The Simpsons Anomaly

This week, America's first family finally makes the transition from television to the big-screen. The Simpsons has become a global phenomenon since it began nearly twenty years ago, generating over $2.5billion of revenue for Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network. In those two decades it has maintained its high standards, and remains one of the best shows on television. With its massive crossover appeal, sharp satire and rich tapestry of supporting characters to occupy the otherwise anonymous town of Springfield, its transition to the big-screen is perhaps long-overdue and certainly tentative. The film itself lacks the confidence of the show and struggles to get to grips with the cinematic format. Still, it remains head and shoulders above the competition.

The Simpsons Movie is something of an anomaly in contemporary cinema, as the bulk of the animation is created using traditional techniques. Of course, with the TV show having the status that it does, the use of CGI was never seriously considered for the production of the film. Although the film does utlise CGI for a handful of shots, all of which notably stand-out as cinematic in style, the movie is otherwise a traditonally-animated feature in a Hollywood where CGI has all but taken over.

When Pixar, with the backing of Disney, produced Toy Story back in 1995, the film became an instant industry landmark. As the first ever fully computer-animated feature, the industry was shown what was possible. Crucially, Pixar invested as much in the story dynamics as they did in the technology that brought it to life. As a result the film drew attention both for its significance as a feature-film, and for the intelligence and imagination of its screenplay, a key factor explaining its appeal to a crossover audience of both kids and adults. Pixar have since dominated the industry in the quality stakes, producing an excellent sequel to Toy Story, as well as films such as A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo.

Twelve years since Toy Story proudly took a bow, CGI has effectively claimed a monopoly over animated Hollywood. DreamWorks, having developed its own animation division, has established itself as Pixar's chief competitor, helped in large part by the massive success of the Shrek franchise, the first of which won the first Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2002. However, now that the technology has become commonplace, the crossover audiences are being increasingly abandoned. While the quality of the animation increases with each new release, the standard of writing - always the hardest part of any film production - has begun to fall. Over the last two or three years, cinema-goers have been inundated with a barrage of CGI features, most of them aimed squarely at the kids. Releases such as Madagascar, Over The Hedge, The Wild, Shark Tale and The Reef, tell very similar stories of animals in peril, and increasingly blur together before fading into oblivion. Each project usually finds big-name stars, all attracted by the minimum of fuss (no make-up or costume-fitting necessary, no waiting around for hours on-set), and an end product they can show the family.

Traditional animation is seen by many as old-fashioned, and is becoming increasingly irrelevant in Hollywood as CGI becomes the default setting. Japan's Studio Ghibli is responsible for recent releases Howl's Moving Castle and The Cat Returns, as well as influential classics Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, the only traditonally-animated films to be seen on general release in Europe and the US in the last few years. This is partly due to the old-school preferences of influential director Hayao Miyazaki. In the UK, even Aardman Animation, the home of Nick Park and Wallace & Gromit, is beginning to experiment with CGI. The recent Flushed Away saw characters created in the classic Aardman aesthetic, but put through a CG filter.

It seems likely that it may fall to the film industries of the Far East to rejuvenate traditional animation in Hollywood. Just as Japanese and Korean horror has heavily influenced an American counterpart hungry for ideas, perhaps the same will happen for animation. In the meantime, it seems that only a film with the iconic aesthetic of The Simpsons will appear on the big-screen without coming completely by way of a hard-drive.

Appeal of the Director's Chair

This month, screen-legends Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood are joined by fellow movie superstar Mel Gibson, in seeing their latest directorial offerings transfer to DVD. De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, a compelling yet ultimately disappointing spy drama telling the story of the birth of the CIA, is only his second film as director. In contrast, Eastwood builds on an already esteemed directing career with Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, two separate films looking at the crucial World War II battle, from both the American and Japanese perspectives. Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (as the publicity sometimes reads) forms the director’s more relaxed follow-up to the massively successful Passion of the Christ.

Historically, big-name actors have had generally smooth transitions to the director’s chair, and the Academy has responded generously. Two of the biggest travesties in Oscar’s history have involved A-List actors moving behind the camera, and the loser on both occasions has been Martin Scorsese. Raging Bull, perhaps the greatest sports film in cinema history, was beaten to Best Picture in 1980 by Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s family drama, and his directorial debut. A decade later, GoodFellas, routinely celebrated as the greatest film of the 1990s, and a clear showcase of Scorsese at his artistic best, fell victim to Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner’s fairy-tale Western, and coincidentally also his directorial debut. The reality is that Oscar has long carried a conservative leaning and has a strong history of favouring the most openly conscientious filmmaking, regardless of whether the most conscientious is also best. Ordinary People was a study of the American family unit disintegrating from the inside, whilst Dances With Wolves was the first of contemporary Hollywood’s revisionist Westerns, following a Unionist soldier’s trip to the Frontier, and the relationship he forms with the Indians he finds there (and, for the record, the Indians of the Mid-West who I’ve spoken to think of themselves as both Indians and Native Americans).

The Oscar success of Dances With Wolves paved the way for Eastwood’s astonishing revisionist Western Unforgiven, which came two years later in 1992. Eastwood directed himself in Unforgiven, as Costner had done in Dances With Wolves. As ever, the bottom line in Hollywood is financial, and even the biggest names in the business face constant pressure from the studios to deliver on their investment. Mel Gibson directed historic epic Braveheart only on the studio-imposed condition that he also take the starring role of William Wallace. The producers were only too aware that with only one low-key entry on Gibson’s directing CV (1993’s The Man Without a Face), his name was worth far more on the cast-list than it was on the crew. In the past few years, however, Gibson has become a force unto himself through the stunning global success of The Passion of the Christ. Turned down by every studio, Gibson invested around $20million of his own money. Despite the film’s bloodletting making it more akin to the Saw franchise than to The Ten Commandments or The Greatest Story Ever Told, the Christian movie-going public responded in their masses, with church groups block-booking theatres across the US. Gibson walked away as the wealthiest actor in the world, with $800million in global box-office.

The creative freedom that Gibson now enjoys has most recently resulted in the superior Apocalypto, a grandly presented tale set against the backdrop of the last days of the Mayan civilisation in Central America. For all its marketing pretensions, however, the film tells a simple tale of a young tribesman kidnapped following an attack on his village, and his subsequent attempts to escape and rejoin his family.

So long as someone else’s money is at stake, however, terms and conditions apply. George Clooney, while routinely celebrated in the media as encapsulating what remains of Hollywood’s integrity, is an individual who plays the game with aplomb. Through the likes of Batman & Robin, The Peacemaker and Out of Sight, he established himself as an A-Lister, before making his directorial debut in 2002 with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The film was a low-key success, and his next film as director, the excellent Good Night, and Good Luck, telling the story of pioneering broadcaster Ed Murrow, won more attention from the Academy than from the movie-going public. With his true filmmaking interests failing to make big impressions at the box-office, he has been forced to satisfy the studios by playing supporting roles in the films he directs, whilst also balancing his output with more commercial fare. The most obvious of these has been the Oceans 11 franchise, remade from the rat-pack original, and then spawning two sequels of its own. The films have been, on the most part, a lot of fun, but ultimately disposable. However, they have been commercial enough to bring studio funding to projects that Clooney is more passionate about, such as Good Night, and Good Luck.

Ultimately, the director's chair clearly hold its appeal. A body of screen-work under the guidance of myriad distinct directors, can create their own insightful stamps on an actor seeking to make the transition. Perhaps crucially, however, a career in the director's chair, and behind the scenes in a wider sense, generally carries a greater longevity than is offered before the camera, especially in modern cinema. It is longevity that established actors tend to identify among their primary objectives, as they sets their sights on the future.