Night Fury; Flight

Rating: Null/10 (29 March 2010)

The first major film where the agent takes a stake. This is sending shivers through CAA whose power resides in control of the performing talent. The old school agents and the performing talent have distorted the product. This business of animation studios and literary agents is likely to distort things in an equally damaging way. But for now, the shift is visible, welcome and exciting as getout.
This is actually written. It grows from within as good writing should rather that seeming like a desired shape made of chicken wire and filled with ordinary bits. Yes, we still have the moralizing because otherwise parents wouldn't think they were parenting. The rendering is cutting edge.
But what sets this apart is the use of space. Most folks don't notice this, but we have come a long, long way in five years. I have been following the advances in this. I'll say that if you have not been watching movies in that period, this could make you a bit dizzy because you will not have been walked through the incremental steps in our new spatial imagination.
The core quality of cinema is that the filmmaker gets to design your eyes. From the beginning, intelligent filmmakers have experimented with what character the camera might have. This is behind all the filmmakers I believe are great; each added and exploited some new character of eye.
With animation, and 3D modeling, it became feasible for the camera to behave in ways that a physical camera could not. Some filmmakers deliberately made their artificial cameras behave like old fashioned ones; perhaps they did not have the skills to move into unusual territory, but I think in most cases the decision was to make the fake world seem real by having the eye treat it as if it were real.
Two centers of innovation were WETA (Peter Jackson's shop) and Pixar. Both experimented heaving with vertical motion and depth. Much of this was in flight, sometimes through water. We have precedents, starting with Hell's Angels and slowly working through Star Wars (the original). Then an explosion, and experiments in often overlooked films: King Kong, Treasure Planet, Van Helsing. Now we have the two schools in full bloom.
Independently, Dreamworks just couldn't get its groove in animation. Heaven knows they tried to catch up, but they always seemed to be working in space left over from someone else. Here the agent-producer seems to have hired some real spatial talent and let them have control. Even the opening sequence where we see the village and then an attack is spatially thrilling.
Luckily, we have two 3D dragonflight movies playing side by side so we can see the two camps compared. Avatar uses WETA and the WETA philosophy. This has the camera as a companion in flight with its own distinct flight path. The excitement is in jumps not in the motion being shown, but the place of the camera.
This film adopts the Pixar philosophy which uses POV and POV-inspired notions heaving. In this notion, we are ghosts that can place ourselves anywhere we wish so as to see thing better. We do move, and our eyes do, but motivated by discovery rather than participation.
Compare in particular the idea of falling in love as shared, dangerous flight.
Thrilling. Simply trilling. We are seeing the birth of a new medium and will dream differently tomorrow.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.