dancing scenes from) "Happy Feet" were. That doesn't mean that the animation community is crazy about motion-capture movies (the "Ratatouille" end credits featured the following quality assurance guarantee: "100% genuine animation. No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film"), but then, they resisted computers at first, too. Nor should it suggest that traditional keyframe techniques aren't featured heavily in motion-capture films (the word "shortcuts" is misleading, since more time and expense is ultimately expended in trying to translate live-action performances through CG than would be true in either the hand-animated or live-action versions of the same film).

Comic-Con: Pixar's Robot Movie Wall-E and Selick and Gaiman's Coraline

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[Posted by Peter Debruge] Going in to Comic-Con, we published a list of the 10 most anticipated movies being presented in San Diego. Coming out of the convention, the two films I can't wait to see in their entirety were nowhere to be found on our original list (that's the beauty of Comic-Con, really).

First, there's Pixar's next toon, "Wall-E," from "Finding Nemo" director Andrew Stanton. "What if mankind had to evacuate earth and someone forgot to turn the last robot off?" he asked the crowd. "Overpopulation and runaway consumerism literally buried the world in trash." Stranded on a landfill planet, Wall-E is a rusty, 700-year-old trash-compacting robot who excavates the waste for clues about the humans that once lived there. His only companion is a cockroach (good thing Pixar made their last movie about rats — it should help prepare auds for more animated vermin), but it's not long before he's whisked aboard a starship, where he falls in love with a probe droid named Eve who doesn't return his affections.

Stanton shared a significant chunk of footage from the first act of the film and brought out Ben Burtt, the sound designer who brought R2-D2 to life through beeps and whirs. "One of the things I knew from the beginning is that I was not going to have dialogue in the traditional sense," Stanton said. Burtt developed a grammar of sound effects for each character, which the team is recording first (as they do with dialogue) so the artists have a performance from which to animate. "I was basically making 'R2-D2: The Movie,'" Burtt joked.

Ratatouille: Disney Garden Sells Food

Imagine my pal Jane's discomfort when she bought organic blueberries at her local farmer's market—and found a picture of a rat on the plastic container.

"It's Disney Garden produce, to promote Ratatouille," I said.

"It's a rat!" she replied. She hasn't seen the movie yet.

Brad Bird and Pixar make the movie's lead-rat chef cuddly, pink-nosed and adorable. He even washes his hands before he prepares his gourmet food. Pixar animators devoted years of study with San Francisco's top chefs as they prepped the movie. UPDATE: Here's a NYT video of Bird talking about how he made the movie.

Ratatouille: Bird Scores, Pixar Takes Over Disney Toons

Pixar's Ed Catmull and John Lasseter have won their battle with Disney over made for DVD animated sequels. Having seen Brad Bird's extraordinary Ratatouille over the weekend, it makes sense that Disney would let these guys have their way. What a record: they've produced one original winner after the other. Much detail, hard work, skill and talent went into the painstakingly-crafted Ratatouille--and it still plays like a delicious light-as-air crepe suzette. I'm still reveling in all that yummy French food.

Richard Corliss writes up Pixar and Ratatouille in Time.

MovieCityNews' David Poland has lunch with Michael Giacchino, the composer of Ratatouille.