From cinemablend, "Earlier this year Frank Miller announced that he was not planning on there being any more film adaptations of his work that weren’t directed by him. This brought question to the minds of Miller fans everywhere. While we all know Miller was involved in the creation of Sin City, he’s a comic book artist, not a filmmaker.Wouldn’t it be better to leave the adaptation of his work to the film medium to those who know how to do it? The answer appears to be yes. Following their tremendous success with 300, Warner Brothers has managed to get Miller to let them option Ronin, the story of a disgraced samurai from the 13th century, reborn into New York about sixty years from now. The ronin battles with a demon who wields a mystical sword. The big news is not only that WB has optioned the film, but Miller isn’t directing it.
The announcement through Variety is that Stomp the Yard filmmaker Sylvain White will be heading up the project. Wait a minute, the director of the urban musical Stomp the Yard and the direct to video I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer has gotten his hands on a Miller project? Not only that, but this isn’t exactly the breaking news we’re being led to believe it is. In fact, we reported White’s attachment to the project in February. So I guess the news isn't the director, but the studio... big whoop. Now I’m no fortune teller, but I can pretty much guarantee that this means at least a year’s worth of bitching from Miller that nobody can direct his stories. Sadly, unlike Sin City and 300, he might even be right this time."
20 comments:
LOVED Ronin! Oh, boy.
There better not be any false noses.
I wonder if the Spirit movie is going to feature those facial prosthetics you love. I seem to recall some pretty non-representational supporting characters.
Ronin has got game but in my opinion it’s the weakest thing he’s ever done besides that Dark Knight sequel. The story could use a lot of trimming even just as a comic, so they certainly have my permission to push the plot around some. Not that they asked.
non-representational supporting characters
We can have the whole argument again (but whimsically, this time) if you want.
My position has always been that they're ALL representational, and any caricatured drawing style is best understood as such. We all know that Charlie Brown does not "actually" have a head larger than the rest of him and that Mike Doonesbury's nose isn't "actually" shaped like a Mini-MagLite projecting from his face. (Same remarks viz. Jack Kirby, Don Martin, Chester Gould etc.) (Actually Chester Gould is where all this crap started, thanks to the idiocy of Warren Beatty's team.)
The only exception to this I can think of is a brillant little thought experiment called Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which the literalness of the juxtaposition was the whole point. Remember when Roger sticks his head in one desk drawer and it comes out another? The whole point is that it IS the direct juxtaposition that all my other examples exactly avoid, because (unlike, say, Tom and Jerry dancing with Fred Astaire) you're supposed to bask in the internally-consistent logic of the "toons" bringing their aesthetics and physics with them out into the real world.
It complicates the discussion that Frank Miller did Sin City (the movie) himself, so I have the additional burden of disagreeing with him, too, and it doesn't look good. But, damn it, he's got it wrong (and that is possible: see Lucas, Roddenberry, Coppola, etc.) Marv's nose, I believe, is 100% within the realm of actual, realistic human faces. He's drawn that way because Miller is a visual genius and a wonderful comic book artist and illustrator. The prosthetics, like the Dick Tracy prosthetics, throw the thing off completely by falsely putting us into "Roger Rabbit" territory.
I wanted to lay out my position again so it's clear. Who's with me? AAAHHH! (runs out of room like John Belushi in Animal House
This is the point where I’m supposed to say “Bluto’s right,” but unfortunately I’m not.
Jordan and I have been over this before; it’s down to a very basic difference in our outlooks. That is, for me, there’s no “actually.” When you say “we all know” Charlie Brown doesn’t have a head like that, I know nothing of the sort. That head, that world, is the start point and end point. I don’t choose to assume a real-world antecedant.
That said, Sin City is not meant to be like Roger Rabbit. They’re not coming into our world, we’re going into theirs. And that’s what they look like there.
I get that caricature is usually an exaggeration of real-life features, but it doesn’t mean every caricaturized drawing has or needs a “real” example of itself somewhere backstage.
octo, by your logic:
1) Charlie Brown can't put a t-shirt on
2) Zonker can't wear a gas mask (and I know he does)
3) The South Park kids are capable of floating in the air when they reach for doorknobs
4) Hartigan can't wear eyeglasses
5) Batman can't dial a phone (because his hands are the size of oven mitts in the Miller drawings)
6) Hobbes is alive
Because there's no "actually," right?
Right. My logic works fine.
Charlie Brown doesn't have to put a t-shirt over his head, it's drawn on.
Zonker doesn't have a nose when he's wearing a gas mask, that is his face.
The South Park kids can indeed do that, which is far less miraculous than all the times Kenny’s come back to life.
Hartigan doesn’t need glasses, but if he did, they’d draw them on like Chuck’s t-shirt.
Batman doesn’t use a phone, he just puts a little two-way to his ear and says "Alfred."
Calvin and Hobbes presents us with two worlds, and one of them is an internal "actually." But in the other one, yes, Hobbes is alive.
"Charlie Brown doesn't have to pull a t-shirt over his head; it's drawn on"
Dude, I've SEEN him pull a t-shirt over his head!
And Zonker's nose goes away? How is that even possible? His nose goes away? It's not just an ideosyncracy of the caricatured drawing style?
(Obviously Doonesbury breaks the "fourth wall," from time to time, like when Mike's daughter refers to her eyes changing, but that's obviously an anachronistic joke. It wouldn't be funny in your version because her eyes would have literally transformed in a way that Mike could see.)
And the South Park kids are actually floating -- it's not just because of the funny, crappy drawing style?
And Zonker's nose goes away?
Dude, come on. You're just being silly. Why would you even want it to work that way?
I guess the "Doonesbury" Broadway musical grotesquely distorted the characters' appearance. I mean, Mark Linn-Baker playing Mark Slackmayer? How can the audience accept this when he doesn't have a nose like an inverted teacup? Couldn't they have done "Beauty and the Beast" style makeup to fix it and make it, you know, more realistic?
Come to think of it the only exception to what I'm saying is "The Simpsons," which OVERTLY and CONSISTENTLY makes it that they are yellow and they do have only four fingers (unlike God) and exist in a world without a third dimension.
But that's the only one.
I agree with octo.
Octo is cute.
Well then I must be right.
I'm drafting a longer response to the above, but I can't post it at stupid work.
Wait, Hobbes isn't alive? Can Stewie really talk?
I just remembered the cartoon Beatles. What about them? The real Beatles have pupils in their eyes! And their heads aren't shaped like big potatoes! What a rip-off! They should have tried to make them look like the actual Beatles.
What about cartoon and comic strip characters that look different from the side than they do from the front? That's a real headscratcher -- it may involve relativity or something.
For example, when viewed from the side, Mickey Mouse's ears face the viewer, and one is sticking straight backwards while the other one sticks up at an angle, while, from the front, his ears face the front and are symmetrical across a vertical axis. So if two people are looking at Mickey Mouse at the same time from those two angles, you're dealing with an impossible shape.
Jordan - Try as I might, I really don't understand the point you're trying to make. What does Charlie Brown's head have to do with Sin City?
"Trying" to make? "Trying" to make? I'd say I'm succeeding, son.
(kidding)
Anyway I'd be delighted to explain. It's an old argument between octopunk and myself. Basically, I don't like Sin City. There are several reasons I don't like it, but the one feature that I absolutely hate is all the prosthetic makeup.
I'm a big Frank Miller fan and a big Will Eisner fan, and Sin City (the comic/graphic novel series) is about as close as Miller gets to the pure, clean black-and-white India-ink style of Eisner, in which the same person writes, pencils and inks the work (in black and white) and the result is, basically, museum-quality expressionistic imagery.
"Expressionistic" meaning that the artist is taking more than the usual stylistic liberties with proportions and lines, so that (for example) a hulking man in a trench coat is drawn to be about four feet taller than the skinny, sexy girl standing next to him, while the girl might have a long waist that he could fit one hand around (since his hands are each the size of dinner plates). Good examples include Hirschfeld's "broadway" caricatures, political cartoons, and the character designs for The Incredibles -- but, really, nearly all cartoon or comic strip characters do this. Even a "realistic" artist like Neal Adams or Brandon Choi is exaggerating the features and the proportions to make a point.
At the far end of the scale are the cartoonish characters I've been mentioning: Peanuts and Looney Tunes, for example. The stylized drawings are, I'm quite sure, not to be taken literally; it's one of the delights of comic strips that Lucy can yell loud enough to make Charlie Brown flip over backwards or that Linus' head is shaped like a three-foot-diameter lima bean.
When this stuff gets turned into live-action film, they go get real actors (like Christopher Reeve or Hugh Jackman) who look like the physical archetypes that the comic books are trying to get across, but also are real people -- in other words, the majority of the stylized exaggeration in the drawings is understood to be a feature of the art. (We know that Superman doesn't "actually" have arms as thick as tree trunks; we understand that the drawings are stylized. So, when they film it, they "translate" stylized drawings into actual photography. So we get to imagine that Peter Parker "in real life" would be Tobey MacGuire, etc. It all makes sense.
Sometimes, though, a filmmaker decides to reproduce the stylization literally and actually make the live-action three-dimensional actors, sets and costumes be exaggerated like the source material. Dick Tracy was filmed on sets and using costumes in six colors only (for example) because the "newspaper strip colors" work that way, and, while they were at it, they gave Al Pacino a big glued-on chin to make him look like a Chester Gould drawing. (Madonna and Warren Beatty were spared this, for some mysterious reason.)
I absolutely hate this.
The only time it works, in my opinion, is in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (see my remarks above). In that case, it's quite literally part of the plot that "the toons" are different: their exaggerations and powers and inability to be killed or harmed are considered to be "actual" traits that Toons cary with them out into the real world. Again, I emphasize that this is part of the plot of the movie; Jessica Rabbit really does have breasts the size of watermelons and Roger Rabbit actually can turn purple and plaid or stick his head in a desk drawer and have it come out another drawer (but he can only take his hand out of the handcuffs "when it was funny").
Sin City (the movie) was made like Dick Tracy and Roger Rabbit. Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke (in the same movie for the first time! Yes!) along with many other actors, are wearing prosthetic makeup to make them literally be shaped like the expressionistic drawings. Hartigan isn't just a guy with scars on his face and Marv isn't just a guy with a brutish pug nose (but drawn in an expressionistic style): the actors are made to have inhumanly exaggerated features.
Again, I hate this. It makes it impossible to like the movie, basically. It turns what should have been a noir masterpiece into a freakshow that I can't watch as if it were a real thriller/drama/crime story. I don't just object aesthetically; I think (as I've tried to explain here) that the idea is just completely wrong and stupid.
Octopunk disagrees with me, and (even worse) Frank Miller obviously disagrees with me, since he was the guy making the movie.
Octopunk's counter-argument (rehearsed above) is that, when it comes to drawings, there's "no such thing as 'actually'." In other words, every drawn character must be understood to really be shaped like that. For reasons I've tried to make clear, I think this is ridiculous lunacy.
"Stylization" isn't a yes/no question, obviously; everything's a little bit stylized. (I happen to dig Tim Burton's crazy Gotham City, for example.) But the prosthetics are a complete deal-breaker for me, in Dick Tracy and Sin City both. I don't see how anyone can get a "clean read" of the story when the characters are wearing Halloween masks (essentially). Again, I think the only way to do this legitimately is to make it literally part of the plot, like in Roger Rabbit.
There it is.
Ok Jordan, thanks for clarifying. I agree that the prosthetics in Sin City were unnecessary and distracting. It wasn't enough to prevent me from loving the movie though because the movie was like nothing I'd ever seen before (Dick Tracy included.)
It seems like they took great pains to be as faithful to the comic as possible. But you still can separate Sin City the comic from Sin City the movie based on the comic. Prosthetics aside, what else would you have changed about the movie?
My problem with Jordan’s operating system goes like this: It’s not our reality he’s referring back to, he’s not saying “People’s heads don’t actually look like Charlie Brown’s,” he’s saying Charlie Brown’s “actual” head can’t really be that big. Somewhere in between the quotes around the word “actual” there’s a whole other reality that looks like ours but features those characters, doing those things.
Frankly, I think this is a fascinating perspective, and it makes total sense why Sin City’s prosthetic overtures are a dealbreaker for Jordan based on this. But my perception of caricaturized drawings does not work this way. Moreover, when Jordan says Frank Miller got it wrong, “it” isn’t about pleasing Jordan’s sensibilities, “it” is instead IT. A rule was broken, one that I continue to flaunt with my “ridiculous lunacy.”
The distinction is so fundamentally basic it’s easy to miss; we’re both going back to square zero in terms of perception. Take Mickey Mouse’s head. His ears are always two circles, no matter which angle you’ve got on his face. Jordan says such an object couldn’t actually exist, therefore the drawing is an interpretation of a different object that does exist. I agree that such an object couldn’t actually exist, and then I stop. The drawing is all there is. It’s really shaped like that (italics Jordan’s) because there’s no intermediary reality between the idea and the drawing. It looks like what it looks like. You’re looking at IT.
Looking at some earlier comments:
Me: Charlie Brown doesn't have to pull a t-shirt over his head; it's drawn on
Jordan: Dude, I've SEEN him pull a t-shirt over his head!
What I assume Jordan’s seen here is a sequence of panels, one in which Chuck’s got a t-shirt over his head and then one with him wearing the t-shirt. Because these are both static panels, both shirts are drawn in position and you don't actually see his head go through the collar of the shirt. If I understand this right, Jordan’s saying these images prove that in between panels he pulls the shirt over his head, therefore his real head must be normal, just like the real shirt.
My question is: where is this real Charlie Brown? Can I peel the stylized panels off the newspaper and see the real Chuck underneath? Can I find him on the special features of the dvd? Is there a picture of him on The Superficial smoking a cigarette?
Perhaps it’s true that Schultz had, in his head, in tandem with the images he was creating, another image of an actual bald, unhappy kid in his actual bedroom pulling on a shirt. But to bear out Jordan’s idea it can’t be just an idea of a real kid, but specifically a kid that looks like a real kid.
Or, since "we all know" that Charlie Brown’s head isn't really that big, it's some obvious facet of the collective consciousness -- the VIP room of Plato’s cave where the solid manifestations of these characters cast their caricaturized shadows on the wall. And we all know this, myself and Frank Miller included.
My take is that these images come from the artists' heads as is, and for me that's the beauty of it. The caricatures have the usual antecedants: those of the real world, where there are pitcher’s mounds and kids who can’t catch a baseball. But there is no Charlie Brown besides the one made of ink. There can be, of course, just by dint of Jordan thinking of this stuff, but it’s not a prerequisite.
Jordan: And Zonker's nose goes away? How is that even possible? His nose goes away? It's not just an ideosyncracy of the caricatured drawing style?
I'm as baffled that he asks "How is that even possible?" as he is that I said what I said in the first place. Jordan and I are operating from two extremely different contexts here. My answer is simply: because he's a drawing. You can't see his nose, so it isn't there. You can't prove it is. You can't prove it needs to be there.
That may sound like a flip answer, or it may seem like I've attached a metric ton of explanatory apparatus to my perception of Doonesbury, or I’m imagining Zonker with the skin ripped off of his face, but that's not the point. The point is I see Zonker in a gas mask and think "there's Zonker in a gas mask" and that's it. I don't need the questions answered, what's in the panels is plenty.
And just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about the nose of the guy that Zonker Harris was based on, and neither is Jordan. We’re talking about the Zonker who talked to plants, was a competitive tanner, bought his way into the British aristocracy, all of that.
Jordan: Obviously Doonesbury breaks the "fourth wall," from time to time, like when Mike's daughter refers to her eyes changing, but that's obviously an anachronistic joke. It wouldn't be funny in your version because her eyes would have literally transformed in a way that Mike could see.
I'm fine with Mike not noticing Alex's eyes change. Just because I'm refuting your "actual reality" idea, I'm not locking myself into a new set of inflexible rules. Of course certain visuals in the Dooniverse can be invisible to certain characters; I know that Honey doesn’t see the miniature Iwo Jima sticking out of Duke’s head, for instance.
And I don't see how my version bleaches out the funny; it's funny to us, and that's what matters. More than that, I feel like my outlook preserves the humor better; I find the idea that the Don Martin characters "actually" look just like us to be pretty unfunny and drab.
Jordan: Dude, come on. You're just being silly. Why would you even want it to work that way?
It may be a silly topic, but I'm being completely serious. It's not a matter of wanting things to work that way as much as it's both of us really digging how our own brains work. That said, I probably could have avoided this whole thing if I’d responded differently to the six numbered indictments of my logic Jordan posted way up near the top of this page. The short answer would’ve been that, by choosing the schema in which the characters actually have those particular appearances or traits, I’m simultaneously assuming the entire range of possibilities available to worlds that exist only on paper. That is, Jordan’s indictments weren’t of my logic, but aspects of his logic grafted onto mine.
The even shorter answer would’ve been “dude, it’s a cartoon.” But who wants that?
Jordan: I guess the "Doonesbury" Broadway musical grotesquely distorted the characters' appearance. I mean, Mark Linn-Baker playing Mark Slackmayer? How can the audience accept this when he doesn't have a nose like an inverted teacup? Couldn't they have done "Beauty and the Beast" style makeup to fix it and make it, you know, more realistic?
Now who's being silly? You're the one who's saying these strips must have an underlying reality. I'm saying they don't. I'm NOT saying they must then only ever look like their drawings when they're being interpreted in other forms.
Nor am I saying that it's always a good idea. I think the efforts in Dick Tracy and Sin City to make the characters look like the drawings were great; I think the similar efforts to realify the Grinch and the Cat in the Hat were horrible failures that never should have happened. Same thing with the comic-booky elements in Creepshow; you need to finesse these things instead of just slapping one reality onto another.
Jordan: When this stuff gets turned into live-action film, they go get real actors (like Christopher Reeve or Hugh Jackman) who look like the physical archetypes that the comic books are trying to get across, but also are real people -- in other words, the majority of the stylized exaggeration in the drawings is understood to be a feature of the art.
I find the statement after the dash to be a HUGE logical leap. You’re asserting that as soon as real actors are brought into the mix, the result is required to reflect our reality. As I said above, Sin City is not our reality and was never meant to be. It’s an idealized film noir cityscape with skies of ink. The fact that actual people are in the filmmakers’ toolbox as they create these images does not drop a huge set of requirements in their laps, which is one of the reasons the look of this flick thrilled me like it did.
Likewise, it sounds when Mark Linn-Baker played Mark Slackmayer he became more important as a visual reference than the drawn Mark because Mark “doesn’t really look like that.” And the same would go for anyone who ever dressed up as Charlie Brown for Halloween. According to Jordan, the “real” image is primary, and the caricature springs from that.
My last question for Jordan is: where’s the line? Since you cite Roger Rabbit, I know there’s a demarcation line in your head somewhere about when a toon can be a toon. Right? Do you have an idea of what Elmer Fudd or Roger Rabbit “really” look like? I’m guessing no. The Simpsons, for instance, seemed to have exempted themselves from having an implied “realer” reality. But where is that line?
Of course I’m not looking for that answer, I’m pointing out: If it’s not obvious to everyone where the line is, then you can’t apply the principle across the board. Frank Miller didn’t break a rule and despite all my crazy talk, neither did I.
My actual last question is: What does it “really” look like when Snoopy puts Woodstock in his lap and uses his ears like helicopter rotors to fly around? It’s hard enough to get a beagle to have a useable lap, let alone the flying part.
"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts, just repeat to yourself, "It's just a show. I should really just relax."
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