“They’re talking cars, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And people watch them race?”

“The spectators are cars, too.”

“What about, like, the mechanics?”

“They’re also cars.”

“But what about…”

“THEY’RE ALL CARS! ALL CARS!”

Where do these cars come from? Are they built, or are they birthed? I’m not the first to struggle with a universe entirely populated with sentient cars. (Okay – and some trains, boats, and helicopters too.) I found this hypothetical cutaway image of Lightning McQueen, guessing at the biology that could be sitting, squelching, inside his metal frame.

I find that to be the more comforting alternative, frankly. When I was visited by the Thirsty Mayor about halfway through the frenetic Cars 2, my vague suspicion of the franchise snapped into focus.

You see, Lightning McQueen is a slick racing car, without even headlights to spoil his smooth lines. But what about Mater, his dim-witted tow truck best friend? Unlike McQueen, Mater clearly has doors.

Doors.

They never seem to open, but they’re there. Are they vestigial remnants of a time before these cars came to life? Before their engines erupted with teeth and gums and flopping tongues? Perhaps there was even a moment of truce – a time when these cars could think and talk and dream, but were still happy to let their drivers inside.

Or maybe it happened in an instant. A signal was broadcast from aerial to aerial. The doors locked. The side windows fogged to grey. The windshields eclipsed with enormous cartoon eyes. From that point forward all cars would drive themselves, and the human skeletons still belted into their seats swallowed down like bad memories.

More and more, comic companies are hoping to supplement sales by offering digital versions of their titles with limited animation and voice acting that sounds like a first take at best. They think it’s just adding a gimmick to an existing story, like, say, slapping 3D on an old film.

What they don’t understand is that forcing this motion onto sequential art actually breaks something fundamental about comic book storytelling. It suggests a group of executives throwing a comic on the ground and poking at it with sticks. “Look!” they say, jabbing at the page. “It’s moving! It’s moving!”

Every time I see another attempt at selling motion comics, I’m surprised at how many ways they find to fail. First there’s the dialogue. A lot of what sits happily in word balloons sounds utterly ridiculous when spoken out loud by even the best actors – and the quality of actors featured on these animations is, uh, variable. Yes, let’s be polite and say “variable”.

There’s also the problem with redundancy, as illustrated by the Watchmen motion comic. It has an actor speaking the narration and dialogue – at the same time as the words are appearing on screen. Transmedia theorist Geoffrey Long points out that this could be because one narrator is doing all the voices, much as they would in an audio book, and the visual component “thus gives viewers a sense of who’s talking”. That’s true – but unless it’s a children’s read-along affair, you don’t usually read a book while also listening to its audio equivalent at once.

(Geoffrey Long’s piece is a much more even-handed survey of motion comics than this one, so go read the whole thing. Now back to my ranting…)

Problems like these are secondary to something much more problematic. In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, he declares that if you want to paint a world full of motion, “then be prepared to paint motion!” And sequential art has developed an astonishing number of techniques to imply motion, both within a single panel and between them. Not just the closure required by two panels in sequence, but speed lines, dialogue placement, panel size, and endless others. (For the academically-inclined, I wrote more about this last year for Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal.)

Introducing literal moments of motion into these panels somehow doesn’t add to these techniques – it just replaces them. Look, I’ve clocked up so many years of comic reading that I’m as conditioned to the idiosyncrasies of sequential art as anyone. And yet the moment I see art creak into motion, something inside me feels like when Homer Simpson saw someone in a wheelchair:

“Hey, they have chairs with wheels and here I am using my legs like a sucker!”

It might not be rational, but there it is: if the pictures can move on their own, why am I bothering to turn stillness into motion in my mind’s eye?

Anyway, Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men motion comic is the most ‘animated’ I’ve seen. It loses the speech-and-text redundancy and makes much more effort to find cinematic segues. It’s almost a cartoon, but it’s still less effective than any fully-fledged, traditionally animated TV episode. At best, it is still – as comic commentator Chris Sims recently put it – “a comic for people who will do anything they possibly can to avoid reading”.

Hollywood is still learning the hard way that comic art doesn’t function as easy storyboards; now animators need to discover sequential art doesn’t provide instant keyframes. And I agree wholeheartedly with Long when he says that “while motion comics may offer interesting differences from both animated shorts and actual comics, they arguably offer real advantages over neither.”

If nothing else, motion comics should try a new name. ‘Motion’ only draws attention to something they do rather unconvincingly. And ‘comics’? Once they move, I’m not sure they’re comics at all.

UP

Directed by Pete Docter & Bob Peterson

Starring Edward Asner, Jordan Nagai, Bob Peterson

When Pixar heard that a ten-year-old girl with cancer might not live long enough to see their latest film, Up, they flew a copy to her house. She died soon after.

To summarise: Pixar are awesome, and the world is terribly, terribly unfair.

Up is the story of what happens when Mister Fredricksen, mourning his wife, decides to attach thousands of balloons to his house and fly it away to childhood adventure. Thank god Pixar put story before toy sales, because a crotchety old man and a fat Boy Scout sidekick aren’t exactly Optimus Prime.

Despite its beautiful use of 3D, Up mightn’t be held up as one of Pixar’s classics. It’s not as conceptually clean as their others, with a plot that happily creates its own logic a la The Wizard Of Oz – one far too gonzo to sum up in a line or two. Watching it, though, I laughed and cried more than I have at a movie in a long, long time.

Other reviews by me this month: Wendy and Lucy, Fast & Furious, and Anvil! The Story of Anvil. (You can read that last one over here).

Issue #32 is on sale now.

The one thing I remember clearly is an easter egg tucked away on the DVD that features the entire cast of the movie doing the dance from Michael’s Jackson’s “Thriller”. And it’s as creepy as hell. Watch:

I was reminded of this by writing about the anthropomorphic mutants living in M&M’s World, but also when putting together a piece on art that features forced dancing as punishment. It’s something seen in everything from the classical ballet to “Once More With Feeling”, the infamous musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Sometimes – as in the original Brothers Grimm telling of Snow White – it’s the kind of torture that wouldn’t be out of place in the next Saw sequel. The queen’s feet are placed into red-hot iron clogs until she ‘dances’ herself to an agonising death.

In other examples – such as Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes or the ballet Giselle – it’s forced dancing through magical possession. That’s somehow even worse. Moving against your will taps into the fear inherent in the cartesian split: that your body is not your own. Your brain might be screaming commands, but your limbs aren’t listening. It means the choice of “Thriller” here is more than just novelty. When the Final Fantasy characters are animated without individuality, they become zombies – corpses, jerked around on invisible strings.

Despite the fact that the BBC ran a hilariously panicky story on how human actors could quickly find themselves replaced by these ‘synthetic actors’, the stars of Final Fantasy are never exactly convincing. So why is watching them dance like Jackson – with soulless expressions and in perfectly calibrated clockwork time – so disquieting?

Chalk it up to the peculiar narcissism of human beings. Remember the rumbles of controversy about the Oscar-winning documentary March of the Penguins attributing comforting human motivations to its feathered stars? (The New York Times quipped in an articled called “Penguin Family Values” that it “…may be fun to find a moral lesson in that enthralling penguin movie, but anthropomorphism, like after-shave, is best used sparingly.”)

In his book on the mechanics of sequential art, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud says that we’ll often see anything with two dots and a line as a human face – and we’ll be more invested in it, too, because of the extra imaginative work we’ve had to do to turn the abstract into the familiar. It’s one reason why comic art is so involving; it’s also why everyone with a beating heart loves the socks-with-eyes that are the Muppets. We can’t help it. We’ll anthropomorphise anything we can get our human eyeballs on, and we’ll certainly attribute souls to stiff and charismaless Final Fantasy stars. McCloud goes on to say:

We humans are a self-centered race.

We see ourselves in everything.

We assign identities and emotions where none exist.

And we make the world over in our image.

We’re unable comprehend how anything could be, or think, or feel differently than us. Sure, it’s narcissism – but at least its side-effect is sometimes random excesses of empathy.

I’m endlessly pleased with Simon’s take on the story, originally commissioned for the Melbourne, and Other Myths exhibition. He yanked out the moments he found most interesting from the monologue and transformed them into smoky, stream-of-consciousness imagery. It looks like dreams feel.

(Plus there’s a handdrawn, copyright-smashing Batman cameo. How could I resist?)

Be Famous And Die
Simon O’Carrigan
2008, 4’45
A Melburnian’s monologue on the subjectivity and transience of fame and stone statues.

The Australian Panorama screens at 4pm,  Saturday 27 June, at the Australia Centre for the Moving Image.

And you can see some of Simon’s other stuff here.