This is the text from a paper presented at the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston, Massachusetts. It remains a work in progress.
A girl named Candy sits alone at her 16th birthday party. A pop record plays quietly in the background. It starts to skip. An untouched birthday cake rests on a table in front of her. Sixteen candles remain unlit. There is no need to light them. For Candy, they are already extinguished. Her friends didn’t come to her celebration. In fact, they couldn’t come. It turns out this party wasn’t today or yesterday. It was years ago. But, for Candy, it is tomorrow. It is always tomorrow. She awaits an event – a future – which will never come, although perhaps it already has. Instead, she lingers in a present moment, hermeneutically sealed off from the yesterday of her adolescence and the tomorrow of her adulthood. She isn’t on a precipice – she is locked in it. As such, she becomes a forgotten figure in her own world. A has-been in her own being.
This is a vision extrapolated from Lewis Klahr’s 1984 short film Candy’s 16!, part of his “Picture Books For Adults” series (1983-1985). In this series, Klahr gestures toward history as both static and moving. Constructed of eight 8mm short films, Klahr uses a variety of techniques – found footage, splicing, as well as his well known cutout animation style – and creates collages from ephemeral, cultural fragments – home movies, comic books, advertisements, and pop music. with a career and signals many of the concerns of which he continues to work through – history, memory, and the recent past. Stripping objects from their specific contexts, Klahr’s films reference the outmodedness of their objects through a self-referential temporal lag – that is, they are lapsed historical objects. The objects and images enter into dialogic communication allowing them to intersect both historically and aesthetically; his films display a process of an ongoing, irresolvable dialectical history: a history of the present’s past and the past’s presence – or, as Klahr himself says, his films illustrate “the pastness of the present.”
This paper will examine Candy’s 16! as a model of what I am calling, following Walter Benjamin, “Has-Been history” – a conception of history understood through outmoded, forgotten objects and commodities. For Klahr, objects are “has-beens” lying dormant in historical ruins waiting to be revived. The stakes of this revival is central to this paper and Klahr’s work in general. Klahr has become well-known for his cutout animation techniques, yet Candy’s 16! is a more traditional found footage film. This may make it a somewhat odd choice for extended analysis. However, I argue Klahr’s approach, even in the early stages of his career, indicates the mission of has-been history – the purpose is not to pace an object historically, but rather to uncover the irresolvable tensions between the historical context and the cultural moment in which materials are extended. Candy’s 16! operates as a transhistorical exchange in which the images of has-been history are revealed as irretrievably fractured. Klahr grants them new visibility only to have them quickly evaporate and remain unrealized. Candy’s 16! questions how personal materials, cultural memory, and the audience negotiate such a schism. Is this all an introduction or a farewell? As Candy awaits her party, celebrating her passage from adolescence to adulthood, Klahr indicates that has-been history can be called, but it cannot respond. History reverberates. Klahr’s films gesture toward its incommensurable aftershocks.
by James Hansen In what is surely the most welcome surprise of the cinematic year thus far, Rich Moore’s Wreck-It Ralph, the latest release from Disney Animation, ingeniously combines the central conceits of both animation and gaming into a thrilling and heartfelt animated film. Moreover, it does so with a regard to history as simultaneously an aesthetic and technological question. If Disney has lagged behind its younger brother Pixar in recent years, Wreck-It Ralph usefully shifts the dynamic back to the kind of risk-taking Disney once took and Pixar overtook before it began inundating itself with useless sequels alongside overconcentration on technique and naturalism, threatening to turn the form against itself and mutate into something “accomplished” yet hyperstatic (a la Peter Jackson). Thankfully, Moore (and co-writers Phil Johnston and Jennifer Lee) allows Wreck-It Ralph to ponder where it came from and where it will go next.
That this all works so well is in large part due to the delicate balancing act of Moore and his screenwriters. Wreck-It Ralph, a Donkey Kong like figure, is the villain of the arcade game Fix-It Felix. After 30 years on the job, Ralph, distressed by his bad guy status, goes on a mission to win a hero medal in order to be seen as a good guy and, thus, welcomed by the rest of the villagers of Fix-It Felix. Here, the rest of the games in the arcade stand-in as a networked world in which characters navigate through electric portals into other (sometimes newer) game spaces. The majority of the film takes place inside the game “Sugar Rush,” seemingly a Mario Kart version of Bratz. Here, a young girl, Vanellope, takes Ralph’s hero medal to cash in for a coveted spot in the Sugar Rush race. Vanellope, a character identified as a systematic glitch, has been banished from racing (thus the space of the actual game) by King Candy. Meanwhile, Fix-It Felix teams up with a Halo-esque female commander, Calhoun, to break into “Sugar Rush” and bring Ralph back before the arcade manager says game-over for the game, unplugging it from the network, leaving homeless characters wandering the portal.
Though this falls into a familiar story of outsider characters finding their place within their changing worlds, Wreck-It Ralph approaches this with a supreme tenderness as it slides between the worlds and the characters come to realize their outdatedness, their glitchy quirks, and their inability to assimilate with their coded, networked spaces. Making ongoing references to strictly defined game code as something to overcome, there remains a tension between the character’s desires and their technological constraints. Wreck-It Ralph doesn’t quite go all the way with its aesthetic – the old, 8-bit game characters are more natural inside their game space and, therein, more alike other characters than different. (This is something of a practical question, as it is unlikely anyone would respond to 8-bit, talking characters versus more natural ones, but it really would have been something if Moore and company would have tried and fully committed to the aesthetic question, actually allowing for the 8-bit world and the modern game world to collide. Can’t have it all...)
Nonetheless, the films remains reticent to updating and regenerating as a means of staying alive. Here, Wreck-It Ralph picks up where Enchanted left off. Whereas Enchanted negotiated the ambivalence between reality and fantasy, the real world versus the princess, the two-dimension versus the three-dimension (see my full Enchanted review for more on this), Wreck-It Ralph operates within this interstitial space, brilliantly conceived as a gaming question, where the villain manipulates code to deny the avatars freedom – the very thing that “avatars” supposedly provide the user. This doesn’t suggest, as one may think, that the coded game is seen as pure, manipulable loss, hence reiterating the old analog versus digital, but rather is an embrace of the glitch, of the code as something which can break down, of the individual who embraces assimilation (or, at least, connection) through difference.
Thus, Wreck-It Ralph denies the input/output logic of the coded network and looks instead for a territorializing glitch which can code, de-code, and re-code. The character Vanellope is key here. Befriending both the destructive forces of Ralph and reconstructive help of Felix, she builds, breaks, and rebuilds her car, her code, and herself. Wreck-It Ralph moves through these concerns with great sincerity, delicacy, and heart. Not merely a technological game, the film packs a serious emotional punch, emotions which underly the very issues of individuality, building and rebuilding, deforming and reforming, which are at the core of the character’s (the the film’s) concerns. Moore may still be navigating an undecided space, but, here, it is one that incorporates its history – both good and bad – as it moves along to a new game. Wreck-It Ralph, you may just be our hero.
After the lovable exploits of Remy the rat were immortalized by Pixar in their previous film Ratatouille, I thought they had scaled their tallest mountain. After watching their latest offering, WALL-E, it seems they’ve found a taller mountain and already reached the summit. Director Andrew Stanton humanizes the loveable loser-bot and manages to craft a wonderful love story-cum-message picture which will have viewers questioning society as it currently stands. WALL-E (or Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class), which takes place 700 years in the future, is the story of a robot who spends his days making cubes from the trash that covers the barren earth. One day a spaceship lands and a new robot enters his life. EVE (or Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) arrives and WALL-E quickly goes from curious to enamored. To impress her, he shows her a plant that he found while rummaging among the earthen ruins. As her primary objective is to find plant life, she stashes the plant in a midsection storage cavity and goes into a coma-like state until a ship comes to retrieve her. As WALL-E has no intention of losing his new friend/love interest, he grabs on and rides the ship back to its “mothership”, The Axiom. There he discovers a colony of obese humans and the machines that make life easy for them. Through various mishaps and robotic saboteurs, WALL-E has to help EVE get the plant specimen to the captain, so the humans can initiate their return to earth.
While on the surface, this sounds like a fun children’s movie (and it is plenty of fun), it’s also Pixar’s preachiest film to date. The largest issue the film addresses is that of environmental concerns. In the future, society apparently litters like the dickens, hence the need for the WALL-E units. It is their objective to clean up the planet while all of humanity is aboard the Axiom. During the initial sequence where the film follows WALL-E during his day-to-day routine, earth is nothing but refuse and wasteland and the color scheme of the film reflects as much. Various shades of brown run rampant, but aside from the faded hues of Buy-N-Large Corporation (insert rimshot here) products or advertisements, there is no real color to speak of. When WALL-E happens upon the plant, the green almost reaches off the screen and slaps you with its vibrancy. Red is to Sin City as Green is to WALL-E. This dramatic visual change emphasizes the important role that the plant will play in the film before EVE is even introduced into the film.
The earlier Pixar feature Cars was too one-note in its message of corporations killing small businesses. While WALL-E takes this issue and goes even further with it, they don’t continually harp on it. In the film, the B-N-L corporation achieved global domination. This in itself is a harrowing thought as this says that not only is a hegemonic state possible, but one needn’t even be a country to achieve it. Another dire conclusion which can be drawn from this is that we as a nation are so enmeshed in consumerism, that we would allow a corporation to take over as our national form of representation. Any way you look at it, the situation is grim. And this bleak scenario is wordlessly raised in the first five minutes of the film.
In WALL-E, literally every human shown in the current era (live-action Fred Willard is excluded as his character was pre-recorded 700 years before the events of the film) is obese. The people all get around via mobile chair units which take them wherever their hearts desire aboard the Axiom. While riding, they don’t even have to interact with the people in their immediate vicinity because each chair comes complete with holographic projector screens which are directly in front of the face of the rider. The only thing that occasionally distracts the rider from their screens is the garishly intrusive advertisements that inundate the ship (think talking jumbo-tron billboards). This amalgamated commentary tells us that 1) people are obese due to a sedentary lifestyle which we seem to be doing nothing about, 2) the proliferation of electronic devices is detrimental to us (see point 1), and 3) consumerism consumes us. This is apparently Pixar’s less-than-subtle elbow to the ribs that we should perhaps look at how we are living (too bad we can’t feel it through our fat rolls…).
The film also presents the scenario that humanity has been dehumanized. WALL-E has apparently developed some sort of sentience which gives him a penchant for Rubik’s cubes and VHS copies of Hello, Dolly! (or in other words, a personality). He and EVE both display individual personalities. But once the “humans” are introduced, they are shown to be a uniform mass of obesity and consumerism with no discernable differences between one and another (with the exception of the captain whose duties preclude that he be differentiated, though only slightly). It’s a sad thought that the most human character shown in a film with plenty of people in it is a robot. The only way that the humans are re-humanized is when WALL-E interacts with them on a personal level. Usually, he clumsily runs into their hover chairs and, in a folksy apology, offers his hand and his name. There are three characters that WALL-E particularly interacts with that become re-humanized: two passengers (who end up saving a litter of children from doom) and the captain. The revelation of the captain’s re-humanization is particularly satisfactory for those viewers well-versed in film. As he confronts the ship’s Autopilot, Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” begins to play in a nod to Kubrick’s glorious 2001: A Space Odyssey letting us know that the captain has officially achieved the status of “human.”
WALL-E is enjoyable on the level of a fun animated movie where robots talking with nasally electronic voices and get into all kinds of hijinks, shenanigans, tomfoolery, and other forms of misadventures. It’s also the story of the love that develops between WALL-E and EVE. And while a viewer can see it at that level and stop there if they so choose, they would be shutting themselves out of a wealth of social commentary that Pixar has taken the liberty to point out. This is Pixar getting up on their soapbox and telling the world to make some changes. I’m just amazed that they were able to make their rant to the country this much fun.
While educating his younger brother, Speed, about the pseudo-spiritual relationship between car and driver, Rex Racer (Scott Porter) drops the line, “The car is a living, breathing thing.” This blended approach to mechanization and organic existence presents a useful ideological foundation for untangling the aesthetics and politics of Speed Racer, the Wachowski Brothers’ most recent exploration of their favorite topic: the dynamic between man and machine. A stylistically bold film, Speed Racer displays a world in which even emotions are computerized (in the romantic scenes, watch the lights morph into little hearts), in which all people are digitally-enhanced, but in which the mechanized individual must still struggle against the even more constricting clockwork of corporatism. In a globalized landscape of shiny plastic, Speed (Emile Hirsch) battles for the rights of the rugged all-American individual, decked out in 1950s retro-futurism and carrying a chip on his shoulder for the lost family-oriented, grassroots ideal. More than just a racer, Speed is a Bull Moose capitalist. Admittedly, Speed Racer’s plot does contain some divots, but these sometimes not-so-minor flub ups are essentially insignificant. Concentrating on technical flaws in a film about generalized mythologies and broad thematic strokes is a fruitless endeavor. Speed, a terrible student and excellent daydreamer, learns to race from his brother. His dad, Pops (John Goodman), owns an independent racing company. Speed’s mother, Mom (Susan Sarandon) is caring and perfect, and blah, blah blah. For those who didn’t catch that, his parents don’t even have real names. Can it get more archetypal? His brother dies, possibly trying to take down the pesky racing-industrial complex. Speed fills his shoes, becoming a prodigy. Courted by Royalton (Roger Allam), a corporate mega-badass, to race for his company, Speed must make the decision to grow cynical and give into the system, or fight for family, pride, and fair-dealing individualism. Guess which one he chooses.
Keeping with its origins as a Japanese anime program (called Mach GoGoGo and later adapted for US audiences), Speed Racer exudes a distinctly presentational style that combines elements of numerous genres (slapstick, action, martial arts, political-ish thriller, animation) and eschews any pretensions to emotional or narrative “realism.” Speed’s brother, Spritle (Paulie Litt) and his chimp, the aptly named Chim Chim, provide ridiculous comic relief throughout the film (as if it needed it) and Christina Ricci adds to the film’s superficial ethos as Speed’s foxy and spunky love interest, Trixie, diversifying (or derailing, as some might say) the film’s tone. One of the most befuddling criticisms that I’ve consistently found regarding the film typically attacks it for basically being a light, sparkly mess. However, I don’t think Speed Racer ever truly aspires to be more than a big blob of bubblegum, nor do I think it ever could be, without eliminating its very essence. Everyone seems to be forgetting just how delicious bubblegum is, especially when you’re not expecting steak. Speed Racer is certainly an exercise in whiz-bangery, but it’s an exercise I haven’t seen before and it’s an exercise that actually creates a world in which such an approach is valid.
Essential to the world of Speed Racer is its brave interpretation of cinematic space and time. Consistently throughout the film, the digitally-enhanced editing of Roger Barton and Zach Staenberg violates preconceptions about staging, camera motion, and narrative structure. Repeatedly, flying head zoom through the frame, overlapping with others, unattached, freely navigating the physics of the screen. This creates a unique aesthetic that ratchets Bergman’s spacing in Persona (1966) to even more surreal heights, particularly during a scene in which Royalton connives with Mr. Musha (Hiroyuki Sanada) to screw over Speed and Racer X (Matthew Fox), a mysterious masked figure who works for the CIB (Corporate Investigation Bureau?). This same kinetic use of heads and dismembered parts defines the racing sequences, in which the faces of announcers punctuate the scenes with a strange visual uniqueness, opening up unexplored spatial dimensions.
Additionally, the film breaks the sacred 180º rule multiple numerous times with its rapid 360º editing, including the dialogue between Speed and Royalton in which Royalton explains the corporate hand that guides the results of the Grand Prix: the biggest race of them all. Incessant zooms and whip-pans further complicate the spatial design of Speed Racer, depicting space as malleable and shortened, tapping into the flashy bombast of the film’s outlandish source material and recreating the visual compaction of comic book frames. Temporally, persistent flashbacks and flash-forwards confuse and stretch the simplistic plot into an arc that, while not always effective, is surely experimental by Hollywood blockbuster standards. Stylistically, the Wachowskis deserve an A for effort.
All of the film’s experimentation is made possible by its extensive use of CGI, which, when mixed with live-action elements, forms an aesthetic scheme that echoes the film’s admittedly half-baked thematic concerns. Where does life end and technology begin? Should people strive for mechanized accuracy? Is there room for the strong individual in the calculated determinism of systematized, mechanized corporate control? The film answers these questions with a romantic idealization of triumphant conservatism that seems to take a page out of the books of Ayn Rand or the political philosophies of Teddy Roosevelt. Contrary to the claims of “Neo-Leftism” hurled at the film by some critics, Speed Racer proposes a value system that, while being anti-corporate, speaks nothing of collectivism or equality. Speed is the amazing savior of the film, a powerful, exceptional individual fighting for his family, his pride, and his livelihood. He harps on the importance of fairness (the film’s final frame features the phrase “cheaters never prosper”), but it shouldn’t be forgotten that Speed is an unashamed competitor. He is the capitalist ideal of up-front competition, stating at one point, “You’ve gotta win if you want to keep driving.” These political values, however, are far from unusual by Hollywood standards, where morally-sound capitalists abound in surprising numbers. Speed’s views are almost a return to the default archetype of heroism, which is somewhat refreshing at this point.
Miraculously changing the game with his ethos of hard work, individualism, and family, Speed’s actions prompt the phrase, “It’s a whole new world,” from a populace inspired by his zeitgeist-influenced return to traditional capitalist values. It’s telling that his pre-race snack is a homemade PB&J rather than the decadent, elitist champagne of his evil corporate counterparts. The loss of the transcendental power of live action in Speed Racer’s visual approach is almost fitting, considering Speed’s politics, which view the film’s corporate environment as soulless and false. If anything, the film, like Speed, attempts to remind us that people are living, breathing things, even if their surroundings are slick, shiny, plastic and over-determined. But damn, those cars do look pretty cool, especially when they do flips.
Since 2D animation has gone to the wayside, the Disney company, and even the Disney brand of children’s film, has had a tough time adapting. While the partnership with Pixar gives them a link to the most powerful (in every sense of the term) children’s entertainment in the world, the true Disney films (“Treasure Planet,” “Chicken Little,” “Home on the Range”) have been marred by stupid plots, second-tier animation, and completely unequivocal success compared to the older films. The 21st Century and the digital age has required a shift in cinema that Disney animation has yet to make. However, with the new film “Enchanted,” it seems like Disney has recognized their product for what it is, was, and, seemingly, always will be. “Enchanted” is self-aware of the Disney history, but uses it as a pastiche that not only serves as one of the strongest Disney films in years, but also a signal that Disney may have figured out how to transfer their product into the digital age.
Starting out in the 2D animated, 4:3 aspect ratio of the Disney days of old, “Enchanted” is recognizing its history and playing with the modes of production and their general plot lines. Giselle (Amy Adams) is a beautiful young lady who lives in the forest and sings to the animals about finding her true love, which can only be recognized through “true love’s kiss.” Prince Edward (James Marden) hears the song and goes off to find Giselle. She falls into his lap while he sits on his horse, they kiss, and vow to be married the next day. However, Edward’s stepmother, the evil Queen Narcissa (Susan Sarandon), wants to keep her throne forever so disguises herself and pushes Giselle into a well where she is sent to a place with no “happily ever afters”: modern day New York City. Giselle, in full wedding attire, rises from the sewers into the widescreen New York City where she immediately misses the courtesy and kindness of her fairly tale land of Andalasia. She gets lost and ends up in Bowery, where she is found by an engaged divorce attorney Robert (Patrick Dempsey) and his daughter. He sympathizes with this poor confused woman and takes her to his apartment.
This plot description is only necessary in noting that from step one onward, the same Disney pattern is being followed even in the live action world. Any astute viewer can predict where the film is going to go and what is going to happen, but if you get caught in this trap of plot it is easy to overlook the smart changes in the Disney message and the updating of their own ideology for the new age. The general complaint about Disney films is that they never apply to real life and the film’s engender some sort of ideology in young woman that they must be thin and beautiful to ever find their Prince Charming. While “Shrek” has notable played with these ideals, it continues to push the same messages. In “Enchanted,” true love is still found in the real world, but only in realizing that there is more to love than what is found in the animated fairy tale world’s Disney has proposed in the past and in Andalasia. “Enchanted” still does very much to present Giselle as a typical princess, but this is only used to play off of their prior films. The underlying message shifts, which in turn should change the way that the proposal of Giselle’s character, a young woman who has to recognize the ways of the real to find true love and get her “true love’s kiss”, as a role model is no longer troubling, as Disney critics of past films have found.
Updated messages and changing philosophies aside, there is so much joy to be found in “Enchanted” that it is difficult, unless you are a total cynic, to not fall under its spell. Amy Adams real-life fairy tale princess is played with a fancy-free attitude that can turn on a dime with the recognition of the darker forces in the world (i.e. divorce.) Adams is beyond perfect in the role and carries the film on her tiara and dresses made of curtains. James Marsden and Patrick Dempsey play along very well, especially in the recognition of the musical elements that somehow don’t make sense to Robert. Giselle’s musical number in Central Park and her calling to the creature’s of the city to clean her new home are two of the best sequences you will see in any movie this year. As if there were any question about it, Adams proves herself fully capable of being a strong leading lady. She displays such a simple grace in her performance, all the while creating such a strong sense of character. As obviously formulaic as “Enchanted” is, and, indeed, is supposed to be, Adams’ great performance helps the audience in recognizing the playfulness of the film and helps it, dare I say, transcend to greater heights. Given her Oscar nomination, but snub all the same, for the wonderful “Junebug,” and an Oscar worthy turn in “Enchanted,” Adams should be fully solidified as a goddess in the acting world (and the love of my cinematic life.)
Maybe the most noteworthy and radical message that comes from “Enchanted” is in the final act where Giselle, who has received true love’s kiss and been revived from a deadly apple, has her final battle with Princess Narcissa who turns herself into a giant, ragingly digital dragon. Giselle climbs the tower in the real world to defeat the digital dragon who has now plagued the animated world of Andalasia and the real world of New York. It is only when the digital dragon has been conquered that the characters can return to the 2D fairy tale land and others can finally find peace and true love and happiness in the real world. If that isn’t a statement on Disney’s major faults and their continuing battle to update and revise at the start of the 21st century, then I don’t know what is.
Out 1 Film Journal was founded in 2007 by James Hansen. All writers retain copyright for their material published herein. If you wish to contact the editor, please do so at out1filmjournal@gmail.com.
