For The Best Effects

Newcastle Herald

Monday October 5, 1998

Reuters

COMPUTER graphics, once the rising stars of Hollywood for resurrecting dinosaurs and creating lifelike aliens, face a key test of their role in two American films opening this weekend.

Film-makers will be closely watching the box office returns for ANTZ and What Dreams May Come, which both rely heavily on computer graphics, industry experts say.

As Sony Pictures Entertainment learned this year with Godzilla, if the effects don't look real audiences won't turn out.

Sony reportedly spent about $US175million ($A295million) to make and market Godzilla, but the fact that some effects looked pixelated on the big screen ? as if still on a digital computer monitor ? left some moviegoers laughing at the picture, not with it.

`There's been so much hardware publicity and so many movies get produced as "now see the world's largest computer generated (effect)" that it really has a tendency to destroy suspension of disbelief, and I think that's a real danger in films today,' said Stuart Robertson of POP Film, one of three visual effects companies working on What Dreams May Come.

Robertson argues, however, that What Dreams May Come takes audiences to worlds ? heaven and hell ? that could only be reproduced for the screen using powerful computers.

In What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams plays the central character, Chris, who is killed in a car accident. His spirit then searches the afterlife for his deceased wife.

Early reviews have praised the movie and the effects.

The journey to find his soulmate, played by Annabella Sciorra, takes Chris through an immense library of life, a graveyard of soldiers and a flower-filled field of paradise.

ANTZ is a far less complicated, but just as compelling. Woody Allen does the voice for `Z', an ant whose individuality conflicts with his duty to work for the good of the colony.

It is the first computer-animated movie from DreamWorks, the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, record mogul David Geffen and ex-Walt Disney Co studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, and it is only the second full-length, computer-animated movie since Disney's 1996 hit Toy Story.

Indeed, Disney has its own computer-animated movie about an ant, called A Bug's Life, set to debut in November, and there has been some finger pointing over who had the idea first.

Controversy aside, if ANTZ and A Bug's Life prove as successful as Toy Story, it's a sure bet Hollywood will keep making computer-animated movies because they cost less and take fewer people to make than traditional animation using hand drawings and paintings.