Something strange is happening in our cinemas. Once a surefire money spinner, the special-effects spectacular is often flopping at the box office. Meanwhile, DIY documentaries, low-tech animation and arthouse dramas are earning unprecedented interest and acclaim.
Some commentators argue that this is a transient blip as audiences recoil from the summer blockbuster glut. But others point to a deeper shift that goes beyond cinema to embrace pop music, visual art, fashion and other cultural fields. William Higham, who runs the forecasting agency Next Big Thing, relates this new lo-fi mood to the popularity of neo-traditional designers such as Kath Kidson and the resurgence in painting over conceptual Brit Art.
We are now, Higham argues, in a “post-bling” culture that prizes homespun honesty over airbrushed perfection. “If you eat too much comfort food, there comes a time when you want something healthy,” says Higham. “We are in the middle of an emotional, moral and cultural detox.”
In the field of animation, Hollywood is certainly rediscovering the appeal of traditional techniques. One reason is simple financial logic. With computerised features now routinely costing upwards of $100 million, even massive grosses do not always translate into huge profits. Consider Shrek 2 and The Incredibles. Despite huge cinema admissions, the stratospheric DVD sales expected for both films never materialised. Even last year’s computerised Tom Hanks stocking-filler, The Polar Express, one of the highest-grossing films of 2004, only just recouped its $150 million outlay.
Ironically, just weeks after Disney closed its traditional animation department, a return to hands-on methods over 3D computer graphics is being spearheaded by several high-profile releases. Howl’s Moving Castle, the latest box-office smash by the Oscar-winning Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, opens this week. It will be followed next month by The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the debut feature outing for Claymation duo Wallace and Gromit, and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, which combines stop-motion methods with wire-frame puppets.
All three films value quirky storytelling over slick surface gloss, although some incorporate “stealth” computer effects amidst their DIY techniques. “We have used a lot of 3D technology in making our films,” Miyazaki admitted to me at the Venice film festival last week. “Actually, too much. We should use our pencil and paper again.”
Also in Venice, Burton seemed ambivalent about the current CGI backlash — after all, his effects-heavy live-action adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been a huge hit. But the director concedes that computerised slickness is becoming boring. “I have no problem with computers, only with their overuse,” Burton says. “Certain projects you can only do with computer animation, such as The Incredibles. You wouldn’t do it in stop-motion, but you wouldn’t do Corpse Bride on a computer, either.”
Ironically, the more photo-realistic digital animation becomes, the more its novelty wanes. “Everyone assumes that the ultimate Holy Grail for us is doing a realistic human being,” Pixar’s John Lassiter said recently. “But that’s not the case because you might as well take a camera, an actor and it will be more successful.”
Outside animation, too, Hollywood is waking up to the fact that big is not always beautiful. The surprise hit in America this summer was the documentary March of the Penguins. Effects-driven spectaculars mostly performed badly, including The Island, Stealth and xXx: State of the Union. And those that did well — War of the Worlds, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Batman Begins — were based on literary source material. Coincidence?
DVD sales now account for 60 per cent of studio profits, with a longer shelf life that favours lower budgets and more adult themes over multiplex “event movies” defined by their opening weekends. Some commentators suggest we are starting to see a return to the auteurist 1970s when, inspired by the neo-realist cinema of 1950s Italy and the nouvelle vague of 1960s France, the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese created a vogue for low-budget, personal stories.
Ironically, this Easy Rider, Raging Bull generation also spawned Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the future architects of the summer blockbuster. Born alongside the multiplex boom of the late 1970s, these mega-budget spectacles were targeted at adolescent repeat viewers, opening on hundreds of screens at once, and judged by the performance of their opening weekend. In such a ruthlessly competitive climate, smaller films dependent on word-of-mouth success were squeezed out of the market.
But in recent years there has been a commercial revival in effects-free, talk-heavy ensemble pieces. This is partly because a new crop of studio-backed boutique production houses, such as Miramax, Paramount Classics and Fox Searchlight, have proven that mid-budget films can offer huge returns for relatively small risk. For a modest $15 million outlay, American Beauty made more than $150 million in cinemas and $200 million in DVD rentals. Lost in Translation earned back more than ten times its $4 million price tag, while Sideways and Crash, each costing less than Tom Cruise’s average fee, have proved equally lucrative.
Another key factor has been the availability of cheap digital cameras and home-editing software.
Ironically, while high-end Hollywood special effects become increasingly costly, the tools for the DIY filmmaker have never been so affordable. Hence the boom in budget features. Assembled for pocket change, Jonathan Caouette’s arty memoir Tarnation and Shane Carruth’s sci-fi thriller Primer have both shamed their bloated Hollywood rivals in intelligence, style and innovation.
Such movies even have an intellectual movement to call their own: Denmark’s “Dogme”, whose manifesto rejects special effects and even artificial lighting in favour of strict docu-drama naturalism. Britain’s Michael Winterbottom, Mexico’s Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu and even superstar American directors such as Oliver Stone have all adopted aspects of Dogme’s grainy, hand-held style.
Higham likens the return to DIY, personal cinema to similarly cyclical currents in music. “It’s the punk aesthetic,” he argues. “Every few years rock gets so bloated that you need a punk movement.” In the field of music itself, the leaders of this trend are the White Stripes, the punk-blues duo who refuse to record on studio equipment made after 1963. A new generation of folksy singer-songwriters, including chart-topper James Blunt and Mercury Music Prize nominee K. T. Tunstall, reinforces this notion that we are living through a kind of early 1970s revival in semi-acoustic, rustic pop. Even stadium bands such as U2 have replaced the high-tech bombast of their 1990s tours with a stripped-down, garage-band format.
Both in music and film, hollow bombast may never go away, and the excitement surrounding Peter Jackson’s forthcoming King Kong remake shows that there is still room for CGI in the hands of a master story-teller. But the goalposts are clearly shifting. Fuelled by DIY technology and back-to-basics storytelling, mainstream moviegoers are starting to realise that simple human emotion is the most special effect of all.
