CNN Insight

Re-Airing Of What's Old And New At The Movies

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, INSIGHT (voice-over): Back to the drawing board. Familiar kinds of movies made with 21st century technology. A trip to the cinema, where some things old are new again.

(on camera): Welcome back. In the age of live TV and the Internet, there is something quaint about animation. Many of us grow up watching cartoons long before we turn to books or movies or anything else on TV, but it's obvious that cartoons themselves are changing, and part of that change is driven or we could say drawn by technology.

One American company called Pixar is at the cutting edge of computer animation, and its new movie, "Toy Story 2," is in theaters around the world now. This is movie week on CNN International, and our program today - what's old and new at the movies.

Here's CNN's James Hattori.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TOY STORY 2")

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR: No, he's stealing Woody.

ANIMATED CHARACTER: What? He can't take Woody...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JAMES HATTORI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Four years after stealing the technological stage in the first-ever computer-animated feature film, Buzz, Woody and the gang from Andy's room are back in "Toy Story 2."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TOY STORY 2")

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR: That's where I need to go.

REX: You can't go, Buzz. You'll never make it there.

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR: Woody once risked his life to save me. I couldn't call myself his friend if I weren't willing to do the same.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HATTORI: It's the third major film produced for Disney by Pixar, the animation studio north of San Francisco whose heritage is more Silicon Valley than Hollywood.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TOY STORY 2")

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR: We'll be back before Andy gets home.

MRS. POTATO HEAD: Don't talk to any toy you don't know.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN LASSETER, EXECUTIVE V.P., CREATIVE, PIXAR: I love this medium of computer animation. I love it. And from the moment I saw it, I loved it because of the dimensionality, you know, the fact is you can create a world that the audience knows doesn't exist, but then you can make it so believable that you feel like you can reach up there and just touch everything, you know.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's just like rocking the theater.

LASSETER: Yeah, you can have that...

HATTORI: It's a world carefully crafted by hand and computer under the guidance of Pixar's John Lasseter - film director, resident creative genius, and...

(on camera): You're a self-professed big kid.

LASSETER: I am.

HATTORI: Does that pervade the environment here?

LASSETER: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I believe that the culture of a studio really comes down from the top. So that gives me license to be the biggest kid, the biggest nut here.

You guys are great. You made a good movie. Yeah.

HATTORI (voice-over): Kids at Pixar are the envy of the industry. They have been since 1995, when "Toy Story" wowed critics and audiences, grossing $360 million worldwide. A year later, the motion picture academy presented Lasseter with an Oscar for special achievement.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP "ACADEMY AWARDS")

LASSETER: I mean, I think, you know, the early work of Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, Buster Keaton were probably my greatest influences.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HATTORI: This 42-year-old father of five with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts never outgrew his true passion.

LASSETER: Cartoons were my life.

HATTORI (on camera): Saturday morning.

LASSETER: Oh, my parents couldn't get me out of bed on a school morning. But come Saturday morning, 6:00 a.m., bam, bowl of cereal, six inches from the TV. I was there until the golf matches came on.

One of the characters, I think, is really -- is really kind of stealing the show is Jesse. She's a cowgirl.

HATTORI (voice-over): Lasseter studied animation in college, worked on Disney films for a while, then joined Pixar in 1984. Today, Pixar chairman and Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs calls him the Walt Disney of his generation.

STEVE JOBS, CEO, PIXAR, CEO, APPLE: And how he's back with these characters that he helped create and he loves, and you can see how he has matured in the meantime as a filmmaker, and it's amazing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TOY STORY")

WOODY: This is my spot, see. The bed here.

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR: Local law enforcement.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HATTORI: But even Walt Disney couldn't have foreseen how animation has gone digital.

LASSETER: This is where Buzz is talking with Woody. Woody is about to go to cowboy camp with Andy.

HATTORI: Glenn McQueen is supervising animator for "Toy Story 2."

GLENN MCQUEEN, SUPERVISING ANIMATOR, PIXAR: So these characters live in the computer. You know, they're almost like puppets or sculptures. And there's a virtual camera. You can look at this shot from any viewpoint. We call them "avars," and they're all the different controls that allow us to move the characters. So here's one for Woody's torso, moves his torso left, his torso right.

HATTORI: Character movement and other nuances like shadows and depth of field are more refined in "Toy Story 2," thanks to more powerful computers and software.

LASSETER: It is astounding. Every film we make, this thing doubles or triples in size as far as the computer power.

HATTORI (on camera): It's like a million little artists scribbling away doing cells instead.

LASSETER: Yeah, it is amazing to see the difference between from "Toy Story" through "A Bug's Life" to "Toy Story 2."

HATTORI (voice-over): Some details just weren't possible before, like fine dust on the penguin in this scene.

LASSETER: You know, what's funny is that there's a lot of detail in "Toy Story 2" that you take for granted because it's like it is in our world but was extremely hard to do.

HATTORI: And while computers can speed some tasks, that doesn't mean animation is faster than making live-action films.

MCQUEEN: It's still a tremendously time-consuming process. A two- second shot might take an animator, you know, two weeks to do sometimes, depending on how complex it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TOY STORY 2")

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR: Go. Drop. I said drop. Go.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MCQUEEN: Anything that moves is moving because an animator made it move. Almost nothing is automatic or done by the computer.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TIM ALLEN, ACTOR: Woody, stop this nonsense and let's go.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HATTORI: And none of the animation is done before actors record the dialogue. In "Toy Story 2," Woody played by Tom Hanks, is saved from a kidnapper, not to mention his own inflated ego, by Buzz Lightyear, voiced by Tim Allen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALLEN: You're a child's plaything. You are a toy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HATTORI: And these are the grown-up toys that do the heavy technological lifting at Pixar.

(on camera): It's kind of noisy in here.

LASSETER: Yeah, it's kind of noisy. This is a render farm, the power of millions of pixels.

HATTORI (voice-over): It's those countless millions of pixels that make up the final film images, all assembled with software called render math, which Lasseter and Pixar developed.

LASSETER: Feel how hot this is.

HATTORI (on camera): Oh, yeah.

LASSETER: See, that's what I was saying. A cup of soup like that, baby.

HATTORI (voice-over): In fact, during the making of Pixar's second feature, "A Bug's Life," the render farm hit a snag.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "A BUG'S LIFE")

FLIK: I'm lost.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LASSETER: The air conditioner on "A Bug's Life" broke once, and this place shut down so fast because the temperature in this room went up to like, you know, 130 degrees like that. There's so much power in here.

HATTORI: But to Lasseter, the real power at Pixar is in the telling of a story.

LASSETER: People don't care how many megabytes Buzz Lightyear is. In the climax of "Toy Story," when that match blows out in Woody's hand, and he's going, "No, no, no, no, no," do people care how much storage we had to have in our computers to do that? No.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TOY STORY")

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR: Woody, what are you doing?

WOODY: Hold still, Buzz.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LASSETER: You want to know what happens next. That's the whole point.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TOY STORY 2")

REX: It's too fast.

MR. POTATO HEAD: How can we even tell what's on?

HAMM: I can tell.

REX: Go back, back, back, back.

HAMM: Too late, I'm in the 40s. Got to go around the horn. It's faster.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HATTORI: After three years in production, "Toy Story 2" is hitting the big screen with state-of-the-art technology Pixar hopes you'll never notice.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TOY STORY 2")

COUNTRY WESTERN GROUP (SINGING): He's the very best. He's the rootin'-est, tootin'-est cowboy in the wild, wild west.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: Your kids will love it. We have to take a break. But when we come back, a big idea updated. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN (voice-over): A 60-year-old classic remade - "Fantasia 2000" draws on the Walt Disney company's long tradition of animation. But the biggest difference between the original and the millennial version is size. "Fantasia 2000" is the first full-length animation film to be released in the giant IMAX format before it gets to mainstream theaters.

(on camera): Welcome back. The IMAX collaboration with Disney is just one example of what the Canadian company is doing to reinvent itself in the new age of movie-making. The other idea it is pursuing is also a test to technology, 3-D. The first three-dimensional movies were made in the 1920s, but they had a reputation for being, well, B-movies. That may be changing.

Once again, here's CNN's James Hattori.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI (voice-over): A state-of-the-art large format film can take an audience on a remarkable voyage. Many different companies make large format films, but the king of the really big screen is IMAX, which makes not only movies, but cameras, film, projection booths and theaters.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That was cool, man.

HATTORI (on camera): Cool is probably the best way to describe a large format film. IMAX screens like this are as big as 80 feet or eight stories tall, images not just in front of you but way off to the side, filling the field of view, giving you the sensation of actually being in the film. As a result, filmmakers are taking notice and today are producing more large format films than ever before.

(voice-over): There are two kinds of large format films: two dimensional, which are flat like feature films, and 3-D, which leap off the screen and into the audience. To project such a clear image on such an enormous screen, everything about a large format film needs to be, well, large. The film frame itself is 10 times the size of a conventional 35-millimeter film. The projection rooms are comparatively cavernous, and shooting with a 3-D camera...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Action.

HATTORI: ...has been compared to working with a small washing machine. The camera is so big because it has to have two separate strips of film and two distinct lenses that record the same action at different depths.

Then these two images are projected together on screen. To the naked eye, they're blurry, but with specially designed goggles, the 3-D effect is achieved. The screen is so big that directors are careful not to include any quick cuts or sudden movements because they're visually over-stimulating and may cause an audience to become nauseous.

GREG MACGILLIVRAY, PRODUCER: You have to understand the psychology of what it does to them because you're quite overwhelming when you're that big and that close.

HATTORI: Greg MacGillivray is one of the first people who truly understood how to use the format.

MACGILLIVRAY: I just got enticed by it. I fell in love with shooting pictures in this grand high-tech format.

HATTORI: His company, MacGillivray Freeman, has produced more than 30 large format films, including one of the first entitled, "To Fly," which debuted in 1976 at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Large format films used to be destined primarily for museums and were routinely dismissed by the movie industry as a gimmick. Then in 1995, a MacGillivray film, "The Living Sea," was nominated for an Academy Award and Hollywood took notice. But the real breakthrough - "Everest."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "EVEREST")

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is what happens when it's 10 degrees below zero and blowing at 80.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HATTORI: In 1996, MacGillivray teamed with world-renowned climber and cinematographer, David Brashears, to make "Everest," a true story with real drama and engaging characters...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "EVEREST")

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If it is not possible, well, it's not possible.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HATTORI: ...that occurs on top of the world. Only one week after friends died attempting to climb Everest in an internationally publicized tragedy, Brashears hauled a scaled-down IMAX camera to the summit of the world's highest peak to an altitude of 29,028 feet.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: With this film, we felt that we could really advance our little industry.

HATTORI: "Everest" certainly achieved that. It cost $7 million to produce. In 1997, it made more money to domestically than big star vehicles like "Man in the Iron Mask," "What Dreams May Come," and "Meet Joe Black" and could break the $100 million mark globally.

The success of "Everest" has made making large format films more attractive to production companies.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Roll camera, and action.

HATTORI: We travel to the giant Redwoods outside Santa Cruz, California, where a film crew was shooting "Journey of Man," a film that will take the Cirque de Soleil performance troupe from the big top to the big screen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cut.

PETER WAGG, PRODUCER: We reinvented the circus, and large format reinvented film. And it seemed to me that the two were meant to be together.

HATTORI: Neither documentary nor feature, "Journey of Man" stands apart because not only is it visually elaborate, it weaves a rich fantasy storyline.

Discovery Channel Pictures views IMAX as a perfect complement to its science and nature franchise. Discovery's second film in the IMAX format goes around the world in search forest fires and the men and women who fight them. It's titled, "Wildfire, Feel the Heat."

MICK KACZOROWSKI, DISCOVERY PICTURES: We got in as close as the people that actually fight the fire. We're at 450 degrees, and you're out in 90 degree temperature, and you're wearing fire retardant clothing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to leave a remote camera all on its own wrapped in a fire shelter.

HATTORI: For "Wildfire," Discovery followed flames around the world. They put the IMAX camera everywhere they could. They buried it in the ground. They smothered it in flame retardant.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This now weighs about 75 pounds.

HATTORI: And most dramatically, at great risk to both the $250,000 camera, not to mention the cameraman, they dropped it out of an airplane.

KACZOROWSKI: A lot of the firefighters that have actually seen the film have said, you know, "I never knew what smoke jumpers did. I really didn't know what it was like to jump out of an airplane" until they actually saw the angle that we actually show them.

HATTORI: So far, only about 140 large format films have been made, and they reach only a tiny portion of the overall movie-going audience. IMAX, which already dominates the industry, wants to further expand its brand by using ever-advancing digital technology, especially in the field of animation.

RICHARD GELFOND, IMAX CORPORATION: So sit there and close your eyes and imagine Buzz and Woody in "Toy Story," or Z in "Antz," coming flying out into the audience and sitting next to you in the seat. And then imagine it's not you watching, but it's your 8-year-old child watching.

In Hollywood, one of the shortcomings is that there are very few brands. Paramount isn't a brand. Warner isn't a brand. Disney is a brand, and Nickelodeon is a brand. Similarly, in a smaller way, IMAX is a brand. People go to an IMAX film because it's an IMAX film.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: In a moment, cinema in the digital age - what's streaming on a Web site near you. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN (voice-over): A sudden flash of emotion on a city street, a one-sided romance that begins unexpectedly and sets the stage for the film to follow, a film you can see only on one screen right now - your computer.

(on camera): Welcome back. Work came to a halt in one corner of our newsroom today. We watched a short movie on one of the computers we were supposed to be using for our work. It's easy to do, and it may change the way we see movies and the kind of movies we see.

We got in touch with Andrew Hindes of iFilm.com to talk about his Web site and the world of the Internet movie.

ANDREW HINDES, IFILM.COM: iFilm is a Web site that offers -- basically, we're trying to create a community for film fans and filmmakers and the film industry to sort of, you know, all come together in one place. And, you know, for sort of the casual user, we offer about 500 short films that you can view right on your, you know, computer screen, as well as news and information about films, you know, with a particular slant towards sort of -- I wouldn't say independent film, but you know, people with particularly, you know, adventurous taste.

MANN: You're running a serial right now on the site. Can you tell us about it?

HINDES: Well, we have -- we are actually -- we're running sort of highlights of a new film by Rupert Wainwright that is called "The Sadness of Sex," and we're running sort of short sections of it. You're going to see 10 different sections of the film in the coming weeks.

MANN: Why does someone like him want to put pieces of a movie like that on your site?

HINDES: Well, I think, you know, there's a variety of reasons that people, you know, put their films on the site. I mean, I think for a lot of younger filmmakers who don't really have the kind of, you know, connections in Hollywood, it's a great way to be discovered. You know, you get your own home page. We handle all of the encoding, and you know, you get basically a worldwide audience, including, you know, the eyes of Hollywood on the site.

I think for a more established filmmaker or a film that has distribution, it's a great way to get people interested in a film in a new, unique way as opposed to just running, you know, trailers in movie theaters or, you know, print ads.

MANN: People pay to see movies at the cinema. In a sense, they pay to watch them on television, and they certainly do on cable. Do you see a day when we will as easily pay to see movies over the Internet?

HINDES: I absolutely do. I mean, I think, you know, more and more the Internet, as people begin to have broadband connections into their homes, you know, I think that eventually, this will move from the, you know, the little computer screen over to the television set. The quality will be much better. And at that point, I think people will be very willing to pay to have sort of instant access to whatever film they want to see.

Right now, when you're seeing the film on kind of a credit-card- sized image on a computer and, you know, a lot of people, I think, are looking at the stuff at work, you know, they're probably less likely to be, you know, looking at a feature film, for instance, that they'd be willing to pay for.

MANN: People used to make movies for the screen, then they started making them for television. Are people going to be making them for the computer screen in that sense? Do you think there are going to be movies that are photographed in a way that's intended to be shown over the Internet?

HINDES: Well, I think people are already are, actually. I mean, I think that, you know, there -- it is clear that when you're looking at something, you know, in a small image and the quality is not spectacular at this point, a lot of people are seeing that sort of, you know, larger graphical shapes. Animation works extremely well on the Web. We have a series, "Spike and Mike's Twisted Animation," that we have exclusive Internet rights to, and those, you know, those just come across great. I mean, you really get the flavor of them, and they're a lot of fun.

Short films work very well for the Web, and it's kind of given new life to the short film. Theater owners have not been particularly anxious to put short films on their screens because they cut into the number of show times. But I think people love short films, and the Internet has given a brand new venue to short films. So I think I would say that it's already kind of changed some of the movie-making habits.

MANN: What about the way movies are distributed? It's said that information is being much more democratically shared over the Internet because you don't need to own a publishing house or a press to get your novel or your short story out. And we're seeing music being shared more widely as well. Do you think filmmakers are going to turn to it just as a place to show their movies without thinking of using it as a means to get their movies somewhere else as well?

HINDES: Well, I think they already are, to some extent. I mean, I think there's a lot of people who have, you know, the advent of very inexpensive digital video cameras and editing equipment that you can use on your, you know, on your MacIntosh or PC has already democratized the making of films. And I think the Internet is democratizing the distribution of films in the same way. And I think there's a lot of people who, you know, want to tell a story, and they don't want to be, you know, a Hollywood director. They've got a job. They've got a, you know, a family, and that's not their goal. But they do want to, you know, create something and they want to tell a story, and they'd like people to see it.

And I think the great thing about the Internet is that because you have such a wide audience, you can make a film that might only appeal to, you know, a small number of people in any given city, say, but you know, spread across the whole world, there's actually a significant audience. It's not enough. You don't reach the critical mass that it would take to send a film out on even an art house run where it plays in one theater in each town, but it is enough to, you know, to create something that will get a real audience over the Internet.

MANN: I guess you just have to keep the popcorn out of the keyboard. Andrew Hindes of iFilm.com, thanks so much for this.

HINDES: Thank you, Jonathan.

MANN: And that's INSIGHT. Stay with us. There's more news just ahead.

END

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