the Tiger Shark

If anyone has seen the Life Aquatic by Wes Anderson, it’s pretty much a cookie-cutter stamp of his previous, more successful hits like Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore. In typical Anderson style, it’s a dry humored trip where if you don’t appreciate a good two hours of subtle, disfunctional conversational humor, you probably won’t overly enjoy it. Still, unlike any other Wes Anderson movie (until later, Fantastic Mr. Fox), it adds a combination of live acting and bits of animation thrown in throughout the film. Although they’re few and far between, its an interesting twist that oddly enough, actually works with the movie.

What I think makes this combination work is that the animation isn’t very modern looking. In a movie that’s geared toward a retro simplicity, the animation chosen fits right in to a certain degree. The use of stop animation does catch your eye more than would a more realistic looking style, though, in the long run it doesn’t feel too distracting or come off as a “look what I can do” type gimmick.

In fact, in some ways the quirky looking figures created through stop animation actually serve to further some major points. For instance, much of the movie centers around Bill Murray setting out on a voyage to track down and kill a never before charted species of shark that attacked and ate his best friend. In some ways, it’s the story of the anti-Moby Dick. The directing of the movie saves the climax for the very end in which Murray takes a small pod down to the ocean floor where the viewer gets to see the long awaited tiger-shark for the very first time. While only getting to see it for some twenty seconds, I think the stop animation adds to the mystery of the whole scene in getting to view an undiscovered shark species. It also enables the creature to be more strangely illuminated and other-worldly looking rather than if the animators just plopped a realistic looking shark that wouldn’t make the viewer think twice about.

All in all, the oddity of seeing the style of animation used to create this weird looking shark puts the viewer in the same shoes as the actors in some ways. Its cool to look at, but we’ve never really seen anything like it.

This week I commented on http://sandyshore2.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/5-lotte-reiniger’s-scissors/#comment-14

and http://earlycuyler.typepad.com/blog/2010/03/post-6-gullivers-travels-disneys-first-competition.html#comments

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