Trailer Catch All

They were so excited about the fact that they could create a CGI anime face they didn't bother to stop and think if they should.

I dig it a lot. Been excited about this for awhile now. Great to see it finally being finished.

I showed the trailer to my brother, who is familiar with the OVA (I've never seen it or read the comic, but I'm getting the new translation in at my local comic shop any day now), and he noped right out halfway through. It was actually pretty funny to witness. However, my understanding is that there is no in-universe explanation.

I'm not sure who to blame. First instinct is Rodriguez, but I wouldn't be surprised if, after doing the make-up and eyes and crap with Avatar, Cameron decided to make her look as anime as possible.

And you're right. I didn't realize it until a couple more viewings, but she looks like a fully 3D animated character – even when she's not – and just as you adjust to what she looks like you see a bunch of actors like Christoph Waltz that look completely normal. Camera back to her and it's like the brain needs a reboot to process the sudden inconsistency.

I'm wondering if they'd be able to give her normal eyes if the backlash is bad enough, because honestly, if geeks on the Internet are gonna look at that and turn it into a meme machine, or it's going to get a bunch of negative reaction videos on YouTube, then any chances of putting a trailer out during the Super Bowl or leading up to release to get mainstream attention is going to be met with "What the f*ck?!" and a nope.

Yeah, I really can not see that face playing in Peoria. Joe Six-pack is never going to watch that movie. Of course, there wasn't nearly enough sexualization in the trailer to get Joe Six-pack in the theater anyway.

Shoulda gone the WFRR route. Still, it's Rodriguez. Probably worth a rental.

ccesarano wrote:

First instinct is Rodriguez, but I wouldn't be surprised if, after doing the make-up and eyes and crap with Avatar, Cameron decided to make her look as anime as possible.

Given their respective output, I'd be inclined to put a choice that dumb choice squarely on the feet of Rodriguez.

Alien Love Gardener wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

First instinct is Rodriguez, but I wouldn't be surprised if, after doing the make-up and eyes and crap with Avatar, Cameron decided to make her look as anime as possible.

Given their respective output, I'd be inclined to put a choice that dumb choice squarely on the feet of Rodriguez.

You'd think so, but Cameron's wanted to do this film for a long time. As far as I'm aware he's been trying to do it since the early 90's and has never gotten it to happen.

Either way it's a coin toss.

The only way the anime eyes are going to fly is if there are others in the world with similar features. Otherwise, it looks like a bizarre character design choice to "reflect the source material," without actually understanding what the source material is or what it's meaning was underneath the surface.

As far as it being bad CGI= nope. It's good. Excellent, as a matter of fact, and I'm sure there's still levels of polish and render passes yet to be done. What a lot of people claim is bad CG nowadays I attribute more to their subconscious inability to suspend disbelief for the given imagery, for a variety of reasons (none of which are necessarily wrong, just at times misattributed, IMHO).

General Tarkin's backlash is borne from the fact that we *know* the actor is dead. Seeing him alive on screen puts the mind on edge, skeptically looking for reassurance that he is still, in fact, not alive, in spite of what the eyes are telling the mind.

Yet Ceasar the Ape is accepted, because where have we seen a real-world, gun-toting talking ape? He was animated and rendered to such an excellent degree that the brain has no real-world counterpart to compare against, and so we chalk it up to good CG and suspend our disbelief for the duration of the story.

So looking at Alita, we know (at least generally) what the real actress/human looks like, and we recognize that those eyes aren't physically possible in the real world, so the mind approaches the imagery with skepticism because the image is counter to what we've seen to be true. Unless they establish the big eye "rule" at some point in the movie, and thus normalize it, our minds are never going to accept the conceit and it will unfortunately be chalked up to bad CGI.

I mean, personally, I'd rather they either cyborg up the face with paneling or camera-eyes or something. I agree that her eyes are too human-only-larger-than-life.

ccesarano wrote:
Alien Love Gardener wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

First instinct is Rodriguez, but I wouldn't be surprised if, after doing the make-up and eyes and crap with Avatar, Cameron decided to make her look as anime as possible.

Given their respective output, I'd be inclined to put a choice that dumb choice squarely on the feet of Rodriguez.

You'd think so, but Cameron's wanted to do this film for a long time. As far as I'm aware he's been trying to do it since the early 90's and has never gotten it to happen.

Either way it's a coin toss.

I know Cameron's been wanting to make this for years, but as a stylistic choice in the context of the world presented by that trailer, it's so dumb I have to assume it's Rodriguez.

WipEout wrote:

General Tarkin's backlash is borne from the fact that we *know* the actor is dead. Seeing him alive on screen puts the mind on edge, skeptically looking for reassurance that he is still, in fact, not alive, in spite of what the eyes are telling the mind.

I watched Rogue One several times on a large format screen, and after the first viewing I paid very close attention to the Tarkin scenes. My reaction to the CGI is not a snap judgement biased by subconscious knowledge that it isn't Peter Cushing. There are static issues (some unnatural textures) and dynamic issues (some unnatural movements) with the Tarkin CGI. The thing that bothered me most is the absence of microexpressions. Either they are missing, or they are too subtle for a very large scale closeup.

The thing is, the CGI is very, very good. The issues are very subtle - so subtle in fact that to my eye they pretty much vanish when watching at 1080p on a smallish screen.

CGI and performance capture have become incredibly precise, but human faces, especially emoting in closeup, have to be perfect, since we primates have evolved over millions of years of reacting to faces.

With Battle Angel Alita, the issue is the mixing of a stylized geometry with a photorealistic appearance. If the intention is to put the audience off-balance every time they look at that face, then bravo, mission accomplished. However perfect the movement and colors and rendering of performance capture, viewers will subconsciously reject the face.

WipEout wrote:

General Tarkin's backlash is borne from the fact that we *know* the actor is dead. Seeing him alive on screen puts the mind on edge, skeptically looking for reassurance that he is still, in fact, not alive, in spite of what the eyes are telling the mind.

Nope.

Tarkin's backlash was because it looked computer generated. The artists who did the Polar Express and that weird Angelina Jolie Beowulf animated movie. The hair looked bolted on and the skin looked like leather. Same thing for "young" Princess Lea.

Tarkin was a fantastic effort; perfect render and superb motion capture but the uncanny valley is still there.

WipEout wrote:

Unless they establish the big eye "rule" at some point in the movie, and thus normalize it, our minds are never going to accept the conceit and it will unfortunately be chalked up to bad CGI.

I think the issue here is a difference in terms. Bad CGI doesn't mean poorly rendered CGI to me. It was noticeably out of place, to the point that it broke my suspension of disbelief. Which makes it a bad CGI effect, in the same way a beautiful matte painting that everyone can see is a matte painting is a bad special effect.

Alita's eyes look like that because unlike very few other humans in her world, she's almost 100% mechanical, like Major Kusanagi. So her designer, for whatever reason, put in larger than normal human eyes and that immediately marks her out as a cyborg, for audiences, and to pretty much everyone else in her world.

It bears mentioning that her world is much more advanced than GitS in some ways, so while they're not entirely up to cloning human parts, they can put people back together using preexisting human parts. The fact that she's mechanical is kind of slumming it. Rich people prefer human to robot parts.

Not sure if this in-world justification is enough to justify the aesthetic decision.

LarryC wrote:

Alita's eyes look like that because unlike very few other humans in her world, she's almost 100% mechanical, like Major Kusanagi. So her designer, for whatever reason, put in larger than normal human eyes and that immediately marks her out as a cyborg, for audiences, and to pretty much everyone else in her world.

It bears mentioning that her world is much more advanced than GitS in some ways, so while they're not entirely up to cloning human parts, they can put people back together using preexisting human parts. The fact that she's mechanical is kind of slumming it. Rich people prefer human to robot parts.

Not sure if this in-world justification is enough to justify the aesthetic decision.

So I went into watching the trailer without any knowledge whatsoever about this character or story. I think I remember news circulating about Alita back when it was announced that Cameron wanted to make it. Other than that, nada.

And I still had kind of concluded the bold part on my own based on just the trailer.

Granted I could just as likely have been wrong in that kind of, well, basically assumption but it still doesn't seem like so outlandish a thing to me given the rest of the world that's shown.

I'm not going to say it isn't a little jarring just to look at because it is, but if it's justified within the logic of the world they've set up then I don't see why it can't just work anyway.

And I think the viewer will adjust. It doesn’t look quite like real eyes that are just bigger; they just look CG. But if the story itself is fine it’ll work.

The white orc would’ve been fine if those movies hadn’t been junk.

ranalin wrote:

I am a dead-in-the-wool zombie media junkie.

This looks rubbish.

I wonder...do they put all of the ear-destroying scream effects in so that people don't fall asleep?

WipeOut, I think you're partly right. I know you're involved in 3D Animation so clearly you know more about the technique than I do, but I think there's always an uncanny valley element with humans that makes it look worse. For me, Tarkin looked like a PS4 cut-scene model dropped into the middle of a live-action movie. I can't quite say what it is, but even if it looks good and there's nuance in facial animations, something about the movement of the character is what throws me off.

I'd say the same goes for Caesar in Planet of the Apes. I love me them movies, and in still shots or shots with little movement Caesar looks damn near real. But as soon as there's a lot of motion it becomes quite obvious that Caesar is a CG-animated creature. However, because he's also an ape it's a bit more acceptable in the vein of Roger Rabbit. I think you were getting that across because we're probably ready to accept that real monkeys don't behave like Caesar and therefore our brains can more easily process the inconsistency.

And I think that's the key of it. Brains processing inconsistency. Tarkin is a struggle because he's in one brief scene and he's juxtaposed against other living humans. Now we have to compare computer generated lighting to real world lighting and computer generated motions to human movement and no matter how much we consciously try to pay attention to the story of the scene our brains are going to be making comparisons.

But like LarryC says, now that I've watched the trailer a few times, I think it's possible to get used to those eyes. Hell, I think one of the reasons they blatantly open the trailer with her eyes opening is to get your shock out of the way (though it sort of makes it hard to pay attention to everything else). But, after a few viewings you get used to it more and more.

I still feel like, domestically, they'd do better if they went back to normal looking eyes (then again, I don't know how much stuff like Waltz wiping away a tear there is and would therefore need to be reworked further due to his finger placement versus where the bottom of her eye was expected to be). However, something I realized is no matter the responses on YouTube and Twitter, what we Western folk think doesn't matter half as much for a film like this as what China's thoughts matter. This is the sort of movie that's bound to do poorly in America no matter what, even if at best it breaks even. But if China is a-okay with her eyes and think the movie looks good, then the eyes stay because the studio is going to care more about the mad China bucks they can earn over what pittance of American cash they can get.

ranalin wrote:

Saw this at the Leeds film festival, oh my god that trailer sells it as a somesort of hitman thriller, it is not that it is boring beyond belief. Everything of note that happens is in that trailer.

Annihilation
*A lot more action than the first trailer

farley3k wrote:

Annihilation
*A lot more action than the first trailer

There's probably more coherent story in that trailer than there is in the first book, to be honest

pyxistyx wrote:
farley3k wrote:

Annihilation
*A lot more action than the first trailer

There's probably more coherent story in that trailer than there is in the first book, to be honest

I was thinking that there was a lot more action there than in the book.

They may have played up the action a bit for this trailer because one the producers complained that the movie seemed too intellectual for American audiences after the first trailer dropped.

Is this our punishment for the world we created?

maverickz wrote:

Is this our punishment for the world we created?

No

No

Nonononono

That was just horrible, horrible.

Now, *THAT* was bad CG.