Creating a monster

This seems to be the time of the year for declarations that movies will never be the same again. Last year at this time it was a low, low-budget horror film that was going to change the way cinema was made and watched: The Blair Witch Project (see below).

This year Hollywood and its global PR network is a bit more true to form, with the "revolutionary" hype boosting a high, high-budget movie, one that cost approximately 5,000 times as much money to make as Blair Witch: Disney, spent something approaching $200 million on Dinosaur, much of it to make us believe prehistoric creatures were alive on our screens.

Such is the high quality of the result that, according to the Disney spokeswoman who introduced a recent screening, film critics have been coming out of the film asking her if she was sure that Dinosaur was really animation.

That seems to be an extraordinarily stupid question, even from journalists, since the alternative is that Disney pulled a real-life Jurassic Park trick and brought hundreds of dinosaurs back to life for the purposes of making a cute movie. Yes, critics, it's animation all right. As for its persuasive qualities, as someone once said in relation to Titanic: "If they're going to spend $200 million on a movie I kind of expect the special effects to be pretty realistic."

What all that money buys is a lot of time and energy expended by talented and careful people, and a lot of computer power to allow them to do their work. Dinosaur, Disney tells us, required 3.2 million hours of computer processing time. The film takes up no fewer than 45 terabytes of disk space.

Terabytes? That sounds like something a tyrannosaurus rex might do to you; in fact, a terabyte is a million megabites. That means all the hard drives in all the PCs in all the schools in Ireland all put together couldn't begin to hold this monster.

What it also means is that when the film's cute little lemurs get caught in a breeze, every hair on their furry little bodies is digitally controlled to blow in that breeze: it's hyper-real computer-generated imagery (CGI), taken perhaps to the point of absurdity.

Lemurs? Yes, Disney goes to the trouble to create hyper-real effects on creatures that didn't even exist 65 million years ago. Everyone knows that humans didn't inhabit the world at the same time as dinosaurs; everyone doesn't know that about lemurs, but it's equally wrong scientifically.

It's easy to see what Disney were trying to do. After all, 65 million years ago dinosaurs had a kind of unhappy ending, while mammals went on to inherit the earth. The first Dinosaur scripts were going to give us the dinosaur extinction but leave the mammals to carry on. Trouble is, the real mammals then were small, rodent-like things. No problem: Disney said to heck with the textbooks and made the mammals cute and human-like, primates.

Even then, as production went on, the executives decided the extinction of the dinosaurs was too much of a downer, so Disney gave the dinosaurs a temporary reprieve - the meteor storm turns out to be just a passing shower - but left the lemurs in anyway: they're kind of pointless now, except that they teach the dinosaurs the sort of co-operative mammalian behaviour that might really have saved them if only they'd caught on earlier . . .

In the end, Dinosaur is spectacular, a major hit and a genuine technological landmark - seamlessly placing its CGI critters in real-world landscapes - but you'd imagine that with the silly licence it takes with prehistory and the weaknesses of its script, it won't go down as a movie classic.

And it seems unlikely that, as some people have suggested, in 10 years' time all movies will be made this way and both human actors and traditional animation will be obsolete. For one thing, these dinosaurs are too real, and real dinosaurs aren't terribly expressive: the animals in Jungle Book - or, indeed, Tarzan - don't look real at all, but they're funny and involving as characters anyway.

That's not to say that there aren't interesting applications to CGI. Just this month comes a story from Britain about how CGI will be used in courtroom reconstructions of accidents. Using information gathered from eyewitnesses and forensic study of the scene and the outcome of an accident, animators will be able to construct a credible computer-animated sequence showing the most likely story of how a given accident took place.

And the further possibilities of the technology are illustrated in a new film, Cyberworld, the first 3D animated film, produced for screening on the giant IMAX screen. Unfortunately for Irish viewers, the Dublin IMAX has closed down, just as the range of material being produced for the format seems to be likely to increase, and the images are ready to burst out of the screen at viewers. Cyberworld is showing in 25 North American cinemas and will open in 75 more cinemas around the world in the next few months.

It's a long way from the stop-action animation of King Kong and the laughable miniature cities of the Sixties Japanese monster movies.

But so far, in general the most appealing movies continue to be the ones where human beings are filmed doing human-being things, even if the settings are sometimes dressed up by computers, a la Titanic. The movie that's being hyped all over the teen-oriented television programmes this season is Road Trip, an old-fashioned, low-tech sexy road comedy featuring plenty of good-looking young people, in the American Pie mould.

But there's an unfortunate development for midterm matinee-goers here. While the British Board of Film Classification reckons Road Trip is a 15, meaning mid-teens can go along next week, the Irish censor disagrees, classifying Road Trip as an 18 cert. (The US rating, by the way, was R, essentially a 17 cert.) So as long as cinemas are enforcing the rules, that's another movie and its audience separated from each other. Ah well, there's always The Little Vampire.