"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D

 

June 10, 2005

 

Right before this series we looked at the Spring 2005 release of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s experiment in comic book literalism SIN CITY. Just over two months later Rodriguez was back with another movie, this time for the kiddies.

 

SUMMER 2005In a way THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D continues the SIN CITY mission by using the at-the-time pretty new approach of heavy green screen to adapt a story on a lower budget than if he had to build full sets and things. But while the other one directly translates the exact words and pictures of a popular comic book series, this one is based on, according to the credits, “the stories and dreams of” his eight-year-old son Racer Max. It’s credited as “A RODRIGUEZ FAMILY MOVIE.”

 

I had never seen this before, correctly assuming it was not for me despite my fandom for Rodriguez (senior)’s previous films. But in the opening scene, I gotta tell you, I felt there was a chance I would enjoy it. The idea of it made me chuckle a little, despite some computer animation most productions would’ve considered unpassable. Our main character Max (Cayden Boyd, MYSTIC RIVER) is narrating the story of how he met Sharkboy (Taylor Lautner, SHADOW FURY) and Lavagirl (Taylor Dooley). He says Sharkboy was a normal kid whose dad was a marine biologist, and he liked to feed sushi to the sharks from the dock on their laboratory. “But one day, an incredible, mysterious storm appeared,” destroyed the lab and separated Sharkboy from his father. “But one of the sharks recognized him” and took him to “their cave home” where hundreds of sharks “raised him as one of their own, training him in the ways of the shark.”

 

 

When Max met Sharkboy he took him home and kept him in his shower for a while, I thought that was funny. I wonder if Guillermo del Toro has seen this.

 

 

Then they met Lavagirl (Taylor Dooley), a girl with purple hair and heat powers, who tried to get Max to come to “a planet so cool it makes you drool” called Planet Drool, but he said he couldn’t because he had school.

 

It really does kinda sound like a kid telling a rambling, nonsensical story, plus a few likely dad additions like the sharks teaching him “Always go forward, never back” and “to live on instinct and instinct alone.” But then we find that Max is reading this story to his class as his “What I did on my summer vacation” story. A total fucking dickface bully named Linus (Jacob Davich) then uses his own assignment just to make fun of Max and say that he smells bad.

 

The class laughs at Max for claiming that his Sharkboy story really happened, but he admits to the teacher, Mr. Electricidad (George Lopez, SKI PATROL), that it comes from the thick, heavily illustrated dream journal he carries with him at all times, like a normal human child from ordinary life.

 

Max’s parents are played by David Arquette (ROADRACERS) and Kristin Davis (ATOMIC TRAIN), who seem to be about to get a divorce and are weirdly open to talking Max about it like he’s a peer. Dad is an unemployed writer who encourages Max and says “Kids need their dreams,” while Mom says “Kids need to grow up.” Troubling.

 

Linus is the type of bully who has minions he directs with hand signals, and who says things like, “I’m gonna burst your bubble, Dream Boy.” He steals the dream journal and defaces it, but Max is redeemed when Sharkboy and Lavagirl burst into the classroom right in front of everybody and take him to their shark-shaped rocket ship to go to Planet Drool, “a place for kids to dream and have endless fun.” They explain that yes they are imaginary and they need his help because he made them up. (He’s their God?)

 

 

 

For a movie all about imagination this is extremely literal-minded. In order to stop “the darkness” from destroying Planet Drool they must travel through The Passage of Time (a bunch of clocks), catching the Train of Thought (a train with brains around it), swimming down the Stream of Consciousness and skating across the frozen Sea of Confusion to the Dream Lair (a bed). Everything is the most obvious, generic version of a thing kids like (cookies, toys, rollercoasters) – a Dollar Store clearance bin fantasy world if I’ve ever seen one. Max has to dream within the dream to find out more information like there’s a crystal heart and an ice princess in an ice palace. And Linus shows up as a villain in a Dracula cape named Minus and puts them in a bird cage.

 

The teacher, who seemed a little insensitive in the waking world now becomes an evil super villain called Mr. Electricity, a giant floating head similar to that much-mocked MODOK character in ANT-MAN 3. Or I guess he also kind of looks like Zordon from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

 

 

A thought I had while watching was that if this exact movie had been made in the ‘80s, on film, with matte paintings, puppets, etc., it would at least be tolerable for longer, if not good. And even made with this low budget 2005 technology if it had been done more artfully, if it was beautiful to look at, there might be something there. But at this level of quality, from my perspective of not-the-intended-audience, it very quickly shows why a movie “based on the stories and dreams of Racer Max” was not gonna work. Yes, it can be funny and cute to hear a kid make up a silly, meandering story. But do you want to listen to it for 93 minutes? And it’s not your kid, but an actor playing Robert Rodriguez’s kid? Not as appealing.

 

If I had known there would be exactly one good thing in this movie I wouldn’t have guessed what it would be. It’s actually Lautner! I have been unkind about some of his acting performances as a grown person, but as a little kid he was actually pretty spectacular in this role. More than the others he gets that vibe of Rodriguez’s FOUR ROOMS segment The Misbehavers: an intense little rascal being a goof. Actually, you know what, he really reminds me of the Feral Kid in ROAD WARRIOR, but with this foam sculpted shark-themed armor. He takes the super hero poses and the monstrousness seriously, and also he had trained in martial arts since he was six so he does gratuitous flips and fights some animated electrical cords and cuckoo clocks and stuff (providing his own choreography, they say).

 

 

There’s also a part where he goes into a musical number, and as worn out as the “gratuitous musical number” joke is his full commitment even made me laugh there. I support the character of Sharkboy, just not the movie he’s in.

 

 

I guess another good part was at the beginning when Max doesn’t yet know Sharkboy and Lavagirl are real but he goes to investigate a noise in the kitchen and in the lightning flashes we see them creepily hanging from the ceiling like it’s a horror movie.

 

 

 

And there’s one weird joke about the location of the school that made me laugh – I won’t give it away in case you too decide you have to watch this for some reason. You need something to look forward to.

 

As the title implies it was released in 3-D, but this was four years before AVATAR and/or MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D spurred the digital 3-D revolution, so it was just the terrible red and green paper glasses type. I have not seen it that way but unsurprisingly everyone thought it looked like absolute garbage, and that may have made the reviews even worse than they might’ve been if critics could’ve seen what they were looking at. (It is kind of funny though that there is a “GLASSES ON” sign that lights up in the rocket ship and then they put 3D glasses on for the launch.)

 

According to Wikipedia it’s unknown whether THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D was a flop or not without knowing the marketing budget. It reportedly cost $50 million and made $72 million. If it really cost that much that’s shocking to me because Rodriguez made his name as a guy who could stretch a budget. Obviously the volume of visual FX is very high but also the quality is not up to the standard of what had previously been considered suitable for theatrical release. Maybe a fruit roll-up commercial or something. Maybe.

 

 

 

 

I don’t know, I suppose it’s possible it didn’t look as shitty before the high definition transfer, but some of these shots would’ve been rejected from the 1995 MORTAL KOMBAT movie. I know you can’t really be sure about reported budgets or compare movies produced in different countries, but just for the record, GODZILLA MINUS ONE and EX_MACHINA won visual FX Oscars on, allegedly, $15 million budgets. DISTRICT 9 supposedly cost $30 million. Shit, set the FX aside, those are movies with many locations and sets and actors and things. You’re really telling me a movie that’s 75% unknown kid actors greenscreened onto rollercoaster screensavers cost $20 million more? Even though it was filmed at his own studio with his own company doing some of the animation? The Jimmy-Neutron-ass company that thought this looked good enough for their logo?

 

 

I actually think there’s a logical explanation for this that would speak highly of Rodriguez, and that’s that he fleeced those motherfuckin Weinsteins for tens of millions of dollars. “You know what, I’ll give you a discount since you’re such a great guy.”

 

If that’s the case I gotta support it. And I can’t get too mad anyway because I don’t know, it’s probly weirder and more sincere than some of the more standard made-for-children garbage that I would find equally interminable. Even if kids didn’t love watching it I’m sure Rodriguez had fun with his kids making it. Maybe he should be doing that on his own time not ours, but I got no business telling people how to parent. If you’re like me though and your kids didn’t make this movie then I recommend continuing with your plan to not watch it.

 

 

 

Tie-ins: Several related books were released: The Illustrated Screenplay, The Movie Storybook, Max’s Journal, and two Sharkboy and Lavagirl Adventures children’s novels by Rodriguez and Chris Roberson (The Day Dreamer and Return to Planet Drool).

 

Legacy: Reportedly Miley Cyrus was in consideration for Lavagirl, but then she got Hannah Montana. So maybe we can thank this movie not casting her for her later pop career? I don’t know. Lautner obviously went on to larger stardom three years later when he joined up with LORDS OF DOGTOWN director Catherine Hardwicke for TWILIGHT.

 

Sequel: I guess Rodriguez’s 2020 Netflix film WE CAN BE HEROES takes place in the same universe – it’s about children of super heroes, including Guppy (Vivien Lyra Blair, Princess Leia from the Obi-Wan Kenobi show), the daughter of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. Dooley returns as Lavagirl but Sharkboy is played by stuntman J.J. Dashnaw. Also in the trailer we see the same Great White Bites cereal. No word on the budget but it looks twenty times more expensive than SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL, with FX by ILM and Weta. Racer is credited as a producer and his brother Rebel did the music.

 

* * *

 

P.S. Here’s a real problem with doing this as long as I have and/or having an aging brain. I went and watched MR. & MRS. SMITH (released on the same day as SHARKBOY), didn’t enjoy it much, sat down to write about it, went to look up whether or not I reviewed it when it came out, discovered I actually reviewed it in a previous summer retrospective back in 2013 (the “Summer Movie Flashback” series). So I guess writing another one would be useless. The action is still pretty good, the two stars are still super hot, the joke is still not that funny, the score by John Powell still sucks. But I have some updates for the legacy section.

 

One of Brad Pitt’s stunt doubles, David Leitch, went on to co-direct JOHN WICK and then direct ATOMIC BLONDE, DEADPOOL 2, HOBBS & SHAW, BULLET TRAIN and THE FALL GUY.

 

Fight choreographer Damon Caro became Zack Snyder’s go-to stunt coordinator/second unit director, including on his produced-not-directed movies like 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE and WONDER WOMAN, so he’s a big part of what we think of as the Zack Snyder style.

 

In the old review I mentioned the unaired TV pilot Doug Liman and Simon Kinberg did in 2007. Well, in 2024 there was a new Mr. & Mrs. Smith made by other people – an Amazon Prime version created by Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane. It’s a different premise than the movie, with Glover and Maya Erskine playing highly competent failures who accept mysterious jobs living together as fake husband and wife and being sent on assassination missions. It’s sort of reverse of the movie, actually, because the arc is that they are just people who work together at first, but playing husband and wife makes them start to fall for each other, then the organization tries to turn them against each other.

 

Honestly the reason I watched it is that Glover also created Atlanta, one of my favorite shows ever. This has some overlap with some of the same directors and cinematographers, similarly cinematic look and a preference for skipping time between episodes and throwing you into a situation without context, trusting you to catch on. This too is an excellent TV show, way funnier than the movie but also very dark and uncomfortable because it lets you take the deaths seriously even when the characters aren’t. Though it stars regular hot people instead of fucking Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie I would even argue that the show is hotter than the movie because of the way it builds and releases the sexual tension. It’s a perfect season of television with an ending that makes it complete, although they are mysteriously doing a second season now. Anyway, forget the movie but definitely watch the show if you have access to it.

 

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17 Responses to “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D”

  1. In general I love Rodriguez’ kids movies because of their wild early Nickelodeon energy. But this one really tested my patience. Even though it was still full of the weird shit that nobody else seem to do (I feel like in another timeline, his first movie wouldn’t be EL MARIACHI, but something closer to the works of Jeunet, Gondry or Tim Burton), it was just so slow and boring, that it failed to hold my interest. It’s not even in the “I might give it another shot one day” category. In the end, I did appreciate the strangeness of it all, but as a whole it just didn’t work. However, apparently it went over really well with a bunch of kids at that time, as I learned when WE CAN BE HEROES came out and a huge chunk of social media was really mad at its treatment of Sharkboy, who, as mentioned, was not just recast, but also only communicated through growls in the movie.

    Thankfully the other superhero kids movie of 2005 (Which I really hope you won’t skip, although I don’t know if it was a summer release) was much better. (Don’t worry about hurting my feelings, in case you review, but don’t like it.)

  2. The concept here reminds me of Axe Cop, a fun webcomic from 2010 that eventually became a paper comic and animated series. An artist adapted the imagination of his kid brother onto the comics page, and it was very silly but also awesome with a deadpan sense of humor about it all. But maybe that kid had better ideas which were also translated in a more visually appealing fashion.

  3. This movie is beyond based, one of my favorites and you’re wrong for saying don’t watch it. Even modern tiktok addled little sh**s like it so it did something right.

  4. Unrelated to the movie but the review made me think of it when it mentioned David Arquette.
    There’s a documentary called “You can not kill David Arquette” that follows his journey to redeem himself in the eyes of the pro wrestling world by training to become a hardcore (Weapon matches, light tubes, thumb tacks that kinda thing) pro wrestler that seems like it would be up Vern’s alley. Even if you don’t fuck with wrestling it’s an insane story (He legit almost died in a wrestling match after getting an artery accidently cut with a light tube)

    Also as a long time Taylor Lautner defender happy to see him get praise here. He’s made some funr little action movies even if he performs with the charisma of a plank of wood

  5. I too assumed that this kid’s movie was not for me in spite of my being a fan of Rodriguez’s career. But until now I’d never heard of people who did choose to see it not enjoying it. And also I have to admit I’d never seen any actual imagery for this film other than the poster.

    So now I’m curious. I’ve always mentally associated this film’s title with “Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl”, a Treehouse of Horror SIMPSONS episode in which Bart and Lisa are child superheroes.

    Personally I have a soft spot for that era when they were using CGI for real-world imagery even when the software and/or budget were not yet up to the task. We take a higher level of photorealism for granted today because the technology has advanced, even to the point where people bellyache about shots that look fine to me. Whereas you look at 1990s/2000s CGI and you can tell they were pushing against the bleeding edge of what was possible at the time. (A buddy of mine has been urging me to watch DESPISER, a 2001 low-budget epic full of crude but ambitious CGI.)

    Also (as hinted in the review), digital cinema back then had the advantage that it usually got transferred to film for theatrical distribution (although STAR WARS episodes II and III were already leading the movement away from that) thus gaining grain and other analog artifacts that gave authenticity. It’s weird to see that stuff removed – I remember renting a DVD of the Naomi Watts digital indie ELLIE PARKER (also 2005!) and being shocked that it wasn’t a film transfer of digital video, it was just digital video.

    As for the budget, my uninformed guess is that maybe $50 million bought less sophisticated CGI back then (at least at this quantity) than it did just a few years later.

  6. @curt

    I too love this era of bad cgi but this movie is Def not an example of the pushing against the edge of what is possible in the medium and much more them pushing at the edge of what their budget could afford.

    This came out the same year as Peter Jackson’s King Kong though. Almost photo real cgi was Def possible.

  7. I’m pretty sure the look of the movie is 85% a stylistic choice and 15% a tight schedule. I read once that the movie was finished to fast, that once Rodriguez delivered the finished cut, they hadn’t even started working on the ad campaign, plus as home made as the FX look, there were several different studios involved in it, including ILM and Tippet Studios.

    Also please don’t be like one of those “There wasn’t any good CGI before 2018” people on social media, who act like every movie looked like SPAWN before INFINITY WAR (and also that SPAWN was the best computers could do in 1997, which was the same year that MIB, FIFTH ELEMENT, STARSHIP TROOPERS and TITANIC came out).

  8. If you think about it, Rodriguez is (was?) an incredibly sloppy film maker. His book and DVD extras were often all about cutting corners, but doing so in a way, that the audience doesn’t even have time to notice. Sadly it took him almost 20 years to realize that you can’t do that with computer animation. Or at least only to some extent. It’s one thing to use the computer for little touch ups, like making someone’s bones stick out after he got shot in the knees or fusing a Cheech Marin dummy with the real Cheech, so that Johnny Depp can pretend to finger his corpse’s eyehole, but it’s also very obvious that he often used the computer as a cheap shortcut and didn’t care to make it look good, as long as it is done fast and cheap. (Remember MACHETE KILLS?) And I’m willing to forgive him the 90s Pet Shop Boys video look of this or the unrealistic FX of some of his other kids movies, because it just adds to their unique hyperactive sugar rush style. But man, I can imagine the external FX houses presenting him some early pre-viz scenes and he just checks his watch and goes: “Great! I love it! Maybe add more green and purple and then send it to my editor until Friday!”

  9. I’m not sure if I’ve written this in a review before, but whenever I see his drawings (like I think that Troublemaker logo is based on one of them) I do not like them. So I like his visual style when it’s based in the limitations of the real world he has to shoot in (EL MARIACHI and DESPERADO) but when it’s more a reality he has to create from scratch I sometimes do not agree with him about what is acceptable to make people look at with their eyeballs.

  10. An overlooked issue with CGI is that it takes, or took back then, a long time for the computer to render (i.e. generate each frame with all the lighting and shading), even longer if it includes realistic surface textures and the randomized “particle animation” for stuff like fur or flame. I did some 3D computer animation as a college project back in the late 1990s and for each shot you would pretty much have to let it render overnight, then come back to the computer lab the next day to download the individual files so you could load them into an editing system.

    And that’s assuming the footage was good enough to use, without some unforeseen issue that was harder to spot when it was just a simplified wireframe at your workstation. And depending on your deadline you might just have to decide that it will have to do rather than render it again.

    I once read an interview with the filmmaker behind the CGI fairy tale comedy HOODWINKED! (which I remember liking) (and again, 2005!) and I remember him saying that he would be shown rendered shots and know there were five things wrong and he could only afford to fix two of them, so he would have to decide which two. Similarly, I’ve read that the crude, smooth look of the planets and asteroids in 1984’s THE LAST STARFIGHTER was a consequence of time and budget limitations – more realistic textures were possible back then but much slower to render. So CJ’s suggestion that Rodriguez simply accepted pre-viz-quality footage as the final product might not be too far from the truth.

    I’m not trying to defend sloppy work – I can’t really comment on SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL, not having seen it. All I’m saying is that the crappiest CG I’ve ever seen in a feature film is still head and shoulders above anything I was able to manage as a student, so I’m withholding judgment.

    The big-budget JURASSIC PARK was of course a breakthrough in photorealism, but other CGI of that era was often limited to either smooth shiny shapes (liquid metal, plastic toys) or stuff that was *meant* to look like computer graphics as in LAWNMOWER MAN. The quick adoption of CGI for real-world imagery in mid-to-low budget movies, and especially TV, was sometimes a bit optimistic.

  11. I just finished watching the first season really entertaining LIGHT & MAGIC documentary series about, well, ILM on Disney+ and for some reason the most interesting parts to me (I know, blasphemy) were not the early practical days, but those last few episodes about the digital revolution. Without trying to belittle what the ILM pioneers did, but all in all they built their work on pre-existing stuff, while the CGI work was brand new. Again, what they did with their practical works were already quantum leaps at times. They took FX technology that hadn’t evolved for decades, looked at them and thought “What do we have to do to make these models or stop motion characters look better?”, which admittedly already involved inventing stuff that didn’t exist yet. But the computer stuff? That was all “I have no idea if we can do it! Nobody ever tried that! Who the hell would think of that? Let’s try it!” followed by “Holy shit, I’ve never seen anything like that! What the fuck was that!?”

    My point is: I have no fucking idea how the hell anybody would think that computer FX are something that you can do easily, but even today it is not!

    Random side note: At one point you see SPAWN director Mark A.Z. Dippé, who was some kind of “frat boy” at ILM, who would throw wild parties in his office, but also one of the people who pushed the evolution of computer animation forward by being one of the driving forces behind JURASSIC PARK’s FX. I doubt it, but I hope they talk about what the hell went wrong with his directorial debut and the FX that were provided by ILM in season 2, but as good as the series is, it’s a biiiit too much “Everything was perfect and even the bad things were good”.

  12. Re: Bad CGI – Titanic 1997, True Lies 1994, The Abyss 1989, Jurassic Park 1 & 2 1993, 1997, AI 2001, Minority Report 2002, War of the World 2005, LoTRs Trilogy 2001 – 2003, Babe 1995, Babe Pig in the City 1998, The Matrix 1999, The Mask 1994.

    The effects in the first two Jurassic Parks are better than any in the sequels. Of course that’s Spielberg and almost all comes down to him knowing that you have to shoot the film in 1:85, not 2:39, but we don’t need to get into that.

    All these films have better CGI and effects than just about anything being produced today – and it’s not a surprise that most of the filmmaker’s today making great use of CGI and effects are the same people who made these earlier films. The real reason the effects in these older films still hold up is a combination of the filmmakers’s skills and artistry AND the fact that the films back then used a multitude of effects techniques to achieve the results, not just CGI.

    There are only 2 filmmaker’s of note that have arrived since the early 2000s that I can think of that are similarly skilled in the visual language of effects, including the proper use of CGI – Christopher Nolan & Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve in particular is really pushing things with a very startling use of framing that might be the equal of Kubrick in its perfection.

    CJ Holden – haven’t seen the ILM doc, but the dudes behind Adobe Photoshop Thomas & John Knoll (with an assist by a Toronto company Alias Wavefront software) were absolutely instrumental in creating the CGI work in THE ABYSS, which excluding a few early films is really the touchstone effects work that launched modern CGI. And the sheer domineering brilliance of James Cameron, a true visionary filmmaker in this field. And Dennis Muren, an ILM effects supervisor has his hands all over this as well.

    There’s a great documentary about Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams, the wild child genius who worked on the water tentacle in THE ABYSS, the T-1000 in T2 & the dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK called ‘JURASSIC PUNK’ that is totally worth checking out. He was involved with SPAWN as well. As to why SPAWN might have fallen apart, I suggest cordially that d***s and alcohol in huge quantities might have a part in it.

    Curt – re time involved in the rendering – I think this was integral to things back then – every shot had to be meticulously planned and thought out, because it took for every for a second of film to render, there could be no wastage. The effects world today is full of stories about how especially the big films from Marvel/DC in particular are under enormous time constraints regarding the compression of post production vs the giant workloads and late stage ‘editorial’ changes. I’m pretty sure that something like the abominable FLASH movie a couple of years ago was a particularly insane and chaotic post with demands that were ultimately unfinishable placed on the effects crews.

    And I don’t want to crap on any filmmaker or director, but it’s well known that most of the big productions allow the director little autonomy and creative control over the effects, they know going in that it’s largely out of their hands from the jump. Maybe they should, because one recent film that I was not expecting to have the level of successful effects work – specifically not just how well it ‘looked’, but the artistic and craft component – mixture of models, CGI etc. was BARBIE. There’s a great conversation video between Greta Gerwig and Cameron about their filmmaking processes out there.

  13. Re: Bad CGI – Titanic 1997, True Lies 1994, The Abyss 1989, Jurassic Park 1 & 2 1993, 1997, AI 2001, Minority Report 2002, War of the World 2005, LoTRs Trilogy 2001 – 2003, Babe 1995, Babe Pig in the City 1998, The Matrix 1999, The Mask 1994.

    The effects in the first two Jurassic Parks are better than any in the sequels. Of course that’s Spielberg and almost all comes down to him knowing that you have to shoot the film in 1:85, not 2:39, but we don’t need to get into that.

    All these films have better CGI and effects than just about anything being produced today – and it’s not a surprise that most of the filmmaker’s today making great use of CGI and effects are the same people who made these earlier films. The real reason the effects in these older films still hold up is a combination of the filmmakers’s skills and artistry AND the fact that the films back then used a multitude of effects techniques to achieve the results, not just CGI.

    There are only 2 filmmaker’s of note that have arrived since the early 2000s that I can think of that are similarly skilled in the visual language of effects, including the proper use of CGI – Christopher Nolan & Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve in particular is really pushing things with a very startling use of framing that might be the equal of Kubrick in its perfection.

    CJ Holden – haven’t seen the ILM doc, but the dudes behind Adobe Photoshop Thomas & John Knoll (with an assist by a Toronto company Alias Wavefront software) were absolutely instrumental in creating the CGI work in THE ABYSS, which excluding a few early films is really the touchstone effects work that launched modern CGI. And the sheer domineering brilliance of James Cameron, a true visionary filmmaker in this field. And Dennis Muren, an ILM effects supervisor has his hands all over this as well.

    There’s a great documentary about Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams, the wild child genius who worked on the water tentacle in THE ABYSS, the T-1000 in T2 & the dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK called ‘JURASSIC PUNK’ that is totally worth checking out. He was involved with SPAWN as well. As to why SPAWN might have fallen apart, I suggest cordially that d***s and alcohol in huge quantities might have a part in it.

    Curt – re time involved in the rendering – I think this was integral to things back then – every shot had to be meticulously planned and thought out, because it took for every for a second of film to render, there could be no wastage. The effects world today is full of stories about how especially the big films from Marvel/DC in particular are under enormous time constraints regarding the compression of post production vs the giant workloads and late stage ‘editorial’ changes. I’m pretty sure that something like the abominable FLASH movie a couple of years ago was a particularly insane and chaotic post with demands that were ultimately unfinishable placed on the effects crews.

    And I don’t want to crap on any filmmaker or director, but it’s well known that most of the big productions allow the director little autonomy and creative control over the effects, they know going in that it’s largely out of their hands from the jump. Maybe they should, because one recent film that I was not expecting to have the level of successful effects work – specifically not just how well it ‘looked’, but the artistic and craft component – mixture of models, CGI etc. was BARBIE. There’s a great conversation video between Greta Gerwig and Cameron about their filmmaking processes out there.

  14. Miguel, yeah, they talk about how everyday tools like Photoshop or any video editing software basically only came together because of the success of STAR WARS and Lucas’ “Cool idea, here have some money and see if you can make it” attitude, which is crazy if you think about it.

    I really have to correct you about modern day CGI. There is still lots of stuff that is so good, you can’t even see it. And for some reason the studios do their best to nerdbait audiences with hyping up the practical FX, even if the movie barely uses any. Here is a great YouTube series about it. The amount of digital FX in supposedly all or mostly practical movies like BARBIE or TOP GUN 2 and the length the studio went through to cover it up, is quite interesting.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo

  15. Modern cgi is in a catch 22 situation. Either it’s so good it’s invisible and everyone praises the movie for not using cgi (mission impossible, top gun, barbie etc etc) or it stands out and it’s bad and you get lumped into the ‘all modern cgi is bad’ arguments.

    Also not sure I buy the ‘intentionally styalistic’ argument for the cgi in shark boy and lava girl.

    Mirror mask came out the same year on a fraction of the budget (4 million) and uses intentionally unrealistic stylised cgi mixed with live action. It looks amazing.

    The look of the cgi in shark boy and lava girl has the look of cgi that wasn’t planned properly and was created with no real artistic vision. Kind of the polar opposite of what he did in sin city. A real ‘fix it in post’ attitude to it.

    As for the state of tools. In 2005 I was studying for my diploma of screen in animation focusing on 3d animation and they were far more advanced then you’d think.
    Like yeah their crazy better now, but 2005 was far after the dark ages where it was all impenitrable maths wizardry. This genuinely is about the quality of stuff we were doing as students. Wich, is not good.

  16. Thank you for bringing up MIRRORMASK, Ben. That’s a perfect comparison for what I was trying to say about “even made with this low budget 2005 technology if it had been done more artfully, if it was beautiful to look at, there might be something there.” Made with far fewer resources but directed by a brilliant visual artist doing something genuinely original with CG. (We don’t need to talk about who wrote it, of course.)

  17. Rodriguez comes from a background of doing everything himself on a low budget, so even after gaining bigger budgets he perhaps held on to that habit instead of delegating some tasks to someone with specialized skills in that area (such as logo design).

    I can only speculate on why this movie would be more expensive than other cheap-CGI-heavy movies of its time. Maybe a lot of money was spent on developing the project in the first place. Maybe there were high labor costs. Maybe the shooting schedule went long due to whatever challenges such as the restrictions on working with child actors. Maybe there were tons of reshoots to try to fix the script or because Rodriguez had some new ideas he wanted to throw in. Maybe other comparable productions were more able to take advantage of tax breaks or outsourcing to somewhere that the US dollar was stronger. These are all just guesses, but who knows what costs there were that did not end up onscreen? Assuming the $50 million figure is accurate.

    Anyway, bad or mediocre CGI in a professional movie or TV production is more likely due to either a limited budget or a limited post-production schedule, not incompetence or laziness. Miguel beat me to it by mentioning recent Marvel movies – it sounds like modern CG artists actually work punishingly hard on tight schedules. Remember the year when the VFX artists for LIFE OF PI tried to use their Oscar speech to talk about working conditions in their profession only to get shut down by the walk-off music.

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