How broad is the phrase "computer animation" these days?
Consider the two computer-animated movies arriving in Utah theaters today:
» One, Disney/Pixar's "Up," was produced on a multimillion-dollar budget by a slew of animators and technical wizards, processed on a massive server farm in Emeryville, Calif., and backed by the marketing might of the Walt Disney Company.
» The other, "Sita Sings the Blues," was made for peanuts by a self-taught animator, first on her Titanium G4 laptop and later on 2- or 3-gigahertz computers with commercially available Final Cut Pro software, and remained in legal limbo for more than a year over the copyright clearances of the soundtrack's vintage songs.
Both films serve as triumphs of the animator's art, while relying on contrasting, yet inventive, visual styles to tell compelling stories about lost love.
How did these unique movies get "the look" that defines them? The Tribune talked to both directors about their movies' visual signatures.
A passage from India » Nina Paley was reading The Ramayana , the ancient Sanskrit epic, while visiting her husband in India in 2002, when she drew some cartoons of Sita, the long-suffering and always faithful wife of the heroic warrior Rama. "I didn't even think I was going to animate them," Paley recalled recently.
It was when Paley left India for a job in New York, and her husband dumped her via e-mail, that she was struck by the personal connection between her painful breakup and Sita's torments.
Telling Sita's story as an animated film was "the therapy I needed to get through it," Paley said. "I thought it would take six months. It took a lot more. But I apparently had to make the film to move on."
Paley -- a former comic-strip artist who started making animated shorts in 1998 -- had no permanent home to come back to, as she and her husband had lived in San Francisco before he left for India, and the thought of moving there without him seemed too painful. Instead, she was reduced to "sofa surfing" at friends' homes in New York. One friend, a record collector, introduced her to the songs of '20s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, whose optimistic rendition of torchy love-gone-wrong standards spoke to the filmmaker.
"Most of the songs I used are ones that I cried to, especially 'Lover Come Back to Me,' " Paley said. Hanshaw's recordings were in the public domain, but Paley later learned the songs' composition copyrights were still held by corporations -- causing problems that ultimately led to her film's unusual release.
To adapt The Ramayana , Paley started animating a Betty Boop-like Sita, with a large bosom and booty bracketing a pencil-thin waist, singing Hanshaw's songs to accompany the action -- for example, the song "Who's That Knocking on My Door?" when Rama rescues Sita from a castle.
But that's just one of five animation styles intercut through the movie. "I knew I wanted to use more than one style," Paley said. "I wanted to reflect the various Ramayana art traditions."
Paley uses watercolor paintings, imitating traditional depictions of The Ramayana , to tell Sita's story. Collages are used to detail the epic's backstory, with three narrators (shown as shadow puppets, another artistic tradition in southern Asia) debating the legend's finer points. A sensual Indian dance is rendered in rotoscope, a familiar form of tracing live-action (think of the "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" segment of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine"). And then Paley used doodle-like hand drawings to show her and her husband's story.
She figured out how to thread together such different visual styles, but copyright laws stymied her. Paley couldn't afford the $220,000 to secure the rights, though she eventually negotiated the price down to $50,000, with strings attached. This February (a year after the movie premiered at the Berlin Film Festival), Paley made the movie's rights available free to anyone through a "share-alike license" online. Theatrical distribution is a piecemeal affair, as anyone can hold a screening for free -- though Paley encourages "creator endorsed" screenings, and has found small distributors to send 35mm prints to theaters.
Paley is trying to develop a "free content" business model, where the artistic work itself is free -- but the ancillary products, like DVD packaging or merchandise, bring in the money. With new technology making filmmaking tools available on the typical home computer, such new business models will be essential for at-home artists to profit from their work.
"It's changed everything," Paley said of the technology. "Riff-raff like me can make feature films."
Ballooney bin » Pete Docter, the director of Disney/Pixar's "Up," was playing with images of floating things with his co-director/co-writer Bob Peterson. Then they thought of a house being carried aloft by balloons.
It was that image that got them thinking. "Who's in there and how did they get there and why are they escaping the world?," Docter said on a recent visit to Salt Lake City.
The "who," Docter and Peterson decided, was Carl Fredericksen, a 78-year-old widower who decides to escape the troubles of urban life by hooking up thousands of helium balloons to his house and floating away to South America. Carl's plans change when he realizes he's got a stowaway: Russell, an 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer eager to earn his last merit badge.
The look of Carl, wife Ellie and Russell reflects the balloon-lifted house.
Designing Carl, "early on, we just started drawing squares," Docter said. "As we conceptualized him, he felt very square. You have this square guy and he's got square glasses, his body is sort of a square. Everything about him is closed off and uptight."
On the other hand, Ellie and Russell "are more of these upward, curvy shapes," Docter said.
Carl and Ellie complemented each other, like the house and the balloons, Docter said. "They were necessary for each other," Docter said. "Without Carl, Ellie would have floated off and never gotten anything done. Without Ellie, Carl would have just stayed in this little box of his own doing."
The visual hints are carried throughout the house Carl and Ellie shared. Docter notes that when you see pictures of Carl, they are in square frames, while the frames holding Ellie's picture are oval.
Docter -- a Pixar animator who began at the company making commercials and worked on "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" before directing "Monsters, Inc." -- acknowledges a subconscious nod to Looney Tunes in the depiction of Carl's house surrounded by skyscrapers, reminiscent of an image of Bugs Bunny defending his rabbit hole from construction workers. Docter included a similar homage, to the Looney Tunes classic "Feed the Kitty," in "Monsters, Inc." "Who knows what's in the back of your head, tumbling around," Docter said.
Another amazing image in "Up" is the otherworldly tabletop mountains of South America, where Carl and Russell eventually land the house. Docter and several Pixar colleagues traveled to Venezuela to see these mountains, one of which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to imagine dinosaurs for his classic The Lost World .
"I'm sure people are going to look at the movie and go, 'Boy, you guys have a fantastic imagination,' " Docter said. "But it's all based on stuff that we saw down there."
