Condiment Complement

Rating: Null/10 (12 October 2009)

This comment is on the IMAX 3D version.
This is superficially another lame morality play, with a childishly simple set of coordinated arcs: temptations, love and family. It features inventiveness as the talent, and I suppose we should be thankful it isn't sports.
But I found two things to really like about this, like enough to recommend it.
The first is that of the IMAX 3d animated films, it is the first I recall that used the expanded dimensionality in a way that was natural. It expanded the cinematic vocabulary and wasn't gimmicky. A word about the balance: when you have something new, the first goal is to make it seem as if it were always there, I think. Only then can you start to exploit what it offers in communicative power. It has taken us years to get here. Pixar couldn't. WETA couldn't, nor any of the SKG projects. It took Sony, who may actually be developing some skills.
I was impressed by how they handled space as a narrative device in their first production: "Monster House." Here, they simply enfold space as if you naturally were there, including emulating shots from many, many other movies — the ones we have seen so many times that we accept them as natural. Star Wars space navigation for instance.
That takes me to the second really wonderful thing. The people who made this know and love movies. There are scores of direct references: obvious ones from space and alien movies of course. Nice, esoteric ones as well, like the passing reference to "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman." There were as many of those as my mind could collect, probably one every couple minutes, every setup. But it seemed as well that even framing, lighting, color balance and movements of different kinds were references as well.
We will have to wait for some clever entrepreneur to make a movie annotation site where you can enter a scene's framing and search the corpus of movies to see where it came from, possibly intuitively. But they are there. This is a cinephile's cartoon.
The "girl" is a redhead of course. Of passing interest is the way that the acceptable shape of female bodies has evolved in this sort of manufactured world. Characters are an engineered mix of suppressing and exaggerating in some coordinated way, so that the backstory of the person can be read from the form of their body shape.
In films made with living actresses, the form is in the motion, carriage, dance. Here it can literally be in the shape, those subtle movements still being beyond the technology. Here, she is all pelvis and thighs. Now this is no small matter because these simple forms will affect a whole generation of desires and the pattern of caresses. These forms matter, and it is remarkable that Sony has these skills.
Watch them. Its exciting to see spatially cinematic competence. The jello scene must have been the first conceived. It is transcendent.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.