Worth a thousand words

Astrange thing happens in “Frida,” Julie Taymor’s new film about painter Frida Kahlo, when she has a nightmare after a near-death experience. It also occurs in the middle of “Bowling for Columbine,” Michael Moore’s documentary salvo against America’s gun culture. It happens as well in this fall’s black comedy “Just a Kiss” whenever a character on screen steps into dangerous territory. Likewise for the coming-of-age chronicle “The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys,” released earlier this year, when the lead teen character retreats into the private world of his mind.

What happens? Each of these live-action films shifts into animation. Unlike previous combinations of live-action and animation in studio movies, from Walt Disney’s silent “Alice” shorts to Warner Bros.’ “Space Jam,” many of today’s independent filmmakers are using the medium in startlingly different ways.

The 1998 German film “Run Lola Run” employed animated segues between real and subjective time, and the 2001 French hit “Amelie” whimsically used computer animation to make paintings and a bedroom lamp come to life. But the current media-mixing phenomenon appears to have hit in the U.S. with 2001’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” the film adaptation of a stage musical about the difficult life of a transgender East German rock singer.

For that film, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell used animation the way he employed projected slides of artwork in the stage version, particularly to underscore the key song, “The Origin of Love.”

“With the rock energy, we didn’t want any images or beats of the song to be lost, so we had the drawings,” he says. “When we did the film, there was still a problem of getting the central metaphor, underlining it and illuminating it, and it seemed natural to me to extrapolate the drawings into animation.”

After viewing the work of several independent animators, Mitchell brought in Emily Hubley, the daughter of animation legends John and Faith Hubley. Working directly on paper instead of transferring to cels, Hubley and a small team of artists used different visual styles, including a yin-yang image as the visual metaphor of a life split in two. But Hubley and her team were careful to make sure the artwork looked as though it had been created by Hansel, the boy who became Hedwig.

“That was getting the idea across that these were images and ideas that Hansel had had as a young boy, and as the life story unfolds, Hedwig has held onto those images,” Hubley says.

“The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys” also employs animated sequences to reveal the inner thoughts of a young boy, this one a 14-year-old Catholic school student named Francis, a fledgling comic-book artist. Originally, the adaptation of Chris Fuhrman’s novel contained no cartoon segments, and director Peter Care considered using dream sequences to reflect Francis’ interior life. When subsequent script drafts gave more weight to the character’s passion for cartooning, animation seemed an obvious choice.

Acclaimed comic-book artist and animator Todd McFarlane, the creator of “Spawn,” was hired to create the animated segments featuring ersatz superhero characters.

“The drawings needed to be a little crude, the staging and acting a little clunky, and all of it a little unrefined,” McFarlane says. “If you make it too flawless, my perspective was that a 14-year-old wouldn’t think that clearly.”

The period between the approval of the storyboards and the delivery of the footage from the overseas studio providing the actual animation was, for Care, nerve-racking. “It was the hardest thing in the world to sit and wait for the most crucial 10 minutes of your movie in terms of budget and also the emotional weight of the film to come back,” he says.

While the animation for “Altar Boys” is traditional TV action show-style tooning, the graphics seen in “Just a Kiss” were created through a digital process dubbed “rotomation,” though its developer, Michael Ventresco of New York-based digital shop Red Scare Inc. had nothing to do with the name. “I hate the name rotomation,” Ventresco declares, blaming Greenstreet Films, which produced the picture, for the moniker. “It’s just animation. It’s moving graphics with, in some cases, reference to the real world.”

Unlike its namesake “rotoscoping,” a process in which live action is traced frame by frame, rotomation involves putting the live-action images into a computer and animating over the shape outlines. “The top level was [a] hard ink line and that would be a combination of drawing and digital-edge detection,” he says. “We ran the same process for shadows, tones and highlights.”

“Just a Kiss” director Fisher Stevens believes the animation was the key to making the movie work. “I was struggling over how to tell the story and let people know it’s OK to laugh, because it is a black comedy,” he says. “I used [animation] whenever there was a warning sign that one of the characters was going to do something that they shouldn’t necessarily do,” Stevens explains.

Working within a budget of only $1 million, Stevens was forced to shoot on digi-beta instead of film. Because the shots that would be animated required extra fill light to make certain the shapes and form edges were separated clearly enough in the digitally shot image for the animators, the director had to sit down with the script and determine where each bit of animation would go.

“Just a Kiss” was shot in the summer of 2000, and also took a long time to reach the screen, though Stevens maintains that the animation process was only partially responsible for the delays. Making the digi-beta footage look more “filmic,” he says, was also a factor.

For “Frida” director Julie Taymor (who previously used graphic enhancement in her 1999 Shakespearean adaptation “Titus”) employed a variety of animation techniques, the most startling of which was a stop-motion depiction of painter Frida Kahlo’s near-death nightmare in which she is treated by a grotesque, skeletal hospital staff. “It is the first sequence in the movie that tells you this is not going to be a normal biopic,” says Taymor.

This sequence was created by the London-based, American-born twins Stephen and Timothy Quay, known professionally as the Brothers Quay. “I have loved their animation for years,” Taymor says, “and I wanted to do [Frida’s] nightmare as a Day of the Dead sequence where the doctors were all skeletons and the beds were skeletal. It came from something that Frida had said, that when she was in the hospital: ‘Death danced all around her.’ ”

After providing the Quays with Dia de los Muertos materials from Mexico and photos from the hospital set on which she was shooting, Taymor gave the animators free reign, asking only that the result be “mysterious and not too concrete, something that would remain slightly awash in your imagination and in shadow.”

By contrast, Michael Moore opted to use a three-minute animated sequence in “Bowling for Columbine” depicting the history of violence and fear in America as a way of making reality more palatable for audiences. “Animation gives you the freedom to say the things that need to be said,” Moore says. “This particular section of my film, ‘The Brief History of the United States,’ has the potential to be a very bitter pill for many viewers to swallow in terms of my take on how we got to where we’re at, and animation is the big spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.”

Moore says that working with New York independent animator Harold Moss on the sequence, which was created using Flash animation for “just a few thousand dollars,” inspired him to write a full-length animated feature with political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.

While the $12-million budgets for “Altar Boys” and “Frida” were multiples of the costs of “Hedwig,” “Just a Kiss” or “Columbine,” they are still firmly within the low-budget realm. And although digital animation has become standard in mainstream Hollywood films, either for settings, backgrounds, special effects, stunts or crowd scenes, it is clearly the low-budget independent films that are putting their limited dollars toward taking such stylistic risks.

“Other cinematic forms, like musicals, have percolated down to the indies,” explains Mitchell. “Animation is just one of those wonderful tools for telling a story, and people who are maybe thinking outside the box are using the old-fashioned styles. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see silent film again.”