Mike King

Madagascar and Episode III

May 29, 2005 on 9:17 pm | In Movies and TV | Comments Off

Took the family to see Madagascar yesterday. The film looks very nice, and the complexity of the CG was quite impressive. But the story left me flat. Some nice gags in there, but ultimately it felt very by the numbers and the characters did not engage me at all. A frenzied, disjointed movie. The penguins are the best thing about the whole thing.

One of the thing that’s beginning to annoy me, particularly in animated films, is the way exposition and characterization is handled. There’s usually a scene or two where a character is summed up. I.E. Marty wants to go to the wild, or Alex is self-involved. And then that’s it. That’s the character. I’m not saying an animated character needs a whole lot of depth. But a one-note character may be interesting for a short while, but I’m going to need something more if I’m going to watch them for an hour and a half. The character needs to feel more real.

The exposition problem to me feels like show-don’t-tell problem. They think they’re showing, but they’re really telling. They’re showing us some action that doesn’t leave much room for the audience to fill in the blanks and make things feel richer than they really are. Dialog goes to excruciating lengths to make sure nobody misunderstands. So the pacing and rhythm feel slow, since we get it right away, but the scenes still play everything out and there are no little surprises along the way.

Hmm. Same goes for Episode III. If the only surprises are the little details and the characters act pretty much one-dimensional, it makes for a very bland movie. All the visual spectacle in the world, as cool as it may look, doesn’t help if the characters aren’t engaging. It’s the same problem I think that Matrix Revolutions suffered from.