Saturday, December 24, 2005
Five hundred objects document the traditional media behind the animated films.
NEWSDAY
NEW YORK -- Monsters, bugs, cute little fish and superheroes have taken over the Museum of Modern Art, turning its austere, white galleries into bright oases of pop culture. There are pot-bellied, polka-dotted hominids, futuristic pastel settlements, phosphorescent deep-seascapes, hopping penguins and huge, toothy sharks.
Most of the museum is still consecrated to the gods of high art, but serious square footage has been given over to "Pixar: 20 Years of Animation," a kinetic, crowd-pleasing show surveying all of the studio's films: "Toy Story" and its sequel; "A Bug's Life"; "Monsters, Inc."; "Finding Nemo"; and "The Incredibles." It features drawings, paintings, collages and sculptures produced in the process of bringing fantasy to the screen.
Behind the technology
It's an exhibit with an agenda. Pixar's people and MoMA's curators alike want to prove that animation involves a lot more than mere technology. As Pixar's creative guru John Lasseter puts it in a wall text, "Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist."
With the company's enthusiastic cooperation, curators Steven Higgins and Ronald Magliozzi have selected 500 objects to illustrate the studio's deep dependence on traditional media.
The first thing that animators conceive is the world that the characters will inhabit. "Toy Story" grows out of a child's cozy bedroom. "Finding Nemo" takes place amid sublime undersea panoramas full of animate vegetation and leering fish. The setting for "The Incredibles" is a space-age suburbia full of ominous shadows, Cubist buildings and postwar Modernism, Palm Springs-style.
This stage is set through "colorscripts" -- storyboards without the story -- that map out the mood, atmosphere and overall look of the movie. This preliminary scene-setting functions as the element in a drama that has yet to be written.
Familiar yet fresh
The characters are first imagined and later refined through multiple drawings and sculptures. Edna Mode (a k a "E," the Lilliputian fashion designer in "The Incredibles") underwent numerous revisions, and the show tracks 14 separate incarnations. She started out tall and mannish, but was ultimately shrunken to a cuter size and bedecked with a pair of oversized glasses and an Anna Wintour bob.
For Sullivan, the tall and goofy titan of "Monsters, Inc.," Jerome Ranft modeled a set of sculptural studies. "Sulley" evolved from a creature with six eyes and oodles of curling tentacles to a much more conventional beast who looks like one of the Wild Things from Maurice Sendak's classic children's book.
The resonance of Pixar's creations with such artists as Sendak cuts to the heart of its creative power. More than most of the modernists housed at MoMA, Pixar depends on a shared set of associations and a conventional set of images. The worlds they create are imaginative, but not too much: They depend utterly on familiarity.
Dominique R. Louis' colorscript monster looks like a cousin of Goya's "Saturn," the horrific god who devours his son. Downtown Monstropolis is a cross between Brooklyn and Rome, with a landmark church that looks remarkably like St. Peter's Basilica.
Pixar's invented universe triangulates between reality, memory and fantasy. Its artists fine-tune a set of cultural references until they are intimately known but still seem fresh.
Contrasts with modernism
Pixar's products seem particularly conservative in the context of a museum dedicated to the self-renewing avant-garde. The imagery churned out by these animators harks back to the cityscapes of the Renaissance. They depend on a sense of realism, a convincing 3-D mapping of a place, successful illusion. Modernism, on the other hand, always has been dedicated to radically reconfiguring such modes of representation.
Which means that in some ways, it's odd to find Pixar celebrated with such fanfare at MoMA. But that's only if you focus too much, as the exhibit does, on the handmade and traditional. Few of these items, however clever, can really hold their own as unique art objects worthy of more than passing interest. And none of them would matter at all if the final product weren't the film itself, bright, magical and uncannily alive on the screen.
The finest and most compelling moments of "Pixar" are a series of short films by Lasseter. In one, a pair of Luxo desk lamps -- daddy and junior -- enact a brief family drama involving a bouncing ball. In another, a unicycle, abandoned in a corner of a decrepit bike shop, dreams of being used and appreciated. Both shorts transpose physical gestures of joy and despair onto inanimate machines, brilliantly endowing them with feelings and hopes.
X"Pixar: 20 Years of Animation" is on display through Feb. 6 at the Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan.