Ah, Michael Barrier

[Superhobo]

So, what is everyone's opinion of 'prestigious animated film historian' Michael Barrier?

Whenever I've visited his site, everything I've read just comes off as unbearably pretentious - among other things.

His commentary on "Beowulf" being a good example. Now, hey. I'll be the first one to level any meaningful complaints against the film - and there are quite a few - but here's the thing that just sets it over the top for him:

The "animation" in Beowulf—the transformation of actors' recorded performances into something neither wholly artificial nor persuasively real—is in one sense an advance over Robert Zemeckis's first two mo-cap films (The Polar Express and Monster House), because it's so much slicker. But it's slicker in the way that all computer-based animation has gotten slicker: there are lots of individual hairs and moles and other stray recreations of the surface of life. Most of the time, mo-cap just gets in the way: these characters would be more acceptable if played by the real actors, without the veil of mo-cap between us and them. The climactic fight with the dragon is, if my eyes don't deceive me, mostly or perhaps entirely CGI animation, with little or no mo-cap.

Or, his commentary of "Monster House -"

These developments have made Monster House and A Scanner Darkly, another new "animated" film, tempting targets for people who believe passionately that animation, hand-drawn animation in particular, deserves and is fully capable of independent existence as an art form. Their criticism has not been entirely fair; the technologies involved in both films have proved to have real but limited virtues. But it's those limits that are most visible in Monster House and A Scanner Darkly—limits that have no equivalents in the best hand-drawn or computer-animated films.

Thoughts?

 

[블라스]

Well, he can shove it.