RED ENVELOPES / FINAL CUT: All Praise the Pixels

Of the approximately 436 animated movies to come out in the past 12 months, roughly 93% have been CGI epics about wild creatures coming into hilarious conflict with the modern world. I even ended up watching one of them, while trapped in a steel tube hurtling towards in an island in the middle of the Pacific. (That would be Over the Hedge, about which all the newspapers ads have quoted me as saying, "Not as bad as you'd think.") But the news is not all giggles and digital bears. Only a handful of these movies are being considered financial hits. This, thanks to the peculiar world of Wall Street, where a film like Cars can make over a half a billion dollars at the global box office, and still be considered to have "underperformed". But there's a much bigger problem. Many of these films are not especially good.

Perhaps you're thinking the solution here is obvious: make better movies. This is why you most likely do not work in Hollywood, or if you do, investors will never trust you to make the right movies. No, according to one source, the powers that be have decided that there are just too many CGI movies, and they need to make less of those and more hand-drawn films. This is a marvelous theory, especially since only a couple years ago, those same geniuses shut down their traditional animation units because they'd determined that people didn't like hand-drawn movies anymore. I mean, why else didn't they flock in droves to see Home on the Range?

Anyway, they're not going to listen to me and just make better movies. After all, the live-action films are largely crap, so why wouldn't the animated ones follow suit? So let me speak to Hollywood executives in a language they understand: utter illogic. Here's my proposal to you, Hollywood. Maybe the reason moviegoers don't go to see your movies is because...wait for it...they're too long. That's right, it's those darned attention spans that kept everyone from going to see The Wild. You need to make short films. Look at YouTube! Yes, short CGI animated films are the key to economic success.

Of course, I don't believe this for a second. But the short masterpieces I watched this weekend could very easily prove the point. In less than 15 minutes, I saw movies that managed to have more humor and more emotion than any 15 minutes of Open Season.

It began with the Academy Award-winning Ryan, courtesy of our friends at Netflix. (Who only had a broken copy here in Chicago, so they had to send me a copy from the San Jose warehouse, which just fascinates me.) Ryan is, of all things, a documentary. It's the story of an animator, oddly enough, by the name of Ryan Larkin. He made a few remarkable shorts under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada, and got an Oscar nomination himself. This was in the early 70s, and the prevalence of drugs and alcohol combined with an already fragile psyche to completely unhinge Larkin, and he eventually wound up as a panhandler on the streets of Montreal.

It's kind of a downer, no? But in the hands of director Chris Landreth, it becomes something else entirely. This isn't just Ryan's story in CGI form. No, Landreth has used the animation form to reveal the psychological truth of the tale. So Ryan's appearance, as befits a man with a shattered ego, is that of a broken shell. His face is incomplete, his skin doesn't entirely cover his body. In short, he now looks in physical form the way he does emotionally. It sounds grotesque, but it's riveting to watch.

Other participants appear a sketches drawn by Larkin. And Landreth doesn't spare himself. As an active character in the piece, he comes off as plenty screwed up in his own way. At one point, when he makes a stab at intervention, a round flourescent bulb projects from his head, creating a halo just as false as his intentions. (Indeed, in a documentary on the DVD, when Landreth shows Larkin the film for the first time, it's hard to tell who is more uncomfortable: Ryan for seeing how he appears to the world, or Chris for trying to convince himself he's not exploiting a defenseless man.) And later, when a possible reason for Landreth's interest in Ryan surfaces, the animation tells you all you need to know in a matter of seconds. It's a devastating finale, and it shows the raw power that animation can have, if put to a higher purpose.

For good measure, two of Landreth's earlier works, the knowingly-pretentious the end and the creepy Bingo, are included. They help to demonstrate how much Landreth advanced when it came to Ryan. What's more, three of Larkin's films are available for viewing. Walking and Street Musique get all the attention in Ryan, and they are remarkable works, which play endlessly with the morphing abilities of animation. But it's an earlier piece, a wordless fable in charcoal called Syrinx, that was most captivating. Somehow, the pictures seemed to re-draw themselves. Like, I actually felt that the drawing was happening there on the screen, not on some animation table.

In a way, this was a perfect set-up for the Chicago International Film Festival's presentation of Pixar short films. For as much as Cars was a disappointment (in a "yeah, it was good, but it just wasn't the kind of great that it needed to be" kind of way), Pixar remains the foremost practitioner of making dots of light show emotion. That's still evident in their smash debut, Luxo Jr. The tale of two desk lamps, Luxo Jr. shows that you don't even need to change the set, let alone have dialogue or facial expression, to tell a story. The two lamps never leave the desk. They just play with a ball, never straying further than the end of their plugs.

All this was really the set-up for the maiden directorial effort for seven-time Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom. He came to Chicago to present the first ever public screening of a five-minute masterpiece called Lifted. I really can't tell you what it's about. (It will come out next summer, as the appetizer for Ratatouille, and I don't want to spoil any of it for you.) What I can tell you is that we asked to see it again. Rydstrom's a hit. Like the best of these movies, Lifted was funny, it did what only animation can do, and it did it without famous celebrity voices. It didn't work just because it was CGI. It didn't even work just because it was short.

It worked because it was really, really good.