By Pamela Pettler ANGLE on: HARRY, as a cascade of emotions cross his face. In animation, you never get to write those words. Sure, you get to explode machine beasts, or have a house uproot and chase you, or go underground and dance around with a bunch of skeletons. But you can never write - or count on - an actor's reaction shot to give you the powerful moment in a scene. So what do you do? One thing I do is find what I call an Emotional Touchstone: a visual, striking icon that represents the emotional story I'm trying to convey. Something simple, clear and graphically interesting. In Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, I wanted Victor to have a poetry in his soul that he longed to let out, which, then, the Corpse Bride would cherish and allow to blossom; so that the movie would become a story in which, as Tim put it, "the dead bring life to the living." So: the butterfly - the hidden beauty, a soul longing to escape, much as a butterfly escapes its cocoon; echoed at the end, when the Corpse Bride herself becomes the butterfly. Monster House is also about secrets and hidden depths: things are not as they seem. So: the telescope in DJ's room. Things are not as they seem to the naked eye - you need a telescope, or DJ's vision of the world, to discover its hidden truths. The house is not merely a house. The mean old man crabbily scaring kids off his lawn is motivated by a completely unexpected secret - and, in fact, is trying to do something very different than you think. The babysitter isn't who the parents believe she is. The video-game geek is actually a sage whose wisdom is at the heart of the kids' quest. And DJ is not the dumb kid everyone thinks he is; he's not even the powerless, babyish kid he secretly thinks he is. He's a hero; and it's, in fact, precisely because of his telescope. And when he finally gets inside that terrifying, kid-eating house, his telescope is echoed by the binoculars Mr. Nebbercracker has trained on him. The imagery of the Emotional Touchstone reinforces the emotional web being woven between the two "outcast" characters. Interestingly, in the advertising campaign, the telescope is featured as one of the iconic images of the movie: the three kids peering through the telescope, with the slightly warped image of the house visible in the telescope's lens. The entire emotional punch of the movie is right there, in that single image. Along with the use of iconic elements, of course, is the imperative to give your characters the same emotions, story lines, problems, perverse streaks, grace and wit that any live-action character might have. Depth. Resonance. All this might seem a lot for a kid's cartoon, right? But I truly believe that, in fact, animation is a true art form, a visual art, akin to painting or drawing. Especially as animation gets more and more sophisticated: In the rich and textured way computer drawings can be rendered, in the complexity possible in stop-motion puppets, in the facial expressivity possible in motion capture, in the way 2-D drawings can achieve a powerful beauty, we can see more and more depth of emotion. Animation isn't just cartoons for kids. It can be emotional and profound and moving and deeply textured, not just in spite of, but precisely because it is drawn, rendered by the human hand. And as writers, we can bring emotional depth, poetry, poignancy and lyricism that match the visual artistry. We can write straight from the soul - and give animation its beating heart. |
