Viva la

And here’s another odd thing.  We watched the Polar Express this Christmas, a film I find both off-putting and oddly likeable.  The animation puzzles me—and my response to it is pretty well summed up by what I just said about the whole film.  Only I can’t put my finger on why it strikes me so oddly.  The people are too real, too round—but at the same time, their movement and line—too angular, too much of whatever style they came out of.

Tom Hanks showing up in thirty characters—strange.  Good thing he charms me.  But the kid.  All the kids, really—but especially the head kid; his movement seems so unnatural to me, the angle of his chin, his arms – the way he turns his head—and I assumed that this was just flawed and awkward animation.

Then the other day, doing the treadmill thing, I watched Second Hand Lions.  There I am, running along, and something about that kid was really bugging me.  Not that I didn’t like him.  It was just that odd angle of the chin, the way he turned his head—and suddenly I realized: this Haley Jo Osmet, he was the kid in the Polar Express. All that movement I thought was just bad animation?  He was doing it, down to the cellular level.

We did a little research, and it turns out that Osmet was not credited in the movie.  My only conclusion, then, is that they stole him.  He was a hot commodity in those days, box office gold.  Is there a law against stealing somebody’s posture?  Their movement?  Because the Polar people couldn’t have come up with so perfect a mimic any other way than capture. (Besides, in the bit of internet inquiry I just did, I found a page that juxtaposed one of Osmet’s younger pictures and the Sad Kid from the express.  They couldn’t look more alike.  So they stole him twice.

That begged a question: years after the Express was produced, I watch it, and am put off by the singular, odd movement of the animated character.  If I had seen it in the young Osmet’s hay day – if I had been familiar enough with him, would I have been more likely to find the movement of the animated boy pleasing by association?  Would I have noticed it, then, at all really?  Would I have been used to that chin, that turn of the head, and simply accepted it as normal?

Here’s where I’m going with this: movies and books date themselves when the creative people lean too heavily on current cultural stuff.  Like I almost wrote, “Let’s google it,” in this book I’m putting together.  But you can’t write something like that, even though for a moment it might make the book more hip and current and realistic.  What you can say is, “Let’s research it,” because people throughout the ages have researched stuff.  But if you mention the current hot tool – a thing everybody has heard of and everybody accepts as an Eternal Element of Life—ten years down the road, people are gonna say, “Wow.  That’s an old book.”  And wax sentimental about the old days of googling.

So, can animation do the same thing?  In taking a very current, saleable and oddly specific pattern of movement, did the movie target the audience of the time – but end up putting off the audience of the future?  Can personal movement be as marked an aesthetic or style  element as music or slang or clothing styles?

Okay.  So then I started to wonder—if you did a study, if you picked a dozen people off the street and did image capture on them, as specific and almost caricature like as this movement of the Polar kid’s—real movement, reduced to it’s basic line and movement—how odd and different would the study reveal our personal movement to be?

We’re used to summing people up by shape and size.  But movement?  I’m very intrigued by this.  And how many of us, our movement captured and grafted on to an animated character, would be freaked out by how we move?  Would it be like me hating the sound of my voice when I hear recordings?

I haven’t thought about this, about how a person’s movement is probably just as individual as the sound of his voice.  In fact, it was only a few years ago when I was talking to a friend, that I realized how different bodies actually are, one from another.  Yeah – height and weight.  But—I was parked by the little corner store, talking to Ruth about my car.  She was talking about how she had to sit too close to the steering wheel air bag to be safe – because her legs were so short.

But I can sit pretty far from my steering wheel.The thing is, she and I are about the same height, standing side by side.

Turns out, her legs are super short, and her torso is super long.  Like, if she had my legs, she’d be significantly taller than I am.  And I’d never considered that difference in proportion.   I think I’d just spent my entire lifetime assuming that human bodies had two legs and two arms and we were pretty much proportioned the same, regardless of size.  Frankly, the thought made me feel a little weird.  It also made me understand why some people love skiing and some people just crash on their behinds – it isn’t necessarily just training or talent – it’s distribution of weight, length of bone – it’s how well the skeleton is designed for the stresses and demands and counter-balances of skiing.

I don’t know about you.  Maybe I’m just really slow.  But this was a revelation to me.  White, black, red, tall, short, yellow, fat, thin – these are such over-simplifications of our differences, I don’t know how they ever became that significant.  We are amazingly the same, but astonishingly different.  Snowflakes are nothing to us.

Am I the only person to find this interesting?