Monsters, Inc.

[magid]

Last night I went with MissDimple and ZZBottom to Millenium Park to see Monsters, Inc., courtesy of Mayor Menino, who has arranged to have a series of kid/family movies on Monday nights in different parks around Boston.

I hadn't been to Millenium Park before; it turned out to be just about next door to WRHS (which, in this case, Scholargipsy, would be West Roxbury High School), where I did my student teaching some years ago. I didn't have time to check the park out very thoroughly; the parts I saw were mostly playing fields and parking and other large, flat, grassy spaces. On the other hand, it was strange to think that we were in the city of Boston near the top of a hill and most of what we could see was rolling wooded hills.

There was a line for kids to get blue helium-filled balloons, which were lost on a regular basis (the breeze last night was approximately south south west, judging by balloon drift...). Most entertaining was when some kids tied six balloons to a soda can (we didn't know how full it was), watching the cluster of balloons carry the can high in the sky. I wonder where it will reappear. I wonder if they thought to put a message in the can... Of course, having balloons for kids meant that there were always one or two balloons blocking a bit of the screen.

The main feature wasn't to be shown until "dusk", but there were some cartoons to start. Then a brief intro by some politician, and a short video about the new voting apparatus they're getting in Boston that are optical scanners. A lot of the information was repeated multiple times, just in case you might've missed it the first three times, like how much faster it will be to set up these voting booths, and how much easier it will be to use. Not a particularly compelling public service announcement... except that when we looked more carefully at the sample ballot someone was filling out, the candidates were for the cartoon council (Bugs Bunny, etc) and for some superhero group (Superman, Batman, etc)....

None of us had seen Monsters, Inc. before; it's a very fun movie :-). Nicely done animation, interesting monsters, reasonable plot. It looked like people had fun working on it... (Outtakes at the end of animated movies always surprise me, since they're obviously more work, rather than recycled unused work.)

Note to self: really, must get bug spray.

Comments

[arfur]

Outtakes at the end of animated movies always surprise me, since they're obviously more work, rather than recycled unused work.

I'd imagine that, similarly to Easter Eggs within commercial software, the time spent working them up is fun-time, of programmers/artists playing around with a concept, trying to make something work just for their own amusement.

Mind you, computer animation is so much more a group effort that the "outtakes" that audiences see, are probably at least polished up using on-the-clock time.

Plus, they're terribly cute. :-)

[magid.livejournal.com]

I suppose the outtakes could be the playing around, but inevitably the outtakes from animated films include short bits that portray the characters cracking up, etc, just as human actors come out of character at times, which is a bit unlikely in any flick :-). These were more than just a handful of scenes, too, including a parody of a whole musical skit that was referred to in passing in the script...

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

Computer graphics have gotten so standarized nowadays that it's almost effortless to generate extra scenes. After you've got the backgrounds drawn and the characters defined, making the characters do things is trivial.

So a lot of those "outtakes", I think, are the result of the voice actors blowing their lines or ad-libbing randomly. Then the producers choose the best bloopers, and generate CGI animation to match.

The first "Toy Story" DVD, though, contains actual CGI rendering bloopers. Things like Woody's arm rotating the wrong way around, or his eyeballs floating above his head with empty sockets. And the "Shrek" DVD has some fun CGI bloopers/test footage involving the fur on the donkey (in one he looks like a tribble with teeth) and the fabric of the princess's dress (Shrek throws her over his shoulder and her dress flies up over her head)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Obviously, I'm behind the times in animation technology...

Toy Story was wonderful; I was reminded of it last night when one of the outtakes included the happy dinosaur from Toy Story, the dinosaur even sillier than usual because he knew he didn't appear in this movie...

I've not seen Shrek yet.

I wonder when all the cool stuff on DVD will inspire me to acquire a TV and a DVD player :-).