An inconsistency unexplained (yes, he's still talking about kid's movies)

I realised today that I seem to have inconsistent views on animation.

In my negative comments about Frozen, I said that computer animation that is close to photorealistic but which portrays humans with a cartoonish aspect (consider the enormous eyes in Frozen, for example) is distracting, as it makes the characters look like moving dolls.

Yet in my positive review of ParaNorman and Coraline, I made it clear that I can get a very particular kind of enjoyment from well done stop motion animation, where the characters really are "moving dolls".

This does seem odd, and I am not sure of the explanation.

I suppose I should say that it is not as if stop motion per se makes for a pleasing film - God knows there was a lot of stop motion dross made in the 60's and 70's for kids' TV (Christmas themed specials in particular) and I was never a fan.    But then again, the quality of the animation in those films compared to the output of Laika or Aardman movies at their best just bears no comparison.

(Speaking of Aardman, I enjoyed Rex the Runt on TV a great deal, and like the wry humour of Wallace and Grommit, but their last movie "The Pirates" was a serious "miss".)

So, to enjoy a stop motion film, it has to still have a good script.  But when it does, the appreciation of all the manual, hand crafted work that has gone into creating them somehow makes them very special.

As to why I don't like computer animation when it has the same sort of visual effect - I am still not sure.

I was partly inspired to think about this while listening to a repeat of The Uncanny Life of Puppets on Radio National.  I have good reason to be thinking about puppets over the last year - I did, after all, see one of the most spectacularly successful stage shows featuring a giant puppet only 6 months ago.

I think that this comment on why puppets can be effective is perhaps relevant to stop motion animation:

Amanda Smith:  In playing around with scale - puppets are often smaller or larger than life size - in that playing around with scale, and in looking lifelike but not too lifelike - as puppets also often are - is this something to do with their kind of strange compelling power? In looking sort of human but not entirely?

Neville Tranter: It’s very strange because what happens to the audience is: the audience know it’s a puppet. Everything is transparent. You can see right through it and it’s all in the imagination. It’s pure suggestion. But at the same time the fact that you can see how it’s being done makes it  even - strangely enough - it makes it even more magical.

Oddly, last week I also heard a bit of Phillip Adams talking to stage actor/director Robyn Nevin, and they mentioned how the very artificiality of stage productions is sometimes what makes them  particularly memorable. 

All very complicated, our perceptions of representations of life, isn't it?