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      ‘The Color Purple’ Tips Its Hat to Classic Black Musicals

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      The new movie has so many references to Hollywood gems like “Stormy Weather” and early jazz shorts, it can be viewed as a Black film syllabus.Even when Hollywood saw little use for Black performers other than as mammies and butlers, the musical genre, a storytelling mode composed of magical realist fantasy and hoofing artistry, provided space for Cab Calloway, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge to manifest their glamorous glow. Through rapturous songs, sung in resplendent gowns and tailored tuxedos, the promise of Black liberation was heard.The genre’s possibility for emancipation is showcased in the latest film version of “The Color Purple,” whose origin derives from a story of perseverance and sisterhood that first found acclaim in 1983, when its author, Alice Walker, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Within two years of Walker’s success, Steven Spielberg directed an acclaimed big-screen adaptation of her novel. By 2005, a staged musical of “The Color Purple” appeared on Broadway. Now, the Ghanaian filmmaker Blitz Bazawule is shouldering the book’s legacy, directing a cinematic adaptation of the Broadway musical.The director Blitz Bazawule narrates a sequence from the musical, featuring a performance by Taraji P. Henson.Ser Baffo/Warner Bros PicturesBazawule’s “Color Purple” aims to grant Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) the kind of interiority that makes visible her resiliency against abject trauma. Raped during childhood by the man she thought to be her father, then separated from her children — the results of his assault — Celie is forced into marriage with the abusive Mister (Colman Domingo). Her sister, Nettie (Halle Bailey), bids goodbye, departing to Africa. Mister’s son Harpo (Corey Hawkins) and his wife, Sofia (Danielle Brooks), become Celie’s only friends. But a chance at real love arrives when the sultry singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), Mister’s old flame, returns to town. Shug and Celie’s developing physical attraction, along with Nettie’s letters, allow Celie to create grand worlds in her head.Celie’s boundless imagination mirrors the continued influence of what Bazawule called “the universal Black cadence,” how an ordinary shuffle or a game of patty cake can become a song. That practice imbues “The Color Purple” with an inventiveness to empower Celie’s story, positioning the arts as an important language for resistance and a necessary tool for Black people to be more than vessels for trauma.“I think music gives Celie the kind of agency we’ve never seen her have before,” Bazawule said during an interview at the Mandarin Oriental in New York.The director Blitz Bazawule, top, with Henson, left, and Burrino.Eli Ade/Warner Bros.Early Black musicals like “Porgy and Bess” and “Swing!” are examined in Arthur Knight’s book “Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film.” His analysis is drawn from W.E.B. DuBois’s belief that music is an essential element of Black identity. The control of that gift, therefore, is crucial, and the musical — as a locus for song, fashion and romance — becomes a strategy against the oppression faced by Black people across America.By visualizing Celie’s inner thoughts and her yearning for independence, Bazawule not only retools the genre’s language of resistance. He also provides audiences with an integral Black film syllabus.Elisabeth Withers-Mendes, center left, as Shug Avery and LaChanze as Celie in the 2005 Broadway musical version of “The Color Purple.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Our work is only understood most clearly when it’s part of a continuum that is built. It’s a language,” Bazawule said. “But you have to know the language to understand what we’re doing.”Bazawule’s influences on the film are varied, including more contemporary musicals like “Idlewild” and “Dreamgirls,” the drama “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and studio-era musicals like “Hallelujah” and “Cabin in the Sky.” The 1932 musical short “Pie, Pie Blackbird” is another reference.The larger-than-life sets used in Aubrey Scotto’s jazz short, “A Rhapsody in Black and Blue” (also 1932) come to mind during a moment of romantic whimsy shared by Celie and Shug. When Celie sings “Dear God — Shug,” she imagines her and Shug on a giant, spinning gramophone. Rather than wholly relying on computer-generated effects, the production designer Paul D. Austerberry sought to marry fantasy with reality by constructing an actual 22-foot diameter record and an enormous needle arm.Nina Mae McKinney in the short film “Pie, Pie, Blackbird.”Warner Bros.The tension rises during the film’s lustful juke joint scene. For this sequence, not only does Shug arrive in grand style — on a barge floating across a swamp — but the costume designer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck also fashioned Shug’s red dress to mirror the allure of Dorothy Dandridge in “Carmen Jones.”“I wanted Shug to look sexy,” Jamison-Tanchuck said.In a nod to the diverse rhythms in the Black diaspora, the choreographer Fatima Robinson orchestrated the scene’s varied dancers, bedecked in dazzling suits and luscious dresses, to use Daggering, a sizzling Jamaican dance.“I wanted to create moves where we touch each other and we hold each other,” said Robinson. “It’s something I feel, as Black people, we don’t see enough.”Celie’s imaginative bid for freedom peaks when she and Shug abscond to the Capitol Theater in Macon, Ga., where they watch “The Flying Ace” (1926). As they view the film, Celie’s mind conceives of a lavish Art Deco ballroom recalling the 1943 musical “Stormy Weather,” which starred Horne. There’s an orchestra dressed in white tail tuxedos (a reference to Calloway), but instead of the high-flying Nicholas Brothers splitting down the steps, Celie and Shug descend toward each other. While the scene takes place in Celie’s mind, its fantastical setting doesn’t render her feelings or Shug’s reciprocation any less real. The power of the musical genre is in its ability to make any person, no matter her background, the captain of her world.For Bazawule, who remembers selling CDs on the street to afford tickets to art house theaters in New York, Celie’s cinematic escape from oppression has deep personal resonance.“I figured if Shug could bring Celie into that world, it would open her mind,” he said. More

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      ‘Ferrari’ and ‘The Killer’: 1 Cinematographer, 2 Very Different Looks

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      Erik Messerschmidt worked with the directors Michael Mann and David Fincher to create cohesive worlds that feel nothing alike.Michael Mann’s new drama “Ferrari,” about several important weeks in the life of the racecar driver and manufacturer Enzo Ferrari, is many things: biographical drama, thriller, period costume film, and also a story about business rivalries, domestic disputes and personal grief. Adam Driver plays the automotive magnate as a man divided between his obsessive pursuit of professional glory and his straining responsibilities as a husband and father. Accordingly Mann approaches these two worlds with different, even diametrically opposed styles. There are intense, breakneck racing sequences and dark, elegiac domestic scenes, and little in between.“There’s really two distinct aesthetic sensibilities in the film,” Erik Messerschmidt, the film’s director of photography, said in a recent interview. “Michael wanted the interpersonal drama parts of the film to be more classically made than the racing.”Messerschmidt said that for the heavier moments Mann “wanted to reference Italian Renaissance paintings,” with their pronounced shadows and dense compositions; the racing scenes, by contrast, made use of cutting-edge technology and contemporary techniques.Messerschmidt also served as the cinematographer on “The Killer,” David Fincher’s recent thriller about a hit man dealing with the fallout of a job gone wrong, now streaming on Netflix. Looking at the two films side by side reveals the marked contrasts in the directors’ approach.“Their use of the camera, in particular, is very different,” Messerschmidt said. “Michael is often looking for those spontaneous moments, and I think he’s a little more shoot-from-the-hip than David is. Whereas David is a very precise, methodical filmmaker — he’s one of a kind that way.”Here, Messerschmidt explains how the look of “Ferrari” was achieved on and off the track and how it compared with his work on “The Killer.”Vintage SpeedThe look of the opening montage was based on archival images of auto racing from when Ferrari was young.Neon“Ferrari” opens with a brisk montage of grainy black-and-white newsreel footage that shows Enzo in his youth racing for Alfa Romeo. Mann, who had been trying to make “Ferrari” since the early 2000s, spent a lot of time poring over archival footage of motor racing from this era, and he and the crew watched it often to help faithfully capture the look. While shooting an early racing sequence, Mann had the idea to open with Enzo himself on the track, to remind the audience that he used to be a racer.The scene is “a combination of actual archival footage and visual-effects compositions of Adam driving a period-correct racecar from the ’20s,” Messerschmidt explained. Driver had to actually get on the track: it’s not a sound stage or a green screen but footage of him that’s been rotoscoped, which accounts for why this shot looks so realistic.Paris was depicted with cool shadows and warm highlights in “The Killer.”NetflixBy contrast, Messerschmidt and Fincher spent a lot of time adjusting images for “The Killer” in postproduction to hone the look of key locations in Paris, the Dominican Republic and Chicago, which they wanted to differentiate aesthetically. “All of those places have a unique look, in terms of architecture, design and how the light falls,” the cinematographer said. Paris, for instance, was depicted with “this kind of split-tone color palette of cool shadows and warm highlights.”While each location had its own visual identity, Messerschmidt said he was conscious of “still keeping them within one cohesive world.”“I didn’t want it to feel like a ransom note of color palettes,” he joked.Racing AlongTo get close to the racers, the “Ferrari” camera team followed at actual speed.NeonThe second half of “Ferrari” focuses on his efforts to win the 1957 Mille Miglia, a wildly competitive race that covers almost 1,000 miles on public roads. To capture its blistering intensity, Mann got extremely close to the vehicles, as in this shot of two cars speeding neck and neck on a winding mountain overpass. The camera team, Messerschmidt said, was following just behind in a Porsche Cayenne. “We were driving these cars at the actual speeds,” Messerschmidt said. “Michael was not interested in faking it or undercranking the camera.”As in this shot, many of the driving scenes have a rawness that emphasizes just how fast and dangerous the racing is. The style, Messerschmidt said, “has a very vérité feel to it,” which adds to the sensation of raw power. “These cars are visceral, they are loud, and the engines shake, and the suspension is stiff. That was something we wanted to show from very beginning.”Night DriveThe headlights were the only source of light for this scene.NeonPart of the Mille Miglia race takes place on an open stretch of road in the dead of night. The only sources of light are the cars’ headlights, which illuminate the rain-slick road and reflect off one another. Shooting this sequence without conventional movie lighting, Messerschmidt said, was a matter of necessity, because there was no obvious place to put up lights. “I had a lot of anxiety about that scene,” he said. “I didn’t really know what I was going to do.”Eventually, he said, he “decided to roll the dice and just do it with the headlights.”Nighttime lighting was also a factor for Messerschmidt in “The Killer.”Netflix“The Killer” makes striking use of nighttime as well, in part because the movie is about a man who “lives and lurks in the shadows,” Messerschmidt said. “We wanted to work in this murky world. It felt like an appropriate thing to lean into that in the film.”Up Close and PersonalThe cinematographer used a “skater scope” to get extremely close to Driver.NeonWhen “Ferrari” is not on the track, the camera has a tendency to probe the characters closely, sometimes getting right up in their faces. In this sequence on the factory grounds, the lens gets so near Enzo that his features become almost a blur. “When Michael really wants to get the audience into a character and bring you close, he will put you literally close to the actor,” Messerschmidt said.To achieve this “very odd point of view,” Messerschmidt employed a “skater scope,” which extends the lens about 10 inches from the body of the camera. That extension “means we can get very close to the actor without the Steadicam itself hitting the actor’s knees,” he explained.Fincher also wants to use the camera to understand his characters in “The Killer,” but “the camera has no personality in the way that Michael’s camera does,” Messerschmidt explained. “Ferrari” has “a very subjective camera,” while Fincher “is working with a conversation between subjectivity and objectivity.” The camera “reinforces” the unnamed executioner played by Michael Fassbender.The camera is far less subjective in “The Killer,” with meticulously composed shots.NetflixThis is clear in the many precise frames and symmetrical compositions — an aesthetic that mirrors the hit man’s meticulousness. “When the killer is in control and confident, the camera is extremely confident, in terms of how we operate it and how the shots cut together,” Messerschmidt said. “When the killer loses control and starts to fall apart, the camera falls apart as well.”Memories at SunsetThe flashbacks called to mind a Terrence Malick film.NeonA centerpiece of “Ferrari” takes place at an opera, where Enzo has an intense emotional reaction. Mourning the loss of his son, he thinks back to their time together, as the film cuts to brief, gauzy flashbacks, including this one, in which the two are playing in a field. The camera is very low to the ground, and the sun is just setting over the horizon; the delicate style is reminiscent of the work of Terrence Malick.“I think I get now maybe how Malick works,” Messerschmidt said. For this flashback, he and Mann started “working with the actors and the camera, improvising a bit,” he said, adding that they just happened to catch this interaction. “It was very spur of the moment. It wasn’t previsualized.”Small and AgileA camera the size of a Rubik’s Cube was affixed to the car.NeonAt times during the racing sequences in “Ferrari,” the camera is fixed to the body of the car itself, stuck alongside as the vehicle zooms at extraordinary speeds. In this shot, we see the bold Ferrari logo against a whooshing blur of grass and road. Because they were sticking a camera onto a car that was pushing its technical limits, “we had to be very conscious of weight distribution and aerodynamics,” Messerschmidt said. Their choice for these shots was a Red Komodo camera, “which is about the size of a Rubik’s Cube.” As Messerschmidt noted, “This would have been a very challenging film to make with a large, cumbersome motion picture camera.” More

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      Watch Taraji P. Henson Sing in ‘The Color Purple’

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      The director Blitz Bazawule narrates a scene from the musical, featuring the star performing as the dynamo Shug Avery.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Shug Avery knows how to make an entrance.The sultry nightclub singer lights up a room, and a swamp, in this scene from “The Color Purple,” the film musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel. At the beginning of the sequence, a performance of the song “Push Da Button,” Shug (Taraji P. Henson), wearing a shimmering red dress and a feathered headdress, arrives at a juke joint on a barge.The director Blitz Bazawule, narrating the sequence, said that his production designer, Paul D. Austerberry, suggested shooting it on location, rather than on a soundstage. They found a swamp in Georgia that they drained and refilled, to build the juke joint in which Shug performs.Bazawule said that it took two weeks of rehearsal to figure out the blocking, with choreography by Fatima Robinson. It was “very important that we gave Taraji an opportunity to shine,” he explained. Henson does all of her own singing in the scene, having taken vocal lessons to prepare for the role.An idea for a dance break while the lights are shut off came to Bazawule when he was on set early one day, before shooting, and saw the environmental lights on. “The blue light started to bleed through,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘I think that’s it. If we can go from light to darkness this way, I think we could have something special.’”Read the “Color Purple” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      The Stories Behind Emma Stone’s Costumes in ‘Poor Things’

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      The designer Holly Waddington breaks down how Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter evolves onscreen, from her childish knickers to her cage-like wedding dress.The designer Holly Waddington had wide latitude in envisioning the costumes for “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s mad comedy starring Emma Stone.“The only brief really was that he didn’t want it to be overtly like a period drama” — the script is set in the 1880s — “and he didn’t want it to be overtly like a science fiction film,” Waddington said. In the movie (a Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival and now an Oscar contender), Stone is a scientist’s creation who evolves from a childlike naïf to a sexually and politically liberated woman.The Greek-born director Lanthimos, known for his surrealist vision, gave Waddington only one reference image: a young designer’s take on “inflatable trousers,” Waddington recalled. When puffed up, they “created this really exaggerated shape, just incredibly curvaceous.” She worked with other departments, like production design and hair and makeup, to finish the look for Stone’s Bella Baxter, whose life changes on a Grand Tour of cities like Lisbon.A lot snapped into focus when Waddington learned that Bella would have long, jet-black hair; an Egon Schiele painting was Lanthimos’s inspiration for that, she said, and it informed her color palette. Another thing to consider, in a movie with a lot of sex scenes: How the clothes come off. “I had many slightly awkward conversations with Yorgos about it,” she said. “He was asking me, how does she have sex in these? I was probably a bit embarrassed. But he’s not, at all.”Waddington knew her Victoriana; she spent years working in a costume house, specializing in archival ladies fashion. But for this film, she cut loose the corsetry — a scary prospect at first, she said, because corsets give period clothes their shape — and mixed eras and materials. Early on, Mrs. Prim, the medical assistant turned nanny, chooses Bella’s wardrobe; then she finds her own style. “The clothes needed to really change with her,” Waddington said.Beyond that, Lanthimos offered conceptual freedom. “He just doesn’t need to have a whole back story,” she said. If it looked good, it flew. Bella’s statement sleeves are already having a moment.In a video interview from her London home, Waddington discussed how, and why, she dressed Stone in three key moments of the movie. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Bella at HomeThe costumes Stone wore in early scenes that took place at home captured her in a more childlike persona.Searchlight PicturesThat look in the house is all based around the idea of her being a very young child at this point. And she’s being dressed by Mrs. Prim, who finds her really annoying. The clothes are not baby clothes, they’re womanly, but applied in this slightly ad hoc fashion, because she has the physicality of a child. Very quickly, things have dissembled and come off. And this is just based on my own observations of children that, even if you’re going to a smart occasion, the clothes, especially from the waist down, often come off. It’s just a slightly discordant, uncomfortable way to dress a woman — like an anxiety dream about going to a job interview wearing a suit at the top and nothing on the bottom, just knickers.The knickers are almost like 1950s nappy covers and they’re highly textured — seersucker. And then there’s this big bodice, a very thick moiré taffeta. The thickness of the cloth is almost too thick for human scale, which is what you get when you look at dolls. Often their fabrics look like marzipan — like cake decoration. Also, the striations in the moiré look to me like the organic marks that you get in flesh.She wears this funny little bustle — one of my favorite things in the film. It’s based on an authentic late Victorian bustle cage which would have been worn underneath the dress to give it volume. What struck me is that it looked super sci-fi.2. Lisbon OutfitWhen Stone’s character arrives in Lisbon, she starts to undergo an awakening.Searchlight PicturesDuring the pandemic, the producers arranged for me to go and meet Emma. I took many different renditions of sleeves with me — big sleeves, medium sized. I took lots of different kinds of knickers. I had an idea about how I wanted it to progress, but it was really in that fitting, trying all these shapes on Emma, that I was able to say, OK, we definitely need a bustle, we need these special 1930s tap pants, which I had just thrown in the suitcase at the last minute. They were a departure from the babyish knickers. In Lisbon, they’re silky and fluid — they’ve grown up and they’re sexy.I knew that I wanted her to step out of the hotel in something really discordant. And I was thinking of that scene in “Taxi Driver” when Jodie Foster steps out into the streets of New York in these hot pants.The ruffly top is based on a modesty piece for Victorian dresses — they filled in the décolletage, but on their own they’re just like a little dickey or bib. And I like the idea that she would just wear that, in its own right, as a blouse. What she’s actually wearing is bits of underwear as her clothes.The boots are a little homage to André Courrèges. In early development, I looked at late ’60s-early ’70s sci-fi costumes, and space age modernism fashion. So those boots are based on this idea of her having her toes free, because she’s just uncontainable — she’s exposing every aspect of her, including her feet. The peep-toe boot would never have happened in Victorian society. They didn’t even show their ankles.The gold, yellow and sky-blue colors are definitely a combination that we associate with many fairy tale characters. She stepped into the world and it opened up to her, sort of a Disney version of how you imagine Lisbon, all pastel. I wanted the clothes to reflect that joy and optimism.3. Wedding DressStone’s character wears elaborate sleeves throughout the movie, including when she dons a wedding dress.Searchlight PicturesI liked the idea of it being a cage, with bands of tubing in delicate silk. So hopefully evoking this sense of entrapment, but you could still see through to her and see her body — that felt important. And also these sleeves.We had this book of patterns from the 1890s, my assistant got it from an antiques dealer on Portobello Market. Patterns from the actual period are much more extreme than how we imagined them. This is a very brief period in fashion when there were huge mutton sleeves. I thought they should be even larger — really massive. And Yorgos was really up for the big sleeves. The wedding dress sleeve is probably about a meter all the way around. They look like balloons.I struggled with the veil because I didn’t feel like it was quite the right thing for this character. But then I took it to Emma on the morning of the shoot, and she grabbed it and got it wrapped around her face in a knot.I quite like the fact that it’s see-through and light and big, and it’s also her favorite costume, because her body felt so free in it. More

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      Why Anime Fans Hate the Growing Use of C.G.I.

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      As the industry continues to embrace computer-generated work, some audiences struggle to accept the change.The filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, a founder of the animation house Studio Ghibli, is one of the last practitioners of hand-drawn animation. His new coming-of-age fantasy, “The Boy and the Heron,” has been praised for a style that seems like a relic from the past. The IndieWire critic David Ehrlich called it “among the most beautiful movies ever drawn,” a much-needed salve “after a decade of ‘Minions’”; it’s also a likely Oscar contender.But while much of “The Boy and the Heron” was illustrated with pencil and paint on paper, the movie — like virtually every modern anime film — makes extensive use of computer animation, including digital compositing and visual effects. The classical, naturalistic style of the film does not call attention to such techniques, though they were a fundamental part of its design and production. They’re most evident in small flourishes: the vibrant flicker of a flame, the swirling flight of an arrow.Atsushi Okui, director of animation photography on “The Boy and the Heron” and a longtime Studio Ghibli cinematographer, said in an interview that the studio regards C.G.I. as “a complementary tool in graphic production that puts hand-drawn 2-D animation as its principal axis.”Many recent high-profile anime movies have embraced computer-generated work more blatantly, in some cases forgoing the 2-D style entirely. “The First Slam Dunk,” released in the United States in July, and “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero” (2022) were animated in a style known as 3DCG anime, which combines the hard outlines and flat planes of traditional 2-D animation with 3-D models and movement. The result looks a bit like a video game. These are extreme cases of a shift that’s been occurring industrywide. In different ways and to varying degrees, all anime has been going digital.The 3DCG style is well-suited to the kung fu battles of “Dragon Ball Super: SuperHero.”CrunchyrollThe transition has been a box office success: “The First Slam Dunk” ($152 million and counting) and “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero” ($86 million) have been incredibly lucrative for Toei Animation, and both are among the highest-grossing anime titles of all time.But hard-core fans — a fickle bunch — have not been as easy to please. To them, the rise of digital stirs passionate debate. Message boards are rife with complaints about the look of computer-generated animation and 3DCG in particular; on YouTube, videos highlighting especially flagrant instances of bad visuals rack up millions of views. The writer Callum May addressed the topic in an article for the Anime News Network, with the headline “Why Do We Hate 3DCG Anime?”“Fans often balk at any announcement that a show will be produced in 3-D, especially when it’s from an established franchise,” May said in an interview. “The gap between good and bad C.G. anime is wide, and fans can spot mediocre 3-D animation easily thanks to having seen decades of top-range American 3-D films.”Some 3-D anime has fared better with fans. The series “Beastars” and “Land of the Lustrous,” from the studio Orange, have won acclaim for their innovative style and visual effects, and tend to be admired even by skeptics.But these are exceptions. Rayna Denison, a film professor at the University of Bristol in Britain and the author of the book “Anime: A Critical Introduction,” said that the aversion may have to do with the art form’s roots. “A lot of anime is based on manga, which is a 2-D medium,” she said. “Anime takes these flat images and allows them to move. That’s very different than presenting a 3-D model of a character that you know as 2-D.”Perhaps, she continued, it may just be a case of resistance to the new. Anime fans have for decades been “very familiar with anime aesthetically and stylistically, and when you change that it becomes quite jarring.”“The First Slam Dunk” is among the 3DCG box office hits.GkidsOf course, the use of computers in the production of anime isn’t a new phenomenon: Animators have been integrating their hand-drawn visuals with digital effects since the early 1980s, when rudimentary C.G.I. was used to help bring to life models that would have been too complex to illustrate by pen and paper. In “Golgo 13: The Professional” (1983), computer-generated helicopters fly through a 3-D cityscape in a lengthy action sequence. Though the blocky, awkward-looking choppers are extremely dated by today’s standards, they added a flourish of spectacle that simply would not have been feasible by traditional means.“The style has evolved a lot, but in some ways ‘Golgo 13’ had it right,” May said. “C.G. is still most commonly used when the creators want to feature a mechanical vehicle, which is something most 2-D animators don’t have the training to do, or when they want the camera to fly through an environment, because 2-D-animated backgrounds are very labor intensive.”In other words, the limitations of hand-drawn animation are much the same as in 1983 but the technology is far more advanced. The 3DCG approach is ideal for stories that feature complex machinery or adventures across sweeping landscapes. It’s also well suited to the explosive kung fu battles of “Dragon Ball Super” and the propulsive basketball action of “Slam Dunk.”“Once you have C.G.I. you get much more dynamic camera movements,” Denison said. “It’s created a much more exciting action landscape for anime.”In this way, C.G.I. is basically another element in an animator’s tool kit, a way to expand what’s possible onscreen. More practically, it also cuts costs. Creating visuals on a computer is usually much faster and cheaper than creating one painstaking frame at a time by hand.“I feel like the large insurgence of 3-D anime comes from the dream of an easier production,” said Austin Hardwicke, a 3-D animator who specializes in anime that is heavy on digital effects. In part, that’s because it’s easier to maintain consistent quality. “Thanks to the enormous video game industry, there are hands available across the globe, making it easy to scale a team up or down at will. And it’s famously difficult for veteran 2-D animators to teach junior animators up to their level, but 3-D animation is infinitely easier to teach.”Hardwicke, who has worked on the 3DCG series “Trigun: Stampede” and “Godzilla: Singular Point,” said that those and other reasons can make switching to digital so enticing that studios often overlook problems. While there is nothing inherently wrong with digital effects, they “can look out of place, ugly or like a cost-cutting measure,” he added. In short, when anime fans see C.G., many are inevitably skeptical because the poor precedents seem to thwart the hope that it might be good: “Visible C.G. in anime can be seen as a bellwether that the show will be bad in general.”Okui, the cinematographer, said that Studio Ghibli regards it as “unavoidable that the tools are shifting from paper and pencil and paint to digital tools” in modern anime. But, he added, “I would hope that in Japan the shift will not occur so completely.” As the masters of the classical style like Miyazaki age out — he is 82 — it’s up to a new generation of animators to carry the mantle. “We can’t continue this way unless we have capable animators,” Okui said, “for which training people is the key.” More

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      Ana Ofelia Murguía, Mexican Actress and Voice in Coco,’ Dies, 90

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      Her 60-year career in film, television and theater “marked an entire era” and made her one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses.Ana Ofelia Murguía, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses, whose voice acting as Mama Coco in the animated movie “Coco” brought her international recognition, died on Sunday. She was 90.Her death was confirmed by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and National Theater Company, which did not specify the cause of death.The National Theater Company described Murguía on social media as “one of Mexico’s greatest actresses.” In a statement, Lucina Jiménez López, the director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, described her career as one that “marked an entire era.” In the 2017 film “Coco,” made by Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios, Murguía plays the key role of Mama Coco, the great-grandmother of a boy, the protagonist Miguel, who finds himself in the land of the dead on a journey to uncover his family’s history. At the emotional climax of the film, Miguel and Mama Coco sing the song “Remember Me” together.The movie, which is built around the Mexican holiday of the Day of the Dead, was celebrated for its portrayal of Mexican culture and its handling of weighty subjects like death in a children’s movie. It won best animated featured and best original song, for “Remember Me,” at the 2018 Oscars.“Coco” introduced Murguía to a global audience, but she was well-known in her home country of Mexico long before.Ana Ofelia Murguía was born on Dec. 8, 1933, in Mexico City. She studied acting at Mexico’s National School of Theater Arts and made her debut in 1954 in the play “Trial By Fire.” Her first screen role was in the 1964 film “Transit.”She would go on to appear in more than 70 plays and 90 films, working with some of Mexico’s best filmmakers. Hailed for her versatility, she often played the role of the villain or antagonist, according to a statement from the Institute of Fine Arts and National Theater Company.At Mexico’s prestigious Ariel awards, Murguía won best supporting actress for her performances in “Cadena Perpetua,” in 1979; “Los Motivos de Luz,” in 1986; and “La Reina de la Noche” (The Queen of the Night), in 1996. She was nominated for best actress five times but never won. In 2011, she was recognized with a Golden Ariel special lifetime achievement award.In April 2023, she was awarded the Ingmar Bergman Medal from the National Autonomous University of Mexico for leaving an “indelible mark” on Mexican film and theater. More

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      America Ferrera and the ‘Barbie’ Monologue We All Talked About

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      Listing some of the many perils of womanhood in a still patriarchal society, the monologue that the actress America Ferrera delivers in “Barbie” with the intensity of a rallying cry, became one of the most talked-about movie moments of 2023.“I’ve never been a part of something so eagerly anticipated,” Ferrera said during an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant. Originally from Los Angeles but based in New York, she was back in her hometown for an awards-season screening of the smash hit.Relaxed in a cozy beige sweater, Ferrera, 39, was recalling a prerelease press stop in Mexico City where 20,000 frenzied people welcomed the filmmaker Greta Gerwig and the cast of her pink-soaked comedy. “It was like a presidential campaign,” she added.Ferrera plays Gloria, mother and Mattel employee whose self-doubt and unfulfilled aspirations in the real world prompt an existential crisis in Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) in Barbie Land. Ferrera’s plucky performance has landed her in the Oscar discussion this year.Though Gloria might be considered a supporting player in “Barbie,” Ferrera knows that it’s her flawed character who sets the adventure in motion. The performer, who broke through in “Real Women Have Curves” (2002) and went on to win an Emmy for her turn as the title character in “Ugly Betty” (2006-10), deeply admires how Gerwig dared to infuse a seemingly vacuous concept with plenty of meaning.“It’s huge for something that is both so commercially successful and culturally dominant to also be about many things at the same time, which is not easy to execute in the biggest movie of the year,” Ferrera noted.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Has the massive success of “Barbie” come as a surprise to you?I went into reading the script with really no attachment to Barbie at all. I didn’t grow up playing with Barbies. I was more curious about what Greta would do with it. It wasn’t just funny and subversive and delightfully weird. It was also about womanhood. When I was done reading the script, I was just giddy that this was the Barbie movie that no one asked for, but we were going to get. I felt it was going to be huge from the beginning.Why did you never play with Barbies as a child?We couldn’t afford Barbies. She was very expensive along with all of her stuff. [Laughs] I had a cousin who had Barbies, and I would play with them at her house, but they also seemed very far away from me. I didn’t necessarily feel represented in the Barbie narrative. It felt like a world that wasn’t accessible to me.Some critics took issue with her monologue as an oversimplification, but Ferrera countered, “We can know things and still need to hear them out loud.”Amy Harrity for The New York TimesSince you didn’t have a personal attachment to Barbie, how did you find your way into the character of Gloria and this world?One of the things that really gave me a glimpse into this character was the documentary called “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie” that showed when Barbie expanded into many different sizes and shapes and colors. The woman [Kim Culmone] who led that as the head Barbie designer, a very cool feminist progressive woman, was getting backlash from all sides: From the legacy holders saying, “Barbie can’t change.” And from her progressive friends, angry that she cared about Barbie. “Why would you care about something that has been so bad for women?”But she had her own deep personal connection to playing with Barbies with her mother. She fought for this idea that she knew was imperfect but that still meant something to her. That gave me the insight I needed to play Gloria as a real adult woman and to understand why she plays with Barbie and wishes herself to Barbie Land.What did you think the first time you saw Gloria’s now incredibly popular speech?It definitely felt like an important moment, but Gloria was shining from the very beginning. She represents this quest for the permission to express yourself. She has to play the role of Mom and of responsible career woman, while hiding everything she loves underneath the corporate suit, being what she thought she needed to be. From the moment we meet her with her pink sneakers on to her getting to drive in that car chase, there was so much wish fulfillment and release for somebody who has been repressing so much.The monologue felt so right for Gloria. Yes, it breaks the Barbies out of their moment, but it’s also the natural breaking point for Gloria, where she has to say what she’s discovering on this journey. I recognized that it was a big moment and that it needed to work, but it also didn’t work independent of her entire search for more freedom for herself.Did the speech change at all?The text evolved a little bit. Greta asked me, “Why don’t you just tell me what you would say? Write it in your own words. What would you add?” Not every director starts out by inviting actors to rewrite their work. Some of what we talked about made it into the script. The line, “Always be grateful” came out of that conversation with Greta. She expounded on it adding, “But never forget that the system is rigged.” There were many versions that we did. We ended in tears. It ended in laughter, it got big, it got small, and I was able to do that because I really trusted Greta to know what would be right for the film.What are your thoughts on the discourse that some people believe Gloria’s speech oversimplifies feminism?We can know things and still need to hear them out loud. It can still be a cathartic. There are a lot of people who need Feminism 101, whole generations of girls who are just coming up now and who don’t have words for the culture that they’re being raised in. Also, boys and men who may have never spent any time thinking about feminist theory.If you are well-versed in feminism, then it might seem like an oversimplification, but there are entire countries that banned this film for a reason. To say that something that is maybe foundational, or, in some people’s view, basic feminism isn’t needed is an oversimplification. Assuming that everybody is on the same level of knowing and understanding the experience of womanhood is an oversimplification.From left, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, who plays her daughter, and Margot Robbie.Warner Bros.Gloria’s story is deeply intertwined with that of Barbie. How do think the two help each other overcome their struggles?Greta, Margot and I talked about Gloria and Barbie’s relationship as a love story. Not necessarily a romantic one, which some people on the internet have pushed for that reading of it, but we talked about it as Barbie and Gloria needing each other to be complete and to be the pieces of a puzzle that’s missing for each of them. The journey releases Gloria of the impossible assignment of being the kind of woman that she thinks she needs to be in the real world. And Barbie releases her herself from having to be an idea that is never going to satisfy all the things she’s meant to satisfy by choosing to be a human.What was your reaction when you first saw the doll made in your image for the Barbie collection inspired by the movie?Surreal. There were actually some similarities to me in the facial features. She’s the first Barbie doll fashioned after a Honduran American woman to ever exist. That’s really special, to know that no one had a Honduran Barbie doll to play with until now.Do you feel like your career has always been marked by firsts, like being the first Latina to win a lead acting Emmy? There’s a lot of pressure in being the first.I just took any single opportunity in front of me to do the best possible work that I could do in the hopes that there would be another opportunity after that. Looking backward, it’s much clearer to see that my career has been shaped by how the culture saw somebody like me. The opportunities that came my way were ones that kept me in very specific boxes. What I saw as my job as an actor was to inject those characters with as much complexity as I could, and not just play characters that were a foil to an expectation.Have things improved for Latinas in Hollywood since “Real Women Have Curves”?It took Josefina López, who wrote it, 11 years to get that movie made. And when the movie was successful, it didn’t result in a watershed moment for Latina writers and directors and actresses being given tons of opportunities. As you stated, I’m the first Latina to win an Emmy in a lead category. I’m still the only one and that brings me no joy. While I would love to think that things are different today than they were 22 years ago when “Real Women Have Curves” was made, the data shows that in large part, it hasn’t changed.That makes me think of Lupe Ontiveros, who played your mother in “Real Woman Have Curves,” and who made a career out tiny roles she managed to turn into screen gold.Ferrera in her breakthrough role in “Real Women Have Curves,” opposite Lupe Ontiveros.HBO FilmsShe was such a force, an incredible talent. [Ontiveros died in 2012.] I often think about all the incredible performances we were robbed of, that Lupe never got to give because those opportunities didn’t exist for somebody like her. And she still did her work. She took whatever scraps would come to her and she would fill them with humor and make them memorable. I think about her often, and all the Latino actors who’ve come before me, who did whatever they could with whatever they got.What does the ideal future for Latinos in the industry look like to you?The hope is that we get to actually have outlets for the immense talent that exists among Latinos. And that we can move beyond fighting just to be visible and that we can actually create and exist as full humans, as artists, with things to say beyond, “We’re here.” But it’s hard to find those opportunities. There’s a lot out there that is very transactional in terms of checking boxes to claim diversity. One of the most exciting things to me about this movie was, as a Latina woman, being invited to be a part of something so adventurous and joyful and fun. Gloria is Latina, but being Latina was not her reason for being in this story. More