CGI animals

It needs to stop.

Once upon a time, animals in movies were real creatures captured on film. They were in the room or on the set with the actors, interacting with them, responding to them, being led or ridden or spoken to, and (in their own way) directed in accordance with the script—albeit, like human actors, subject to their own whims and fancies, and occasionally doing unexpected things, as in the final scene of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink.

Beyond their verisimilitude or personal presence to the actors, part of the power of animals on film is their unique haecceity, or thisness. The wonder of an animal in person, even at the zoo, translates to the medium of film because any animal, however tame, is its own thing, separate and apart from its ostensible human masters. This wonder extends to stunts and set pieces, because any time Indiana Jones hops on a horse or Lawrence of Arabia rides a camel, you know the actor had to take the time to learn—to be taught—how to do such a complex activity as if he’d been doing it all his life. Even something as lowbrow as Sofia’s fight-on-command dog in John Wick 3 is a remarkable testament to the trainers, choreography, and direction, not to mention the (two) dogs themselves. You can’t help but marvel even as you’re laughing.

For the most part, though, real animals in movies have been replaced by computer graphics, and nine times out of ten it’s slop. To add insult to injury, often as not the slop-CGI animals are meant to be objects of wonder. For some reason directors are especially enamored of slop Cervidae—i.e., deer, elk, moose, and other forest folk. They love their fake eyes on their fake heads, staring intently at the camera. We are meant to marvel in awe. Instead we yawn in boredom. “Really? This is it?” we ask.

The teaser trailer for Spielberg’s next movie is only the latest instance, or victim, or culprit of this cinematic crime. And the contrast came to me in stark terms as I watched Martin Scorsese’s film Kundun for the first time this week. Released in 1997 and now unavailable apart from old DVDs—I got mine via university inter-library loan—the film is the story of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, from age four to his exile at twenty-five years old. It marks Scorsese’s first collaboration with famed cinematographer Roger Deakins.

And you know what? In the first hour it features a regular appearance by a rat. A physical, real-life rat that finds its way around the monastery, sipping the monks’ water and tea when they aren’t looking, or when their eyes grow heavy from meditation and prayer. For the child lead, the rat is an object at once of humor, of delight, of terror, and finally of benign respect.

Yet all I could think about as I watched the little rat scurry around was: If Scorsese made this film for Netflix in 2025, that rat would be CGI.

Masterly Spielberg

I’ve written before of my love for Steven Spielberg (whose critical fortunes, having waxed and waned over the decades, seem to have settled into a sort of consensus: whatever your personal feelings for this or that movie of his from the past 10-15 years, it’s undeniable that the man knows where to put the camera), and Tim Markatos, whose writing on film you should read and whose newsletter you should subscribe to, captures perfectly what makes Spielberg so great in his explanation for placing West Side Story at #5 on his list of the best 25 films of 2021:

This movie is so well blocked that it simply embarrasses nearly every other movie released this year (including some of the highbrow fare on this very list). Mise en scène alone doesn’t make a movie (“But what if it does?” whispers the little devil-horned Janusz Kamiński that suddenly appeared on my shoulder), but it matters more for a musical. The Spielberg–Kushner rendition of West Side Story lets the Robert Wise version alone and leans harder into political awareness (a key distinction, I would say, from political correctness) not merely by writing it into the script but also by building it into every material aspect of the production. Sometimes it gets a bit hokey, Ansel Elgort brings all his personal baggage to the screen in a way that will either alienate you or not, but none of that matters because I will watch “America” approximately 300 times once it’s inevitably uploaded to YouTube and be floored by Spielberg’s total mastery of this medium every single time.

I will, too. “Total mastery” is right. In those areas of which he is master, the man is without peer.

Kubrick + Spielberg = ?

I had my cinephile card revoked on or around the birth of my first child (there’s only so much time in the day, you know?), but for the first dozen years or so of this century, I was something of a budding film fanatic. I watched American films, foreign films, old films, new films, art films, popular films. I had lists upon lists of directors whose whole oeuvres I devoured one by one.

I always knew I was supposed to like Stanley Kubrick but not Steven Spielberg; something about internet movie culture, or perhaps film-loving dudebro influence, or some such thing. (Maybe I missed the memo to dislike both of them.) But in any case, I couldn’t help myself: while I certainly found a lot to appreciate in Kubrick—I still remember that first 2001 viewing—I loved Spielberg. Adored him, in fact. And not just because his films are popular or entertaining or tailor-made for my tastes. Spielberg may be king of the high middlebrow, but the royalty is earned: his art, to my young eyes, was evident in all that he made. Ever since, I’ve thought that there’s nothing for a director like him to apologize for, and nothing for those who love his work to apologize for, either.

I still remember twenty years ago, the summer before I turned sixteen, dragging my parents, younger siblings, and extended family visiting Austin for the week of the Fourth to see “the latest Spielberg sci-fi blockbuster.” That sci-fi blockbuster was A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Needless to say, no one liked it but me. Better to say, no one knew what they had just watched. I had an inkling, though I knew I needed to read up and re-watch what I had just seen if I wanted to form a complete opinion.

Armond White (a longtime Spielberg lover) calls A.I. the best film of the twenty-first century. Whether or not that’s true, it’s certainly worth remembering, and reconsidering from a critical perspective. Over at The Ringer, Tim Greiving has a long essay exploring the winding route the film took to make it onto the big screen. He focuses in particular on the nature of Kubrick’s demanding, idiosyncratic development process and the shape of his collaboration with Spielberg, who (after Kubrick’s sudden death in 1999) completed the script himself and directed the film in the spirit and style of Kubrick. The result is a cinematic chimera, in every sense of the word. As Greiving writes,

It’s the end of the movie when this cinematic marriage is consummated, and when there’s both harmony and friction. The 2,000-year epilogue and Monica’s temporary return were what Kubrick wanted, not (as some critics supposed) Spielberg’s feel-good addition. Spielberg is not known for ambiguous endings, and this one is ambiguous: Does David die? Was it all for naught? Is it beautiful that a Monica clone gave him the affirmation he needed and then disappeared—or is it macabre? “For me, A.I. can be tragic, but also not soul-crushing,” says Osment, “because there’s a sense of possibility, and you don’t give a definitive answer to something like that. I really like that. That’s what 2001 did so well. That’s something that Kubrick and Spielberg share.” Robards agrees: “It was different, and chewy, and dense. It did have that Kubrick feel to it, right? Dispassionate. At the end, it was great they got together, but also it wasn’t wholly emotional. I think Steven nailed that.”

That feeling my family (and I) felt when the credits rolled was honest: emotional confusion was the point, or rather, it was the inevitable result of Spielberg channeling Kubrick. In my view, the film is unspeakably sad, and the sheen of Spielbergian family love and redemption—the light, the music, the mother and son’s one happy day in a post-human wasteland in which intelligent machines “survive” without knowledge of their own creators—is what lends it its pathos. Far from masking the tragedy, it highlights it. It gives us what we, like David, think we want. But we, who are human, know better than David, who is not. It isn’t real. Nor is he. That perfect day is artifice. It’s fiction. It’s a false “happily ever after” to a would-be fairy tale that is nothing but one long story of rejection and loss. Which only makes it the more unbearable.

That’s my reading, anyway. The depths of the film, the many interpretations it is patient of, are a testament to its unique creation, indeed to its unique duo of creators. In honor of them, give it a second watch this weekend. You could even make it a family viewing.