Animators, Sharpen Your Pixels

By MICHAEL KRANTZ/SAN FRANCISCO

One flick of Rick Sayre's keyboard tells you all you need to know about the future of animation. "We start with a pencil and a paintbrush," says Sayre, senior animation scientist for the digital studio Pixar. On his screen is a graceful line-and-pastel drawing of two ants gazing across an underground landscape, an early rendering from the much anticipated film A Bug's Life, which opens this week. "When we recruit artists," Sayre says, "we still look for people with great hands." Then he hits the return key, and up pops the finished shot, lush with color, aglow with light and so intricately textured and three-dimensional that you feel you could step right into the screen. "As you can see," he says dryly, "the finished image is quite a bit more interesting."

Indeed. A revolution is under way in animation. The terrain is your local multiplex, and the insurgents are goateed, stock-optioned tech-heads armed with graphics software and high-powered workstations. Once upon a time, animated movies were the sole domain of winsome beauties and fearsome beasts, all lovingly drawn by hand. That era ended three years ago this month with the release of Toy Story, the first purely computer-generated feature and the only animated film to near the $200 million box-office mark since 1994's The Lion King.

A transformed industry is flourishing in Buzz and Woody's wake. The recent success of Antz was only the first shot in a fusillade of diverse CGI (computer graphics imaging) epics designed to appeal to moviegoers whose tastes are informed more by Super Mario and Doom than by Snow White and Bambi.

Even as A Bug's Life debuts this week, Pixar is hard at work on Toy Story 2 and a project dubbed Monsters, Inc., about the creatures living beneath a child's bed. DreamWorks is hoping for Antz-size success with Shrek, set for 2000 and featuring an ogre who pines for a beauty (some things never change). Universal is working on a Frankenstein project with CGI pioneer Industrial Light & Magic. Warner Bros. is readying The Iron Giant, about a machine that befriends a boy in 1950s Maine. And although both of Disney's '99 releases, Tarzan and Fantasia 2000, use traditional animation, each will contain elements created largely by computer.

Does CGI spell the end of the old school? Not by a long shot: the ease with which the crudely drawn two-dimensional, or 2-D, worlds of South Park and The Simpsons have won over America's couch-potato masses is proof that story matters more than even the most eye-popping special effects. "Sooner or later, all this stuff is going to seem antiquated," admits Andrew Stanton, the co-director and screenwriter of A Bug's Life. "The script is the only thing that isn't going to deteriorate over time."

Still, traditional cel animation sometimes seems like just one implement in an ever more digital toolbox. Half the shots in DreamWorks' upcoming biblical tale, Prince of Egypt, for instance, were created with special effects. The 7-min. parting-of-the-Red-Sea sequence used (take a deep breath) 10 digital artists, a 2-D artist, 16 traditional animators and two programmers.

"It's an exciting time in animation," says Chris Meledandri, president of Fox Animation Studios, which started work this month on Planet Ice, a science-fiction adventure that melds traditional and CGI art. "The shackles are coming off. We're creating whole worlds that come out of the imagination. There's so much freedom for storytelling now."

That newfound freedom springs from the magic of the silicon chip. Animation is a torturous process; a typical artist draws just three seconds of film a week. By automating tasks that once had to be endlessly repeated by hand (one Pixar program instantly covers a creature's body with pockmarks), computers cut that time dramatically. Such efficiencies haven't yet made animated films much cheaper, of course; actually producing movies for less money would violate the laws of Hollywood physics. "The cost for visual images comes down every year," says Carl Rosendahl, president of Pacific Data Images, which did effects for Antz. "But you'd rarely want to do today the same thing you did yesterday. So the per-shot cost doesn't drop, but your money buys things you couldn't even imagine five or six years ago."

The smooth, seamless look, for instance, of Toy Story's indoor scenes and plastic dolls--sorry, "action figures"--counted as dazzling effects in 1995. But before the film was even out, Pixar's digital warriors had moved on to the thornier challenges posed by A Bug's Life. "The more symmetrical the object, the easier it is for a computer to render," says John Lasseter, who directed both films. "The more organic, the more difficult."

Breathing life into the new movie's verdant vistas and insect masses presented precisely the sort of complex problems that digital innovators live for--that thrilling "You're kidding!" moment when the boss hands out a visual wish list for the tech guys to make come true. A recent tour of the Pixar studio, hidden in the freeway sprawl east of San Francisco, made clear how projects like A Bug's Life erase the boundaries between technology and art. Model builders sculpt clay facsimiles of the film's characters. Traditional animators act out roles before video cameras to decide just how the characters' limbs should move. Graphics jocks transform 2-D pictures into 3-D worlds, agonizing over how to make raindrops splatter realistically when they hit the ground.

And long before A Bug's Life was finished, Pixar was on to a new set of enigmas: how to render photo-realistic hair and skin, how to make fabric crumple with verisimilitude when the character wearing it moves. "Look at how stunningly beautiful this is," says Lasseter, standing in the dirt outside the studio, holding a colorful autumn leaf up to the brilliant midday sun. "Look at the incredible detail. It's spectacular. It's a whole new world you can walk in." Why? Lasseter smiles as broadly as a child, dreaming, no doubt, of movie fantasies to come. "Because we can."

--With reporting by Cathy Booth/Los Angeles

With reporting by CATHY BOOTH/LOS ANGELES