Tale #12 - The Tale Of Toes

Hi, all!

Sorry, guys. No daily sketches because I can't access a scanner but I'll make up for it on monday. I promise you guys that one. Anyways, I came back from watching Happy Feet on DVD. Interestingly enough, it's sorta the subject of one of today's discussions.

When I watched it, the animation was for the most part polished (although, the characters really couldn't portray expression very well in their character models. The expressions still came off unnatural.) and from that perspective, I can see why people could have been easily wow'd by this film. But for people like me, that's only scratching the surface. There was one major thing this film seriously sucked at - STORY! The movie's story was weak and even a touch boring. It was sorta like trying to make a broadway musical of "March Of The Penguins" and end up falling terribly flat. A story MUST have flow to it and move viewers/readers from Point A to Point B smoothly without leaving a whole hord of questions at the end or leaving the viewer/reader more confused than when they came in to this. Happy Feet did an excellent job of confusing me. As an example (SPOILER! Avert your eyes!) in the final scene when they let Mumble go back to the wild. They didn't explain the hows (and stuff) of it all. He just spontaiously appeared back at his home at the end saying pretty much "Yo! I'm back from the aliens now!" It was so much of a hasty jump that it confused me. All in all, I felt cheated of a story. If you don't believe me on the power of story and storytelling, try blindfolding yourself when you play Happy Feet again. Now does it have that same power? How's the story? Happy Feet can't stand up and keep its' head above water. The only thing that saved that movie was the animation, but their flaw was was trying to let the technology and the computers tell the story. Computers don't tell stories. People do. And Happy Feet, there were no humans telling the story or making a great story.

So it makes me think back to something Atari once said - "You can put s*** in a box and it will still sell." Now this was proven wrong with the major flop of E.T: The Game, but with Happy Feet, I can't help but to feel that there's a grain of truth to what Atari said. Happy Feet had a wonderful "box" with the "box" being its' animation. But what was inside the "box" was poor story but people bought this movie up because of how pretty the "box" was. The story was quite weak and could confuse you easily if you weren't careful. This was the computer's movie and not the human's and it's quite a sad thing. Computers are there to help tell the story, but they can't tell it for you. People animate. People create. People tell stories. And the computers never do nor should they.

So long and short of it, Happy Feet had good animation but had a crappy story. So a message to all you people out there - Computers can't tell or create stories worth a damn. It's the people behind them that do. So please when you watch a movie with excellent animation, please also pay attention to the story too because the story is just as important for without it, there's nothing to animate.

End uh... long and serious debate-type thingy. Uh.... yeah... XD