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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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      ‘Avatar’ and the Mystery of the Vanishing Blockbuster

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      First it was said that James Cameron was no match for reality. In late 2009, before “Avatar” came out, skeptics warned that the visual-effects behemoth would never recoup its unearthly budget, estimated to be upward of $237 million. In just over two weeks, it grossed $1 billion, quieting doubters, at least temporarily. After that, the story reversed: Reality was no match for “Avatar.” The condition went by different names: “Avatar” Syndrome, Post-Pandoran Depression or PADS (Post-“Avatar” Depression Syndrome). It was marked by despair and suicidal ideation, brought on by the insurmountable gap between real life and Cameron’s C.G.I. Eden.This was at the dawn of the era when a small group of people acting weird online could set off a dayslong cycle of news. Here, the source was a multipage thread on the independent fan site Avatar Forums — “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible.” By that point, January 2010, even certain well-adjusted people had seen the movie two or three times, lured back to theaters by the all-consuming tale of an ex-Marine fighting to save the Na’vi race from the venal designs of a mining corporation. For the people posting on the thread, watching was not enough; they wanted to live inside Cameron’s world, to fly through Pandora as a 10-foot-tall blue alien, in perfect symbiosis with nature. One of the afflicted, Ivar Hill, told CNN, “I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world.”Hill was 17 at the time, living with his parents in Borås, Sweden. He first saw “Avatar” at the local cinema and woke up the next day feeling empty and lost. On Avatar Forums, he found others who felt trapped, who yearned for a chance to start over on Pandora or dreamed of leading a Na’vi lifestyle here on earth. Some of them recognized the futility of the sentiment. Others went searching for a feeling of escape, seeing the movie again and again and brainstorming tips for improving their own lives. “Start living like Neytiri,” one wrote, “in touch with nature, the environment, and not being greedy and wasteful.” Hill belonged to the second group. He started reading philosophy. He devoted more time to communing with nature. “I would go out into the woods and spend time there hiking,” he says. “ ‘Avatar’ made me feel like I could sit out in a forest and just be.”Though the first ‘Avatar’ was the world’s top-grossing movie, its most oft-cited claim to fame is its surprising lack of cultural impact.Hill saw “Avatar” four times, once even traveling an hour to Gothenburg, at the time the nearest city with a 3-D-equipped theater. Eventually, with two friends he met online, he started his own fan forum, Tree of Souls, named for the holy site where the Na’vi go to experience the interconnectedness of all things. In the chat room, he met a woman named Heather, who had also experienced post-“Avatar” depression. After messaging about the film, they moved on to more metaphysical concerns. “Neither of us was the kind of person who had ever been looking for a partner,” he says. “But a few weeks after we first started talking, we kind of realized, ‘Huh, we’re feeling something here.’” In 2012, the pair met for the first time at an in-person “Avatar” event in Seattle. Two years later, they were married in Sweden. The couple now live in the Pacific Northwest, where Hill, who became an American citizen last year, works as a video-game developer. “My life would be very, very different if I hadn’t randomly ended up seeing that film in 2010,” he says.Hill still operates Tree of Souls, one of the few surviving “Avatar” fan forums. The site today is mostly speculation about “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the first in a series of four long-delayed sequels that will transform “Avatar” into a franchise. “The Way of Water,” which was shot simultaneously with a yet-to-be-titled third film (and part of a fourth), arrives in theaters Dec. 16. When asked about his plans for the premiere, Hill was nonchalant. Though “Avatar” altered the course of his whole life — arguably more than even James Cameron’s — he doesn’t really think there’s anything that special about the movie. It was just the thing that happened to cross his path at the moment when he was already searching. “Maybe if it wasn’t ‘Avatar,’ something else would have come along,” Hill says. He thinks of the sequel as just another movie. “It’s going to be really interesting to see, but it’s not like I’m counting down the days.”Of all the questions raised by “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the most pressing seems to be: “Who asked for this?” Though the first “Avatar” was the world’s top-grossing movie not once, but twice, reclaiming the title from “Avengers: Endgame” after a 2021 rerelease in China, its most oft-cited claim to fame is its surprising lack of cultural impact. While films of similar scale and ambition — “Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park,” “Iron Man” — have spawned fandoms and quotable lines and shareable memes and licensed merchandise, “Avatar” has spawned mainly punch lines. On the fifth anniversary of the film, Forbes announced, “Five Years Ago, ‘Avatar’ Grossed $2.7 Billion but Left No Pop Culture Footprint.” A few years later, Buzzfeed ran a quiz titled, “Do You Remember Anything at All About ‘Avatar’?” challenging readers to answer basic questions like, “What is the name of the male lead character in ‘Avatar’?” and “Which of these actors played the male lead?”Even if you cannot answer these questions, chances are high you have seen “Avatar.” (According to a study by the consumer-research firm MRI-Simmons, an estimated one in five American adults saw it in theaters.) To jog your memory, a quick rundown of the plot: The year is 2154. Earth, as you might expect, is a husk. Four light-years away on an inhabited moon called Pandora, an outfit called the Resources Development Administration extracts a mineral called unobtanium. This is not an in-and-out mission. The air on Pandora is toxic to human lungs and mining operations are resisted by the Na’vi, an Indigenous group that lives off the land and is rightly distrustful of “the Sky People.” To learn the Na’vi mind and protect its own investments, the R.D.A. funds a side project called the Avatar Program, in which scientists create Na’vi clones that can be piloted by humans. Each of these “avatars” is matched to a single researcher’s DNA. When one researcher dies before his avatar is fully formed, his twin brother is tapped to take over his role. Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, is a paraplegic ex-Marine. In this avatar body, he discovers a new freedom. What follows is basically what you would expect: Guy goes native, has a change of heart, saves the local race from his own kind.“Avatar” was first mentioned in the press in 1996. Before a single frame was shot, the film was foretold as a kind of prophecy. A headline in The Tampa Bay Times announced, “Synthetic Actors to Star in ‘Avatar.’” At that point, motion-capture was practically science fiction, and C.G.I. had mainly been used to render nonhuman creatures or effects (the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” for example). Cameron was promising a marriage of the two that would produce lifelike humanoids. He would soon find out that the technology was not there yet. After “Titanic” in 1997, “Avatar” was set aside as Cameron began to work out the technological kinks. In the meantime, he produced an academically disreputable documentary about the lost tomb of Jesus. He designed and built a submarine and then piloted it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.Work on “Avatar” officially began in 2005. Cameron contracted a linguistics consultant at the University of Southern California to begin development on Na’vi — a lexicon of more than 2,800 words, drawing on the rarest structures of human language. From there, the anecdotes only got more insane: a team of botanists advising on imaginary flora; a bespoke head rig to record facial expressions; a motion-capture stage in Howard Hughes’s airplane hangar, six times larger than any seen before. Each new detail fed a tornado of hype, a low-pressure system of buzz so rapacious that it grew to encompass everything from the film’s tech — a 3-D camera system, invented by Cameron, which could mimic the spread between the human eyes — to its budget, estimates of which ranged from $237 million to $500 million. (No one could agree exactly when to start the meter — on the first day of production? With Cameron’s R.& D.? On the day of his birth?) One line that Cameron trotted around town was that watching “Avatar” would be like “dreaming with your eyes wide open.” An article in this newspaper skewered the hype: “James Cameron has been working feverishly to complete a movie that may: a) Change filmmaking forever, b) Alter your brain, c) Cure cancer.”The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Sigourney Weaver: Hollywood has never quite known what to do with the actress, who has four films out this season, including the “Avatar” sequel. She spoke to us about her unusually fluid career.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.“Avatar” premiered on Dec. 18, 2009, at No. 1, bringing in a respectable, if not astounding, $73 million. Celebrities logged on to newly ascendant Twitter to spread the word (Michael Moore), announce their plans to see it on peyote (John Mayer) or lament their sad fate to not bed a Na’vi (Rainn Wilson). The Los Angeles Times suggested that the film had done for 3-D technology what “The Jazz Singer” did for sound. By the first week of January, “Avatar” surpassed $1 billion, setting a record for reaching that milestone. By the end of the month, it was the first movie to ever gross $2 billion. In China, a quartz-sandstone pillar in Zhangjiajie National Forest Park was renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain. In Palestine, people put on blueface to protest an Israeli separation barrier. Oscar nominations flooded in, along with a wave of “Avatar” porn, suggesting a strong libidinal undercurrent to the hype. In April 2010, when two sequels were announced, it came as no surprise to anyone.These sequels would be repeatedly delayed, reportedly on account of: two sequels expanding into three (2013); delays in script delivery (2015); three sequels ballooning to four (2016); the epicness of this quadripartite undertaking, which Cameron at one point likened to “building the Three Gorges Dam” (2017); Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, which demanded a shake-up in the rollout strategy, to better harmonize with the “Star Wars” release schedule (Disney, by then, also owned Lucasfilm) (2019); and finally, the novel coronavirus (2020). (Disney disputed some of these accounts but declined to directly address the cause of the delays.) Over this 13-year period, the entertainment industry underwent a transformational shift, the beginning of which almost exactly coincided with the moment that “Avatar” was released. In 2008, “Iron Man” came out, the first of the 30 (and counting) movies that today make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As “Avatar” promised one future for film — ​original world building, envelope-​pushing effects, the theater as the site of cinematic innovation — Marvel, and other endeavors that would follow, went on to develop a very different one.Illustration by Kristian HammerstadIn this vision, any given movie was merely one installment in a more complex cultural product called the franchise. The on-again-off-again Disney chief executive Bob Iger defined the franchise as “something that creates value across multiple businesses and across multiple territories over a long period of time.” A franchise is an ecosystem oriented toward an infinite horizon, in which a common set of characters and stories are constantly refreshed and reworked across platforms. From 2008 to today, entertainment brands, old and new, turned themselves over to the new model. “Harry Potter” turned seven books and eight movies into three spinoff movies, more than 30 video games, a Broadway show, five theme-park worlds, an interactive website and more; “Star Wars” turned the original trilogy into the nine-film “Skywalker Saga” plus two more stand-alone films, an animated movie, nearly 20 TV shows, action figures, trading cards, a hotel — the list goes on.According to data from Franchise Entertainment Research, in 2019, franchise movies made up 42 percent of Hollywood’s new wide releases and accounted for 83 percent of global box-office proceeds. The ascent of this networked form of entertainment has had far-reaching cultural effects on everything from the tone and plot structure of movies, to what it means to be a fan, to how we calculate success. If “Avatar” feels irrelevant today, it has less to do with the film itself and more to do with how the world has changed around it.After the success of “Avatar,” there were naturally some attempts to expand the brand under the franchise model that was emerging. Even when these brand extensions were thoughtful, few could withstand the long wait for the sequel. A novelization by the science-fiction author Steven Charles Gould was announced in 2013 but hasn’t yet materialized. “Avatar: The Game,” which was set before the events of the film, sold decently, but by 2014, its servers were shut down. Even the Mattel toys had problems: The Na’vi figures were produced at the wrong scale; the lack of young children’s toys overlooked future audiences. Those who might have shelled out for collectibles might not have been eager to do so for the articulated figurine of an R.D.A. bureaucrat, played by Giovanni Ribisi, putting a golf ball.In July, when I first started working on this article, a search on Amazon for “Avatar” returned only products for “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” an unrelated franchise owned by Nickelodeon. Today just one major vestige of the fandom still survives, Pandora: World of “Avatar,” a detailed 12-acre simulacrum rising from the flatlands of Orlando, Fla. The theme park offers the most fleshed-out look at how “Avatar” might remake itself in the age of the franchise.Pandora is inside Disney’s Animal Kingdom, an attraction that combines the pious conservationism of a zoo with the wacky extremity of a carnival. When it opened in 2017, about halfway through the sequel delays, it was widely regarded as Disney’s response to Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of “Harry Potter.” Wizarding World is all-encompassing, inviting its guests to live as Potter does, down to even mundane tasks like exchanging Muggle currency for galleons. With Pandora, Disney aimed to raise the bar, promising not just a world but an entire alien world to explore.Pandora is one of five “lands” within Animal Kingdom, the other four being “Africa,” “Asia,” “Discovery Island” and “DinoLand U.S.A.” In the spatial arrangement of this taxonomic nightmare, Pandora is in the southwest of the park, on a plot of land rumored to have originally been reserved for a never-built zoo of mythical beasts. The first thing I saw upon landing on the planet was a signpost offering a welcome in Na’vi: “OEL NGATI KAMEIE (I See You).” As fodder for an immersive theme-park experience, the plot of “Avatar” presents certain challenges, namely regarding the role of the immersed in light of the fact that the movie concludes with the Na’vi’s kicking major human ass and banishing their colonizers back to earth. To square the race-war thing with the hordes of human guests, the park is set more than a generation after the first movie, following a yet-to-be-cinematically-​depicted armistice. The sign cleared this up with some slapdash world building, introducing the “Pandora Conservation Initiative,” a joint venture between “the indigenous Na’vi people” and an Earth-based venture called Alpha Centauri Expeditions. In other words, we were tourists playing tourists.Like many postcolonial people, the Na’vi now support themselves by selling a version of their culture to outsiders. On Pandora, there are three major attractions: Flight of Passage, a 3-D-simulator ride; an “It’s a Small World”-style boat tour called Na’vi River Journey; and a scale replica of the Valley of Mo’ara, the massive floating mountain range that Neytiri, Jake Sully’s love interest, calls home. (The range didn’t have a name until after the park was built.) As I entered the park, these mountains loomed above me, held aloft by steel supports disguised to look like mossy vines. The pristine green of this false Amazon was interrupted only by the teals and magentas of plastic sprayer fans and sun-protective T-shirts and quick-dry bucket hats. Families all around posed for photos. Most of the children, I guessed, were not yet born at the time the first “Avatar” was released.According to Derek Johnson, a professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of “Media Franchising,” one major feature of a franchise versus a movie is not just its multiple sites of production — the theme park, the toy, the television show — but also its orientation toward the future. In order to survive, it must maintain a careful balance between novelty and familiarity, courting the next generation of fans without driving away too many of the old ones. By now, there are certain canonical tactics that work in service of this overarching goal: The prequel invites a new generation into an old saga. The reboot refreshes the father’s intellectual property to win the pocket change of the son. The spinoff inducts a new demographic, centering a side character (often a person of color or a woman). In between, a fandom is maintained through intermittent product tie-ins and announcements.Today it has been thoroughly demonstrated that superhero and fantasy movies are the best forms of intellectual property for the endless reiteration necessitated by the franchise model. But it was not always self-evident that they would come to dominate. In the years surrounding “Avatar,” executives were still experimenting with adapting different types of source material: the young-adult novel (“Twilight”), the theme-park ride (“Pirates of the Caribbean”), the board game (“Battleship”), the casual-​gaming app (“The Angry Birds Movie”) and even the Unicode pictogram keyboard (“The Emoji Movie”). The most successful franchises share certain principles: an epic plot, on the scale of all mankind, sweeping enough to encompass different stories; a detailed setting, with high specificity, implying a world beyond what gets shown onscreen; assorted sects and institutions, providing easy points of fan identification; a set of distinctive totems to merchandise — a scarf, a shield, a mask, a ring. One challenge facing Pandora: World of “Avatar” is the relative thinness of the actual world of “Avatar”: The movie offers few clues about Pandoran life beyond just what is shown onscreen.This was evident at the Satu’li Canteen, an air-conditioned fast-casual concession housed in a reclaimed R.D.A. mess hall. In “Avatar,” the Na’vi eat something called Spartan fruit, which grows from the fictional kuchenium polyphyllum. Short of bioengineering a new species, park designers were left to fill in the gaps for what a restaurant on Pandora might serve. This prompt was made even more challenging by a mandate that the food appear alien, while also looking and tasting familiar — or, in the words of one Imagineer, “like chicken” — enough to satisfy the average Disney visitor.The menu that day offered strange-but-​recognizable delicacies: “steamed pods” (beef bao buns), “teylu” (hot dogs wrapped in dough) and “ber’ri” (blueberry cream-cheese mousse). I ordered the crispy fried tofu bowl, which arrived topped with bright orange, fruit-flavored boba. Pandoran appeared to be a fusion cuisine: local ingredients mixed with the traditional lunch fare of Midtown. After lunch, I went outside for a drink at Pongu Pongu. On tap was a Pandoran craft beer called Mo’ara High Country Ale. I ordered the Night Blossom, a nonalcoholic slushie, presumably conceived as Pandora’s answer to Butterbeer at the Wizarding World of “Harry Potter” — a soft drink so delicious and successful it sold one million units in six months, substantially offsetting the cost of the park. Night Blossom tasted the way your teeth feel after eating a Jolly Rancher. Suffice to say, it would not be paying for Pandora. As I took three sips and threw it in the trash, I struggled to picture a Na’vi onscreen sucking one down under the Tree of Souls.After lunch, I downloaded an app and scheduled reservations for both rides. Conventional wisdom about Avatar’s cultural irrelevance notwithstanding, the park was swamped, and the first available time slot was hours away. I wandered into Windtraders gift shop, curious to see which elements from the preindustrial world of “Avatar” might lend themselves to merchandising. In one corner, I found T-shirts that said “Pandora” in the type style of a national park, riffing on the tourists-playing-tourists conceit. In another corner hung a wall of light-up “woodsprites,” the omniscient seeds from the Tree of Souls, which play a pivotal role in the film. Bioluminescence — in the form of light-up toys, black-light Christmas ornaments and glow-in-the-dark sweatshirts — was a key feature of “Avatar” merch. This choice made sense, in the way that light evokes the 3-D spectacle that real dimensionality cannot. Still, it was hardly a light saber.Leaving the gift shop, I strolled back through the mountains, dreading the hours I still had to kill until my scheduled ride reservations. I walked around in desperate search of a Na’vi. I studied a replica of the mech suit worn by the movie’s forgettable villain. Eventually, I just got in line. Waiting, by that point, seemed more entertaining than spending the rest of my evening in the park. As it turns out, a 3-D simulacrum of a 3-D movie kind of cancels itself out. Divorced from the dazzle of visual effects, I could see the aesthetic universe of “Avatar” for what it was: a glorified World Market sale section. The Na’vi alone were just a tiki-bar mishmash of traits that white people perceive as foreign: dreadlocks, beadwork, body mods, loincloths, feathers, cowrie shells. Compared with that of Hogwarts or Tatooine, the logic of their world seemed to lack imagination: What were the odds that, galaxies away, a society not only had two genders, but those genders were “male” and “female” — and the females were stacked?Six weeks later, on Sept. 23, Disney rereleased “Avatar” into theaters, in an ostensible effort to revive the intellectual property and prime the viewing public for “The Way of Water.” I went to see it with a group of 20 friends. In two rows of recliners, as the previews played, we took turns leaning over and asking, “Are we supposed to wear the 3-D glasses for this part?” The action did not leap from the screen so much as stumble forward in a seasick kind of way. I worried that I would not make it three hours, but from the first moment Jake Sully appeared, my skepticism slipped away, replaced with sudden, overwhelming understanding of why people once lost their minds for “Avatar.”Here is probably a good place to disclose that when I first started working on this article, I had never seen “Avatar.” The film came out my senior year of high school, when I was still committed to the thought that nothing popular could ever be good. (I have spent my life revising and re-​revising this position.) My plan was to see it for the first time in 3-D, as it was intended to be seen, but all my attempts to make this happen led nowhere. I ended up watching “Avatar” for the first time on a laptop screen in my hotel room in Orlando. Everything I had heard seemed accurate — the plot was rote; the dialogue, forgettable. The experience was so unremarkable it left me questioning my own humanity: Was the movie’s success a global mass delusion or was I lacking in some fundamental trait that would let me even understand why it was loved?Watching in 3-D was a different experience. As Jake and Neytiri darted through the forest, the special effects brought me into their world. The action did not just come forward as one frame, but instead wove me into the movement onscreen, the tendrils of plants and falling drops of water each reaching out from a different point in space. The Na’vi bodies appeared to have mass. It was hard to discern what was real or C.G.I., which led me to wonder, “Why even distinguish?” This, in turn, produced a twisted surge of delight at the prospect of man’s becoming God.The history of recorded images might be described as an incremental quest to master the building blocks of consciousness — first sight, then motion, then sound, then color. With “Avatar,” Cameron revealed that human ingenuity could marshal even more: physics, light, dimensionality; the ineffable sense of an object being real; the life force that makes a thing feel alive. As Sully soared through the floating mountain range, I thought of those apocryphal Victorians, ducking as a train appeared to rush out from the screen. I thought of all the geegaws and novelties and illusions of the latter part of the last millennium: the magic lantern show, electric lights, the Ferris wheel, color television and Pong. I didn’t know that I could still be dazzled.This is not to say that “Avatar” is good. The movie is basically a demo tape, each plot point reverse-engineered to show off some new feat of technology. The awe it inspires was not just about itself but rather the hope of new possibilities. It was easy to imagine someone in 2009 leaving the theater and asking: “What if we made more movies like this? What if we made good movies like this?” The year 2009 was a relatively optimistic one: Obama had just won on the audacity of “hope.” Climate change still felt far away. The forever wars were going to end. Surely we would fix whatever caused the recession. “Avatar” pointed toward a widening horizon — better effects, new cinematic worlds, new innovations in 3-D technology. It did not yet seem incongruous to wrap a project based in infinite progress around a story about the perils of infinite growth.Watching that day, I could still access these feelings but they were tied to a sense of melancholy, knowing that “The Way of Water” will emerge into an almost total deferment of that dream. Today, 3-D is niche (at best); digital effects are used to cut costs; home streaming is threatening the theater; and projects of ambitious world-building are overlooked in favor of stories with existing fanbases. We did not get here by pure chance: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated broadcast media, allowing companies to form megaconglomerates. In this world of mergers and acquisitions, the franchise blossomed into a highly efficacious product, allowing companies to maximize intellectual property across their numerous platforms. As the economy grew more financialized, and even movie studios began behaving more like banks — promising profits quarter over quarter — the franchise product became even more appealing. Because franchises have a ready audience, they effectively functioned as a way to manage risk, allowing companies to bet bigger and win bigger.Pulling a tactic from the franchise playbook, the screening ended with a post-credit sequence previewing “The Way of Water.” The movie takes place 15 years after the events of the first film (but still before the world of the theme park), following Sully, Neytiri and their children on some sort of partly undersea adventure. Most of what we know about the movie comes from a decade of tabloid oddities — it was shot in a 265,000-gallon ocean simulator! Sigourney Weaver plays a teenager! Kate Winslet trained to hold her breath for seven and a half minutes! The preview showed a young Na’vi splashing alongside a whale-like creature. It felt obvious that the clip had been chosen to show off Cameron’s latest innovation: underwater motion capture. The ocean was rendered so effectively it was hard to remember I was seeing something new.The story of “Avatar,” however hacky it may be, still suggests that humanity can save itself in the face of rapacious profiteering. This is something we have a moral imperative to keep believing. In today’s franchise movies, visions of the future are inherently constrained by the mandate to keep the franchise up and running — a project that forecloses any story line critiquing growth, consumerism or globalization. If the business of the franchise points toward an ever-widening horizon, the movies produced within its logic must do the opposite. Their vision of life is necessarily circular, always pointing back to itself.Jamie Lauren Keiles is a contributing writer for the magazine. They are currently working on a book about the rise of gender-neutral pronouns and nonbinary identity in America. More

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      Lenny Lipton, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ Lyricist and 3-D Film Pioneer, 82, Dies

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      He used the royalties earned from the hit folk song, based on a poem he wrote in college, to fund decades of research into stereoscopic projection.Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s bountiful royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.His wife, Julia Lipton, said the cause was brain cancer.Few people leave much of a mark on popular culture; Mr. Lipton was among the few who got to leave two, and in such wildly divergent corners as folk music and cinema technology.He was a 19-year-old student at Cornell when he sat down at the typewriter of his friend and fellow physics major Peter Yarrow. He had just read a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” and felt inspired to write his own.Some time later, Mr. Yarrow found the poem, still in his typewriter, and felt a similar inspiration. He put the poem to music, and in 1963 he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It begins: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea / And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.”Mr. Yarrow tracked down Mr. Lipton, who was working as a journalist in Manhattan, and gave him credit as a co-writer. (As Mr. Lipton told reporters repeatedly, despite persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)The song was such an immediate and lasting hit — Mr. Lipton called it his “MacArthur ‘genius’ grant” — that it allowed him to leave his job and move to California. In the Bay Area, he fell in with a circle of independent filmmakers and made several short films of his own.He received even more royalty income from his book “Independent Filmmaking” (1972), which became a niche but durable success, giving him enough of a financial cushion to explore yet another abiding interest: stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D technology.Mr. Lipton had fallen for it as a boy in early 1950s Brooklyn when the first wave of 3-D films arrived in theaters. He saw them all: “House of Wax,” “Bwana Devil,” “The Maze.” And while the craze passed — the technology was crude, the projectors were hard to synchronize, the cheap eyeglasses that had to be worn to see images in 3-D were clunky — his belief that 3-D was the future of film did not, and in California he began tinkering with ideas to make that belief a reality.“‘Puff’ gave me a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2021 interview with Moving Images, a YouTube channel. “I didn’t have to get a job. I spent years in my little lab in Point Richmond developing my stereoscopic inventions.”Mr. Lipton accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D technology, among them a screen that switches rapidly between left- and right-eye images, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and close in sync with the screen.He developed that technology, which he called CrystalEyes, in the early 1980s. It soon found applications far beyond the movie theater: Versions were used by the military for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling, and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.CrystalEyes equipment developed by Mr. Lipton. He had some 70 patents related to 3-D technology.CrystalEyes and other advances devised by Mr. Lipton seeded the emergence of a new generation of stereoscopic filmmaking, used in 3-D versions of movies like “Avatar,” “Chicken Little” and “Coraline.” Today, some 30,000 movie screens across the United States use 3-D techniques that evolved from his innovations.Mr. Lipton “changed the paradigm of the audience’s experience in cinema culture entirely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3-D animation at Arizona State University, said in an email.Leonard Lipschitz was born on May 18, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, owned a soda shop and died when Leonard was 12. His mother, Carrie (Hibel), a teletype operator, later changed their surname to Lipton.His mother inspired his love for film by taking him to some of Brooklyn’s many grand old movie palaces, like the Ambassador and the Paramount, while his father inspired his love for filmmaking by bringing home a toy film projector. Leonard soon assembled his own, using aluminum foil, a toilet-paper roll and a magnifying glass.He entered Cornell intending to study electrical engineering but quickly switched to physics, where he felt more freedom to experiment.After graduating in 1962, he got a job at Time magazine in New York, then became an editor at Popular Photography. After work he would head to a small theater in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, where he and some friends presented the latest movies to emerge from the city’s underground film scene.He did much the same in California, though without the need for a day job. He wrote a weekly film column for The Berkeley Barb, an alternative newspaper, and made several short documentaries shot on 16 mm film, including “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” about the clashes surrounding People’s Park in Berkeley, and “Children of the Golden West,” a rambling, touching portrait of his countercultural friends.In addition to “Independent Filmmaking,” Mr. Lipton wrote several other books, among them “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era,” an 800-page opus on the history of movie making.Along with his wife, he is survived by his children, Noah, Jonah and Anna. He lived in Los Angeles and died in a hospital there.Mr. Lipton had an idealistic certainty about the coming dominance of 3-D films, but he was also critical of the way Hollywood had limited its use to cartoons and action movies.“I had hoped that stereoscopic cinema would be about actors and acting and involve people in stories about the human condition, but that’s not what happened,” he told Moving Images. “What happened is, it’s a cinema of spectacle.”Still, he held out hope for something different around the corner.“As soon as someone has success, financial success, a stereoscopic documentary or a stereoscopic buddy comedy, then the studios will copy it,” he said. More

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      Douglas Trumbull, Visual Effects Wizard, Dies at 79

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      His technical savvy was on display in films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Star Trek: the Motion Picture,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Blade Runner.”Douglas Trumbull, an audacious visual effects wizard who created memorable moments in a series of blockbuster science-fiction films, including the hallucinogenic sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which an astronaut in a pod hurtles through space, died on Monday at a hospital in Albany, N.Y. He was 79.His wife, Julia Trumbull, said the cause was complications of mesothelioma.With colleagues, Mr. Trumbull was nominated for visual effects Oscars for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Blade Runner” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” but perhaps his most stunning work came in “2001” — his first big break in motion pictures.He was in his early 20s when Mr. Kubrick hired him as a $400-a-week artist, and his first job was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of HAL 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer that controls the Discovery One spacecraft at the center of “2001.”Then, using a process called slit-scan photography, he conceived the trippy five-minute scene in which the astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) soars at hyperspeed in his pod through a phantasmagorical cosmic passageway in the universe.Mr. Trumbull used a motorized camera that tracked to a slit in a rotatable rectangle of sheet metal, behind which he manipulated illuminated art — wedding his ambitious youthful vision to Mr. Kubrick’s.Keir Dulleau in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). Mr. Trumbull’s first job after being hired by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of the seemingly omniscient HAL 9000 computer.Warner Bros. via Museum of the Moving Image, New York“It wasn’t about the normal cinematic dynamics of close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots and reversals and conflicts and plot,” Mr. Trumbull told The New York Times in 2012. Mr. Kubrick, he said, “was trying to go into another world of first-person experience.”Over the next half-century, Mr. Trumbull became known as one of the film industry’s most innovative visual effects masters. He used old-school tools like mattes and miniatures to enhance science fiction films before digital effects animation became the industry standard.“He had this ability that I don’t think most people have — to see a final image in his mind and somehow figure out what was needed to get that image on film,” said Gene Kozicki, a visual effects historian and archivist. “Sometimes those images were crazy, like a diaphanous cloud traveling through space heading toward the Enterprise,” the spacecraft in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979).For Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium filled with a mixture of fresh and salt water to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of the extraterrestrial mother ship.For Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), Mr. Trumbull used, among many other things, models and images projected onto blimps and buildings to fashion the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles.When Philip K. Dick — whose book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was adapted into “Blade Runner” — saw a segment of Mr. Trumbull’s visual effects on a local newscast, he recognized them approvingly as “my own interior world,” he told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1982.An image from Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), for which Mr. Trumbull fashioned the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesFor “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” Mr. Trumbull oversaw the docking of the shuttle with the Enterprise and Spock’s spacewalk, a wild excursion (partly through a “plasma energy conduit”) that has obvious visual links to “2001.”“I thought it would be fun to just get kind of abstract and make it a fantasy dream sequence in a way, not literal,” he told TrekMovie.com in 2019.In 2012, Mr. Trumbull received the George Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions to the film industry and the Georges Méliès Award from the Visual Effects Society.Douglas Hunt Trumbull was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942. His mother, Marcia (Hunt) Trumbull, was an artist; his father, Don, worked in visual and special effects, most notably on “The Wizard of Oz,” but had gone to work as an engineer in the aircraft industry by the time Douglas was born.His father “never mentioned much about ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ except that he had something to do with the lion’s tail, the apple tree and rigging the flying monkeys,” Douglas Trumbull told VFXV, a magazine devoted to visual effects, in 2018.Growing up, Douglas was a fan of science fiction movies, became fascinated with photography and could build crystal radio sets. After high school he worked for an electrical contracting firm while studying technical illustration at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif.For “Close Encounters,” Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of a U.F.O. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesHe took a job with Graphic Films in Los Angeles, where his paintings of space modules and lunar surfaces appeared in documentaries for NASA and the Air Force. He was hired for “2001” after Mr. Kubrick noticed his work on a 15-minute film, “To the Moon and Beyond,” which was produced in Cinerama 360 and exhibited during the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.After working on “2001,” Mr. Trumbull created space scenes in “Candy” (1968), a comedy based on the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg; provided visual effects for “The Andromeda Strain” (1971), about a team of scientists trying to contain a deadly alien microorganism; and directed his first film, “Silent Running” (1972), in which botanical life has ended on Earth and plants are kept in a greenhouse on a space station by an ecologist played by Bruce Dern.Although Vincent Canby of The Times called “Silent Running” “simple-minded,” he praised its “beautifully eerie and majestic special effects — particularly its spaceship that looks like horizontal Eiffel Towers attached to gigantic oil tankers.”Mr. Trumbull resuscitated his father’s film career by hiring him for “Silent Running,” “Close Encounters” and “Star Trek.” The senior Trumbull also worked on George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” but his son was too busy for that one.Douglas Trumbull’s affinity for vivid visual effects led him to conceive ways to produce films with a format that more closely approached reality. He created Showscan, a cinematic process in which 70-millimeter film is projected at 60 frames per second (35-millimeter projection is usually at 24 frames per second).He shot part of “Brainstorm” (1983), his second directorial effort, with a Showscan camera. That film — about scientists who devise a system that can record and play a person’s thoughts — is better known for the death of one of its stars, Natalie Wood, during production. Mr. Trumbull fought to complete the film, but it could not be exhibited in Showscan because theaters would not invest in the necessary equipment until all studio films were shot in that format.But developing the Showscan camera earned Mr. Trumbull, Robert Auguste, Geoffrey Williamson and Edmund DiGiulio the Motion Picture Academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award in 1992.Mr. Trumbull in action in 2011, the year he returned to traditional filmmaking after many years of designing theme-park attractions and other projects and working for Imax.Joseph HeckThe experience led him to detour from Hollywood filmmaking and move to the Berkshires, where he worked on projects for the rest of his life. He developed simulator-based attractions like “Back to the Future: The Ride” for Universal Studios Florida, which opened in 1991, and, using Showscan, created “Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid,” a virtual reality experience featuring three films, at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, in 1993.In 1994, he signed a deal to bring his simulator-ride technology to Imax. He also served for a time as the company’s vice chairman.In addition to his wife, Mr. Trumbull is survived by his daughters, Amy Trumbull and Andromeda Stevens; his stepdaughter, Emily Irwin; his stepsons, John Hobart Culleton, Ethan Culleton and John Vidor; nine grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; his sister, Betsy Hardie; his stepsister, Katharine Trumbull Blank; and his half sisters, Kyle Trumbull-Clark and Mimi Erland. His marriage to Cherry Foster ended in divorce; his marriage to Ann Vidor ended with her death.Mr. Trumbull returned to traditional moviemaking when the director Terrence Malick, a friend, asked him to help on his film “The Tree of Life” (2011). Working as a consultant, Mr. Trumbull helped conjure the kaleidoscopic sequence that depicts the Big Bang and the creation of life on Earth, using chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, carbon dioxide, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics and high speed photography, he told cinematography.com in 2011.“It was a freewheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business,” he said. “We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.” More

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      How a Times Team Captured the Sound of a Harlem Gospel Choir

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      What does a socially distant gospel choir sound like? Here’s how Times journalists and technologists put users inside the sanctuary of a church in Harlem.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In March 2020, one of the earliest coronavirus superspreader events in the United States occurred when a church choir in Washington State met for a rehearsal. Of the 61 singers who attended, 53 developed symptoms of Covid-19. Soon after, congregations around the country held what would be their last in-house services of the year.Tariro Mzezewa, a New York Times reporter, talked to churches recently to learn how they had adapted. “My favorite part of going to church as a kid was the music and the sense of community,” she said. “I wanted to know how the pandemic changed that.”Some churches had a soloist sing from home during live-streamed services. Others created small pods of a few singers that performed from an empty sanctuary. Some had choir members spread out in the pews or the balcony.Churches are built for their acoustics, so when Tariro told our Narrative Projects team about these socially distant choirs, we wondered: What does that sound like? Three months later, we’ve created a special feature to give you a feel for that sensory experience.As a visual editor at the Times, I work on innovative journalism, joining with colleagues to leverage new technologies like augmented reality, photogrammetry, 3-D modelingand visualization and volumetric video (moving 3-D images of real people, like a hologram). One of the best parts of my job is the thrill I get from trying new things.For the past year, we have been experimenting with a technology called environmental photogrammetry, with which we can build photorealistic 3-D models of a room or a neighborhood.We wanted to transport our readers into a church to hear the new sound of these choirs. With the help of Bethel Gospel Assembly in Harlem, we built a 3-D model of its sanctuary and embedded 3-D audio in it, something we’ve never done before for the Times website.Times journalists and technologists spent two days at the church in April. They used lasers and sensors to measure the size of the room and the distance between all the objects in it. They also took more than 7,000 photographs, many of them using a drone inside the sanctuary (with the church’s blessing) to capture images of the upper reaches of the balcony and ceiling. That data was combined using photogrammetry software to produce the 3-D model in this interactive article.With 31 microphones, two mixing boards and a sea of cables, our team recorded a live rehearsal with a small group of singers, a band and Bethel’s leader, Bishop Carlton T. Brown. Using binaural audio, which replicates the acoustics of the human ear, we created a 3-D audio experience meant to mimic what it sounds like in that room.“You really get a sense of the energy and how important the live part of making music is,” said Jon Cohrs, a technical producer on The Times’s research and development team and an audio engineer. In the two days he spent at Bethel, Jon witnessed the camaraderie and connection among choir members. “It’s really special, and you can see how impactful it is for everybody involved.”The music you hear in the opening of the interactive feature is captured from two microphones in the back of the church, as if you were sitting in the pews hearing the voices reverberate through the cavernous space. You can move through the space in the 3-D experience, and the sound changes as you get closer to the stage and fly over the instruments.Working on this project over the past few months, I’ve spent many minutes a day listening to the ethereal music we recorded, often with my eyes closed, my mind floating somewhere between my home office in Brooklyn and that sanctuary in Harlem.Our reporting affirmed why so many churches went to great lengths to bring music to their communities during times of hardship. Again and again, pastors, congregants and choir members told us that church without music was never an option. Music is healing, they said, and it brings people together in a shared spiritual and cultural experience, even when we have to be physically apart.As part of her research, Tariro attended an Easter Sunday service at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, which is now allowing a small number of parishioners to attend in person. “There was a real sense of people sighing in relief, like, ‘We made it,’” she said. “A year ago they didn’t know if they’d make it.” More