#Quarx | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rivetgoth · 1 year ago

Text

A Plea for CGI

I feel like the last bastion of defense for CGI as an art form sometimes dude. CGI fascinates me so much. As a kid it felt so wondrous and unlike anything I’d ever seen. The dancing bear in Teletubbies was the first instance of CGI I ever remember seeing and it enamored me unlike anything else. It felt like genuine magic. I felt similarly about Tiny Planets, which genuinely felt like it transported me to an alien world. Later on as a kid I stumbled onto the Madagascar tech reel Easter egg on the DVD and it was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. It scared me so bad I couldn’t be in the same room and I was scared to turn off the television. I stayed in my bedroom until my dad got home because I knew he’d turn the TV off if he walked in and saw nobody watching it and I didn't want to be out there until I knew for sure the television was off and the reel wouldn't still be playing. I couldn’t sleep for days after seeing it and I was literally scared of DVD menus for fear of accidentally stumbling onto something like that again. Blooper reels for CG films absolutely terrified me, it was like genuinely nauseatingly scary. The “You’re not perfect” Courage the Cowardly Dog bit was similar.

I don’t think I’m an anomaly for finding these examples scary, a LOT of people did (the former one is full of commenters saying it scared them as a kid, the latter is literally meant to be scary). But the thing is with CGI, despite that it never stopped having this sort of wonder to me as well. When I was a kid CGI still felt uncommon enough that any time it was employed it felt really magical. It felt like I was seeing into a world that didn’t actually exist. I think its ability even in its earliest forms to be implemented into live action media, or its ability to have strange three dimensional properties when used in fully animated films, gave it this sense that it could be used to bring things to life in a way that couldn’t be done before. Like, I recognized even as a kid that the dancing bear didn’t look REAL. But it also looked three dimensional. It looked almost dreamlike to me.

I think the history of CGI as an art form is just so fascinating. I remember how fascinated I was reading about the CGI of the 80s and 90s, as it began to move beyond being an oddity that computer scientists could use to demonstrate tech and found some mainstream and wider spread usage. Tony De Peltrie (1985) was the first CGI human to express emotion and objectively he hasn’t aged well, he looks super creepy as does almost everything about his short film, but it fascinates me that he was so well received and touched people’s emotions in spite of that. The human ability to connect with something so alien in every way—stylistically, but even in terms of the art form being used, which was still absolutely brand new—is so interesting. The fact that the Canned Food International Council commissioned a commercial to be done fully in CGI in 1984 and it was referred to as so realistic you “couldn’t tell if it was animated or not” when nowadays it’s surpassed by PS1 video game graphics is so fascinating. The entire implication of that moment in the history of art, advertising, aesthetic. Maybe most fascinating to me is the short series Quarxs from the 90s utilizing CGI in one of the most bizarre ways I’ve ever seen to this day to bring to life cryptobiological organisms. Really insane looking stuff using really limited technology. The creator of Quarxs, Maurice Benayoun, writes theory on virtual reality, including some really interesting stuff about the human relationship to the material and virtual world that is most definitely reflected in Quarxs.

Nowadays I turn to Severed Heads as an example of one of the most fascinating recent uses of CGI to intentionally evoke the uncanniness of older CG and bring to life the music through a visual accompaniment. “Tiny Wounded Bird” (2016) is hard to watch even as an adult, it feels like in the best way it strikes so much uncanny fear that would've ruined my life as a child. It was the first time I saw someone fully, intentionally evoke those fears in art—I think it’s so fascinating the way CGI evokes the uncanny valley so easily for so many, and Tom Ellard was clearly aware of this. Tom Ellard, the artist behind Severed Heads, has worked on the cutting edge of technology to make unabashedly uncanny art in both visual and auditory forms since the 70s.

I see people suggest the uncanniness of CGI has to do with early or pre-textured CGI looking almost corpse-like, but I always felt like it was something else, it's not just CGI People Look Creepy. I think it’s just so, so, so foreign to the eyes. It exists in a three dimensional plane that should be similar to ours but isn’t quite ours. It can emulate the human body but also contort it in any way imaginable. The blooper reels I mentioned being scared of as a kid show these fully three dimensional beings with limbs elongated far past the physical possibility of a real body, eyes popping out of the head. Shadows having to be implemented manually, AI trying to figure out how physics work for thousands of particles of simulated hair. It's sterile and it's incomparable to really anything else. CGI is an entirely new artform, unique from any other that exists. It's literally creating a whole new plane of reality. I think it should lean into that more.

I think CGI as a tool is extremely oversaturated due to all sorts of issues within the entertainment industry around the desire to rush products, the lack of unionization and worker protection, corruption from the top down causing companies to rely on it heavily in the least imaginative and most predatory ways. But that’s not the fault of CGI as an art form, which is still only a couple of decades old—Again, Tony de Peltrie, first emotive CGI human, is only about 40 years old. The first television series less than that. The first movie only about 30. This is BRAND NEW technology. We are in the earliest of earliest stages of CGI experimentation. History will look back on CGI and not view 2024 as notably distant from Toy Story’s release in ‘95. I think it’s only in the past few years that we’ve seen mainstream film really try to use CGI for something genuinely brand new—Trolls in 2016 creating an entire world comprised of textures that wouldn’t exist in such a way in real life (like felt ground, cotton ball clouds, etc), Moana (also in 2016) using computer generated blacklight and neon for the Tamatoa sequence, Into the Spider-Verse in 2018 absolutely changing the game with its use of comic book stylization that looks nothing like anything that came before it, followed by Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in 2022 implementing something similar to evoke a storybook feeling and experimenting with intentional drops in frames per second (there’s a cool video about it here that covers some of this). But these new and inventive attempts at CG, all less than a decade old, would not exist without the decades leading up to it. Terminator 2 was an extremely significant breakthrough in animating liquid. Finding Nemo over a decade later was a huge technical breakthrough for animated underwater environments. 1991 to 2003, 12 years spent learning how to make a computer animate water, and Finding Nemo looks plenty dated now. The first realistic digital fire was shown off in my all time favorite animated short, Peedee Meets the Dragon, in 1989! Only 35 years ago animating fire was in and of itself a feat! Toy Story in 1995 famously used toys as protagonists because humans were still difficult to animate—Only 29 years ago HUMANS still couldn’t be consistently animated in CGI. The Incredibles would be THE FIRST ALL HUMAN CAST that Pixar would attempt, and that was in 2004, almost a DECADE later. All the weird uncanny experimental stuff are building blocks to something so much greater than we can even imagine. I really believe that.

So like, yeah, the homogeneity of CGI in the industry right now is frustrating. The industry-standard willingness to exploit digital artists for rushed, cheap, and unregulated third party work is disgusting and genuinely abhorrent. But man, I hate seeing CGI itself shit on in the same breaths that these criticisms are made. So much fundamental misunderstanding of what it is and what it can do as an art form and such a lack of genuine desire to see it continue to evolve and progress. To be blunt a decent amount of it is just straight up nostalgia, and often very rose tinted nostalgia. “Things from my childhood looked better.” Sometimes it’s genuinely being misinformed—Tons of movies that get heralded as being traditional animation or practical effects… still utilize some form of CGI. I also think there’s something to be said about the fact that I believe the current trend of using CGI for hyper realistic effects in big budget live action films is genuinely a misusage of the medium and a complete failure to actually utilize CGI in any meaningful way (looking at you, live action Disney remakes). I love practical effects and I love traditional animation, but I don’t see why they need to be at odds with CGI. The best and most visually striking movies with the greatest visuals tend to recognize that and utilize a blend of the strengths of more than one of these mediums—Though interestingly, Courage the Cowardly Dog remains one of the only examples I can think of that uses CGI as a form of mixed media INTENTIONALLY. As in, not to look hyper-realistic or to replace/accompany practical effect or traditional animation, but to squarely be intentionally meant to be read as CGI in order to evoke a specific tone, functionally using CGI as a punchline the same way one would use live action shots in a show like Spongebob. I'm sure others have done it, but it doesn't appear particularly common.

That’s my last note: I really want to see CGI utilized more with both its strengths and weaknesses taken into account. Back to “Tiny Wounded Bird,” which makes use of the way models of the human body can be reskinned and manipulated to the point of being unrecognizable, a succinct but evocative visual theme for a song about pride and suffering. But I want to talk about another older CGI short film that does something similar, Polly Gone from 1988.

Y’all, I’m literally switching from my phone to my computer to type this out because this matters a lot to me.

EVERYONE writes Polly Gone off as absurdism. That goofy "Early CGI Was Horrifying" video writes it off as "a shitpost," which half the damn commenters on the artist's upload are quoting, annoyingly. The VintageCG Youtube account cruelly calls it "The second worst computer animation ever produced." It finds its way onto r/OddlyTerrifying and similar subreddits not unoften. You guys. Polly Gone is directed by the artist Shelley Lake, who has made this statement about her work:

"The artwork that comes from the world inside is the culmination of my mind’s eye–a fantasy world where, through my imagination, anything is possible. I enthusiastically partner with intelligent machines and together we create an artificial reality. A simulated world of superheroes, erotic men and women, wireframe meshworks, anatomical investigations, cybernetic creatures, phantasmagoric depictions of impossible people, places and things. Although these artworks often resemble our photo-real existence, these creations are utterly unreal and sometimes uncanny." (X)

She KNOWS it's uncanny. She knows it's weird. And her work is, explicitly, intentionally, and, honestly, blatantly, engaging with the weirdness of this medium to deliver messages in ways surreal, fresh, bizarre, and off-putting. I don't know what exactly her intentions are behind Polly Gone, but I would very strongly make a case for it being about women's roles in society, or at least that being a perfectly viable interpretation, especially if you do a 5 second deep dive into her body of work exploring themes about female bodies, sexuality, kink, and queerness. Her synopsis on her own Youtube page for this short is: "A day in the life of a robot." Consider watching it through a feminist lens. Consider how uncanny and dehumanized this animation is of an expressionless, mechanical humanoid--in a dress, in lipstick, with breasts--that zooms around its futuristic house doing mundane chores. Consider the name being a feminized version of the word "polygone." Consider this oddly cool OddlyTerrifying comment:

They're joking, but they're not: This is a short film from the EIGHTIES, seven years before Toy Story would be the first full-length CGI film. Shelley Lake received both a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master of Sciences degree in the 70s. This is artistic experimenting from someone with years of experience, this is making use of the strengths and unique facets of computer generated animation that cannot be replicated through any other means, and it is not purposeless nor does it deserve to be written off as "a shitpost." And it's not asking you to look past the CGI limitations, it is wholly embracing them.

I want to see more CGI play with this. I think it was a mistake to veer CGI in the direction of trying to disguise it as something that it is not. I think it can work as an accompaniment to other effects, sure, but I don't think its sole purpose should be photorealistic lions emoting less than their real world counterparts singing covers of Elton John songs. I wish CGI wasn't devalued and I wish people would engage with it as a unique art form of its own.

#media essay

10 notes · View notes

turtlethon · 2 years ago

Text

“The Starchild”

Season 7, Episode 15 First US Airdate: November 6, 1993

The Turtles try and protect an alien child who has been granted incredible powers.

Season seven of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles continues with “The Starchild”. This episode first aired in the US in a double bill alongside "The Legend of Koji".

Donatello is accompanied by the other Turtles as he rummages through junk in a scrap yard, intent on finding new materials for his inventions. The action kicks off quickly today as the team witness the crash landing of an alien starship. Surveying the area after the impact, our heroes wonder whether the pilot is a friendly or hostile visitor, and make the decision to venture inside.

The Turtles cautiously wander through the spaceship. Eventually they find themselves face to face with the creature at the helm: a violet-coloured alien child who resembles E.T., a star symbol appearing prominently on his forehead. The visitor greets the Turtles, revealing his name to be Quarx.

A second ship is seen descending nearby, a burly alien named Drako emerging from it. He checks in with his superior, confirming that he has located the “Starchild”. Meanwhile the Turtles attempt to talk to a disinterested Quarx, who flies out of his ship and begins playing with the junk in the scrapyard. The Turtles follow close behind, winding up in the path of Drako as he points a laser blaster at Quarx. Intent on protecting the child, the green teens are briefly able to restrain this second alien, who informs them that he’s pursuing “the Starchild – the most dangerous being in the universe!” Drako retreats to his ship and flies away, leaving the Turtles to wonder what just happened.

At Channel 6, Vernon is seen chastising April for considering leaving the office early on what has been a slow news day. He informs her that “a good reporter doesn’t wait for news to happen – a good reporter can find a story just by looking out his window!” April’s rival is taken aback as he spots Drako’s ship flying above the skies of the city, leading him to wander off without revealing what he saw.

Drako is seen checking in with his superior, an ape-like alien with bright red hair. He informs his boss that while he was able to locate the Starchild his tracking equipment was damaged in an altercation with the residents of Earth, and requests reinforcements.

The Turtles take Quarx back to the Lair and seek guidance from Master Splinter, keeping the child occupied with some of Michaelangelo’s Bugman toys. The Starchild moves on to making a set of bladed weapons mounted on the wall fly around the Lair, the Turtles being forced to run for cover. As act two opens, the Turtles ask Splinter to use his ninja mind powers to stop Quarx’s rampage, but the team’s sensei is powerless to assist, his mental abilities no match for those of the alien.

After dodging their own weapons some more, the Turtles try again to talk to Quarx, who declares that he “just [wants] to play” and flies out of the Lair, refusing to listen to the team as they’re “not [his] father”. Emerging onto the streets of the city, the Turtles decide to use the equipment on the van to track the alien child. Splinter elects to visit the alien ship on his own, his ninja senses guiding him to find a solution to their problem there.

In the van, the Turtles pick up on police radio reports regarding the alien visitor. The team arrive on the scene to find the cops ready to open fire, and step in to try and reason with Quarx again. The Starchild is now hurling cars and trucks around with his telekinetic powers, but is convinced by Michaelangelo to put them down. (In the process, a garbage truck drops its contents on Raphael, who declares that if this happens again he’ll quit the show.) Quarx soon begins messing around again, ramming a pair of police cars into each other before escaping.

April contacts the team via Turtlecom, informing them that a group of spaceships are landing in front of the Channel 6 building. Leo and Mikey head to the station to confront the invaders while Donnie and Raph continue to pursue Quarx.

Outside Channel 6, April and Vernon film the unfolding events, Drako now accompanied by a group of aliens who march through the streets of the city. Leonardo and Michaelangelo arrive on the scene and waste no time in doing battle. Meanwhile Donatello and Raphael find Quarx playing outside a building marked for demolition. His antics have now attracted the attention of the military, who send a tank out to open fire at him. Enraged, Quarx goes on a destructive rampage, destroying the tank and his surroundings. The alien again tells the Turtles they’re not his father before flying away; having failed to reason with him, Donnie and Raph decide to check in with Leo and Mikey.

As Splinter attempts to make sense of the files aboard the alien spaceship, Drako and his allies continue to do battle with Leonardo and Michaelangelo. The group try to escape in one of their ships, but Mikey’s grappling hook – quite improbably – prevents it from taking off, causing a domino effect where the entire fleet is crushed.

The Turtles reunite and again find themselves face to face with Drako, who re-iterates that Quarx is an existential threat. Our heroes remain unconvinced but are alarmed when a reading from the Turtle Van’s computer indicates that 4000 spaceships are approaching Earth; above the planet, a mothership demands that the Starchild is handed over. If the people of the planet fail to comply, he’ll be killed destroyed, even if this requires the destruction of the entire world.

With only 30 minutes remaining until the alien fleet opens fire, Leonardo presses Drako as to why the Starchild is so sought-after. Drako explains that Quarx has left a path of destruction throughout the galaxy, and that he represents a band of survivors intent on stopping him from doing the same to other worlds, a mission that has continued for two centuries. When quizzed as to how Quarx could have remained a child for so long, Drako reveals that the Starchild wields so much power that he can remain in any form he wishes.

The Turtles engage in a group huddle along with April (and, somewhat humorously, Vernon). After April remarks that Quarx needs to grow up, Leonardo suggests this might be the solution to their problem. Donatello is given the keys to the news van to check in with Splinter at the scrap yard, while the rest of the team head off in the Turtle Van to find Quarx.

Drako is unconvinced by the Turtles insisting they can find Quarx, revealing after they leave that he wants the powers of the Starchild for himself. He deploys a group of drones, ordering them to seek out the alien.

Aboard the crashed ship, Splinter shows Donatello a recovered file containing a video log from Quarx’s father, Merrick. He’s seen performing experiments on his son, intent on imbuing him with “extraordinary powers”; this is necessary as their planet is under fire, Quarx being the key to their survival in an interstellar war. Time passes in the video log; later, Merrick is seen lamenting that it’s too late now for their world, and that Quarx is too young to understand their mission. Quarx is now left in a position where he doesn’t understand why he has his powers, his father not around to explain their importance to him, and so he remains stuck in perpetual childhood, but Splinter believes he may have a solution.

Donnie checks in with his team-mates via Turtlecom, encouraging them to try and buy time while he works with Splinter on a solution. Leo, Mikey and Raph head to a nearby playground, feigning having fun to draw in Quarx. This briefly seems to work, but Drako’s drones arrive and open fire. The alien hunter removes his helmet, revealing to Quarx that he too has a star on his forehead as a means of gaining his trust; having lured him in, Drako produces a handheld hypnosis device that freezes Quarx on the spot.

The Turtles tear through Drako’s drones and break his hypnotic control; a furious Quarx then declares that he was tricked and “everyone hates [him]”. (In easily the funniest moment of the episode, Michaelangelo insists that this isn’t true, but Raphael chips in and counters this: “Now hold on, I- I hate him!”

Quarx is set to go on another rampage when his father appears from behind a nearby tree. Merrick informs his son about the true nature of his powers, encouraging him to use them to end war throughout the universe. He assures Quarx that he will be with him always, declaring that it’s time for him to grow up before vanishing in a cloud of smoke.

Beneath ground, Merrick is seen dropping down a ladder into the sewers alongside Donatello. He removes his mask to reveal himself as having been Splinter all along, performing an elaborate ruse. Back on the surface, Quarx is seen transforming into his fully-grown form. He uses his powers to undo all the destruction he caused in the city, before going on to distribute this energy through space, even repairing damage caused to the ships in the armada hovering above Earth. Quarx convinces the assembled aliens to join him in restoring peace throughout the galaxy, before transporting Drako to a prison world. He says goodbye to the Turtles, T-posing as he floats off, Poochie-style, into the sky.

We close the episode out in the Lair with the Turtles each breaking away one at a time as Splinter rambles about the moral of the day, going on and on about how everyone has special gifts and that people need to learn to care for each other. Finally, only Leonardo is left as the team all enjoy their own leisurely pursuits in the living room; Donatello assures Splinter that like Quarx, they will grow up, “one of these days”.

“The Starchild” goes some way in continuing the momentum of “Night of the Dark Turtle”, a rare example of a non-Shredder episode that doesn’t feel like a downgrade. Rarely have the stakes in TMNT ever been higher, with the whole planet facing imminent destruction, which helps in preventing this from resembling a filler story. Quarx is undeniably annoying, his voice provided by guest star E.G. Daily in what amounts to an out-of-control version of the Tommy Pickles character she was portraying around this time on Rugrats.) As with Buffy Shellhammer in “Poor Little Rich Turtle”, Quarx’s irritation factor is deliberate on the part of David Wise, a necessary evil for the eventual payoff of his maturation. This is fine, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t mean I have to like him.

It’s a minor complaint, but I’m inclined to question the sequencing of this episode immediately after the [intended] season seven opener in “Night of the Dark Turtle”, both stories seeing the planet facing huge alien threats. While I’m the last person to complain about the Turtles taking on big challenges from varied and unusual characters like these, it does diminish gags like Vernon being alarmed by a spacecraft flying past his window when such things are now a weekly occurrence. And that’s before we even get into the fact that he was once abducted by a group of aliens resembling Elvis, and later found himself in a spaceport filled with aliens in Dimension X – would someone who’s been directly involved in as many far-out adventures as Vernon really be that shocked by seeing spaceships shooting around at this point?

You can probably tell that I’m reaching to find things to quibble about here, the show having regained its footing after seven weeks of the Vacation in Europe arc. It’s refreshing to have the entire voice cast back together and the animation back to the level of polish we’ve come to expect during this era. Next time we’ll explore a unique attempt to unify the different facets of the 1990s TMNT franchise in “The Legend of Koji”.

#Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #TMNT #TMNT 1987 #1993 #Ninja Turtles #The Starchild #Starchild #Quarx #Turtlethon

2 notes · View notes