RUN, PETER, RUN
CGI is killing children’s favourites and their youthful imaginations
All is not rosy in Mr. McGregor’s garden — and not only because in the big-screen remake of the Beatrix Potter classic, Peter Rabbit’s spade-wielding nemesis is bumped off in the opening scene. Starring the voice of James Corden as our hero, the film has been widely criticized for turning docile little Peter into a knowit-all delinquent who wrecks other people’s houses, dabbles in explosives and pelts an allergy sufferer with potentially lethal blackberries.
But perhaps an even greater crime for those who grew up on the original books is the fact that its mix of live action and CGI puts it, in visual terms, a few cabbage patches away from the world created by the hand of Beatrix Potter.
The makers have gone to such great lengths to make Peter and his furry friends look as lifelike as possible, they have taken away their charm.
In other words, Peter Rabbit is just the latest in a long list of beautifully illustrated and muchloved children’s stories gobbled up and spat out by “computer generated imagery,” to unpack the common film industry acronym.
Poor Peter is merely one member of a club of children’s characters ruined by 21st century technology, rendered flat, characterless and in some instances virtually indistinguishable by generic CGI remakes.
It’s only fair to point out that there have been some excellent CGI children’s films, notably from Disney’s Pixar stable.
Yet it’s also worth asking whether the relentless bombardment of digital imagery in children’s entertainment is having a critical impact on children’s imaginations. Children feed off the way artists and storytellers re-create the world for them. It’s why we love Winnie the Pooh, immortalized in our minds by E.H. Shepard’s scratchy little drawings (and sensitively updated for Disney’s 1977 traditional animation feature film).
CGI invariably makes no such invitation. In its relentless pursuit of hyper reality, it often produces something that is neither real nor imagined but miserably in-between. Paradoxically, the more CGI attempts to emulate reality, the less lifelike and human it becomes. It creates simulated, two-dimensional surfaces that appear curiously depthless because they lack the texture of a paintbrush, the grain of a charcoal nib or the inner life of an individual hand-drawn frame. In the case of its worst offenders — I’m thinking of Canadian series, Paw Patrol, to which my four-year-old was once addicted until she was forced to go cold turkey — it’s the visual equivalent of junk food, often compounding the poor quality of the animation with stupefying rapid editing, leaving their imagination with no room to breathe.
When the great Walt Disney was asked why he went to the trouble of painting five shades of pink in a single bubble, he said: “If it wasn’t there (you’d) notice that it was different.”
Consider The Little Mermaid, the last Disney film, released in 1989, to use traditional techniques. It has about a million hand-drawn bubbles. Each one is a thing of beauty.