Reel Politique: Movie Review, The Golden Compass, Beowulf
To a certain sensibility there is nothing that drains the spirit faster than the prospect of seeing a string of animated films come the holiday season. Well, any season, really, but they seem to be concentrated near Christmas. And they don’t even have to be about the holiday. They just have to be animated. Animated films are either the ne plus ultra of filmmakers, since you can create within the frame anything you desire or can imagine, or a degradation of the cinematic art, thanks to animation’s betrayal of the reality the camera can record. For some of us, though, the generic quality of most commercial animation movies is imprisoning, more limiting than even the most conventional blockbuster.
Stepping into a theater about to show The Golden Compass or Beowulf is like stepping into a pirate movie and knowing you’ll see parrots, eye patches, doubloons, earrings, plank walking, and the rest of the short list of pirate movie conventions. In the child’s fantasy world type of animated movie you have sweeping vistas of unreal worlds, cute creatures who serve as best friends and advisors to the main character, twisty travels through complex interiors, and a tale of quest or rescue. The Golden Compass, essentially an animated movie despite the presence of a few filmed human beings, consists of these elements.
The Golden Compass is an adequate movie for its genre, but also suffers some of its problems. There is far too much explanation and scene setting at the film’s beginning so while you’re trying to process that overload, the story carries on and introduces an onslaught of people and creatures. From there the narrative progresses to external souls called familiars, a strange compass looking device, old fashioned dirigibles like those seen in recent animes, and animals that flutter about as in a Disney movie. Everything is ornate and rococo in a fey attempt to create a colorful alternative world, straining to awe you, but the effects are derivative (as are story elements, be they from Philip Pullman’s novels or the conventional script by writer-director Chris Weitz of American Pie fame); Sam Elliott’s cowboy character, for example, is based on a similar character in the original novel of Dracula. It’s a road story into another world like Oz, a rescue tale like all the animated films that have come out in the last few years, a series of captures and escapes alternating with “meetings” containing more information conveyance.
If The Golden Compass is an animated film posing as a feature film, Beowulf is a feature film pretending to be an animated movie, thanks to its “realistic” performance-capture technology. In fact it highlights the same animated tropes as The Golden Compass with the forced exhilaration and sweeping camera movements. And like The Golden Compass it is based on a book, in this case the fragmentary poem from the 8th to 11th century. However, Robert Zemeckis’s film bears as much resemblance to the epic poem as O Brother Where Art Thou does to the Odyssey.
Again the heart sinks as one sits in the theater and the title rises amid chantings and aged pan flutes and people with ornate headbands engage in 8th to 11th century frivolity with mead and chicken legs (actually the film pretends that the events are taking part in Denmark very specifically in 507 A.D.). Beowulf proceeds to kill a few monsters and evil beings and makes a deal with the devil (a change from the book) and the faux noble language deadens one’s spirit. They call them animated films but I’ve never seen anything so lifeless.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Beowulf’s animation was pretty good, though the characters’ movement reminded me a lot of Shrek. I appreciate the fact that this movie gives a pseudo-education in ancient literature (never had to read the book as a child)