Medienfundstück “Donald” – Eine Männerzeitschrift mit Comics

(Update: Die Zeit kann einen manchmal auf merkwürdige Weise einholen. Als ich dieses Magazin vor sechs Wochen in den Niederlanden entdeckte, kannte es die deutsche Öffentlichkeit zum großen Teil noch nicht. Ein Freund wies mich nach diesem Blogpost darauf hin, dass eine erste Ausgabe inzwischen in Deutschland erschienen ist. So zeigt sich, was es bedeuten kann, mit dem Bloggen zu lange zu warten. Insofern ist die Frage am Ende dieses Postings nicht hinfällig, sondern zutiefst aktuell geworden.)

Wenn ich im Ausland bin, verbringe ich gerne ein wenig Zeit damit, die örtlichen Zeitschriftenregale durchzuschauen und zu entdecken, welche ungewöhnlichen Zeitschriften andere Länder eventuell zu bieten haben. Und tatsächlich: manchmal ist ein echtes Fundstück dabei, zum Beispiel die Zeitschrift “Donald” aus den Niederlanden.

Hier ein Bild davon, wie skeptisch ich zunächst war, als ich zum ersten Mal dieses “Männermagazin für große Jungs” (Untertitel) in die Hand nahm.

skeptischer Blick

Denn “Donald” ist tatsächlich eine sehr merkwürdige Mischung – ein Spinoff von “Donald Duck”, dem holländischen Äquivalent des deutschen “Micky Maus Magazins”. Es verbindet die üblichen Disney-Comicgeschichten, die ja in Europa einen wesentlich höheren Beliebtheitsgrad haben als in ihrem “Geburtsland” USA, mit den Themen einer zahmen Männerzeitschrift: Frauen (ohne Erotik), Gadgets, Mode, Interviews, Fotostrecken.

Da Comics (“Strips”) in den Benelux-Ländern immer schon auch bei Erwachsenen beliebt waren und “Donald Duck” in den Niederlanden einen Kultstatus sondergleichen besitzt, scheint die Kombination aufzugehen. Das Hochglanzheft erscheint viermal jährlich, jedes Mal mit einem anderen Leitthema, um das sich alle Artikel drehen. Das aktuelle Heft hatte “Holland” zum Thema und untersuchte nationale Identität und niederländische Erfolgsgeschichten – und das ziemlich gründlich und unterhaltsam. Der Schreibstil ist relativ salopp und das Budget des Hefts scheint nicht gigantisch zu sein, aber das Ergebnis macht Spaß – auch wenn es etwas gewöhnungsbedürftig ist, dass jede Geschichte an irgendeiner Stelle einen kleinen Donald-Dreh bekommt. So führt etwa “Donald” einige Interviews und alle Prominenten werden nach ihrer Donald-Historie gefragt.

Wer die Zielgruppe wirklich ist, ist mir nicht ganz klar geworden. Vorstellen könnte ich mir, dass sowohl “kindgebliebene” Erwachsene mit einem Hang zu Disney (ähem, wie ich) als auch Teenager, denen das reine Comicheft “Donald Duck” nicht mehr cool genug ist, das Blatt kaufen. Vermutlich ist die letztere Gruppe größer, was auch den etwas flapsigen Stil und den Untertitel des Hefts (“für große Jungs”) erklären dürfte. Die Selbstbeschreibung auf der Website, “Donald ist ein Hochglanzmagazin für Männer, randvoll mit Comics, Interviews und Reportagen” spricht hingegen deutlicher die erste Gruppe an.

Heft

In jedem Fall ist die Gesamtqualität des Heftes deutlich höher und eleganter als beispielsweise die des 1998 eingestellten deutschen “große Jungs”-Comicmagazins Limit, das ich damals eine Weile gelesen habe.

Was meinen die Leser dieses Blogposts? Würde ein Konzept wie “Donald” auch in Deutschland funktionieren?

Stuff I learned this week – #10/11

Rango – and new ways of directing animated films

A behind the scenes featurette for Gore Verbinskis upcoming animated movie Rango has been floating around the web for over six weeks now.

Verbinski is the fourth live action director who, in recent times, tried his hand at directing an animated feature – if you leave out folks like Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron who worked with Perfomance Capturing. Like his three predecessors, George Miller (Happy Feet), Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr Fox) and Zack Snyder (The Legend of the Guardians), who also weren’t raised in an animation environment, Verbinski brought an interesting new directing style to the table.

As the featurette shows, he actually gathered the actors together on a small sound stage and let them act out the movie with a few basic props. This, apparently, made it easier both for the actors, because they could interact with each other (while usually vocal recordings are done with one actor at a time alone in a booth), and for Verbinski himself, who could actually direct a cast rather than keep the complete puzzle of recordings in his head and stitch it together afterwards.

The featurette also mentions that the material created during the shoot served as a reference for the animators. The question that arises in this context is, how much of that is true. Pierre Coffin, one of the directors of Despicable Me recently debunked the featurette myth that video footage from actors recording voices in a booth is important for the animators’ work.

Live action reference footage has been used in animation since the early Disney days (for some great insights into the process, watch the bonus material on the latest DVD edition of Pinocchio), but even Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, in their Disney Animation Bible “The Illusion of Life”, explain that

Animators always had the feeling they were nailed to the floor when their whole sequences were shot ahead of time in live action. Everyone’s imagination as to how a scene might be staged was limited by the placement of the camera (…).(p. 331)

At the beginning of the chapter on live action footage they note that

Live action could dominate the animator, or it could teach him. It could stifle imagination, or inspire great new ideas. It all depended on how the live action was conceived and shot and used.(p. 319)

I had the rare pleasure of seeing storyboard artist Christian De Vita give his talk on the development process of Fantastic Mr Fox at eDIT Frankfurt last year. He explained that the “direction” of the film consisted mostly of Wes Anderson, De Vita (who would sketch out Anderson’s ideas) and a film editor holed up in a hotel room in Paris. Anderson would act out every character in every scene and the editor would stitch the footage together in order to create reference footage for the animation studio in Britain, who had to animate from that footage and wasn’t always too happy about it.

In a way, this did create a similar situation to the one that Verbinski used on Rango – with the difference that all actions were staged and performed by one person, the director.

What all of this shows is, once again, how the field of feature animation has changed in its second coming of the last decade. Live action actors have pretty much replaced trained voice actors for principal roles. The Pixar process has put a lot more emphasis on animation as a director’s medium – whereas in the Golden Age of Disney and Warners, the industry stars were basically the animators and animation supervisors (e. g. the Nine Old Men). And now live action directors bring approaches from their background into the game that diminish the recognition of animators as the true artists behind animated films even further. On top of all this, there is the ongoing hybridisation of live action and animation through visual effects and performance capturing.

It will be interesting to see what the animation industry will make of this and if there will at some point be an oversaturation of live action elements in animation that will result in a return to more pre-Disney, i.e. liberated, animation techniques in the future – or if the two approaches will just continue to co-exist like they do now.

Stuff I learned this week – #48/10

Stuff I Learned this Week – #47/10

Mind over Meta!

Rapunzel – Neu Verföhnt

Es gibt einige Momente in Rapunzel, in denen niemand spricht. In diesen Momenten darf man noch einmal erleben, was Animationsfilm bedeuten kann: Charme und Emotionen übertragen, nur durch die Kraft von bewegten Bildern und nachempfundenen Gesten. Kurze Zeit später fangen dann alle wieder an zu reden und zu singen und der Zauber ist vorbei. Das liegt nicht einmal daran, dass Alexandra Neldel und Moritz Bleibtreu Sache als deutsche Synchronsprecher von Rapunzel und ihrem love interest Flynn Rider irgendwie schlecht machen würden, im Gegenteil. Es fällt einfach nur schwer, hinter all den kitschigen Phrasen irgendetwas anderes als Klischees zu entdecken. Zumal nachdem Filme wie Shrek und Verwünscht diese Klischees schon vor Jahren so treffend entlarvt haben.

Weiterlesen – meine erste Kritik für NEGATIV

Stuff I learned this week – #45/10

Tagline: This time, it’s bilingual!

Stuff I learned this week – #44/10

This is the attempt to install a new weekly link feature in this blog, similar to the way Worte zum Wochenende used to be.

Spiel’s noch einmal – Toy Story 3

USA 2010. Regie: Lee Unkrich. Buch: Michael Arndt, nach einer Geschichte von John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton und Lee Unkrich. Musik: Randy Newman. Produktion: Darla K. Anderson, John Lasseter.
Sprecher: Tom Hanks (Woody, deutsch: Michael Herbig), Tim Allen (Buzz, deutsch: Walter von Hauff), Joan Cusack (Jessie), Rex (Wallace Shawn, deutsch: Rick Kavanian), Michael Keaton (Ken, deutsch: Christian Tramitz), Ned Beatty (Lotso)
Länge: 103 min.
Verleih: Walt Disney Pictures.
Kinostart: 29.7.2010

Gibt es ein Rezept für gute Fortsetzungen, für gute und erfolgreiche Fortsetzungen gar? Noch dazu, wenn der Urschlamm, auf dem man aufbaut, ein echter “game changer” von einem Film ist, der mehr oder weniger im Alleingang eine ganze Industrie auf den Kopf gestellt hat? Pixar hat es mit TOY STORY 2 einmal vorgemacht, und mit TOY STORY 3 machen sie es gerade ein weiteres Mal. Das Geheimnis: Beliebte Charaktere und Grundstil beibehalten, aber ansonsten eine wirklich neue Geschichte erzählen, die nicht nur höher-schneller-weiter geht als beim letzten Mal, sondern uns wirklich etwas Neues über unsere liebgewonnenen Freunde erfahren lässt.

Manchmal kann es dafür auch vonnöten sein, mal ordentlich in der Zeit zu springen. Wenn man nicht alternde Protagonisten hat, geht das umso besser: Die Welt dreht sich weiter (elf Jahre seit dem letzten Abenteuer), aber die Helden bleiben gleich, schon hat man ganz organisch den ersten Konflikt hergestellt, auf den man aufbauen kann. In TOY STORY 3 ist es Andy, ehemals so spielbegeisterter Eigentümer von Woody, Buzz, Jessie, Rex und Co, der quasi über Nacht erwachsen geworden scheint und kurz davor ist, aufs College zu gehen. Ausgemustert finden sich die Plastikfreunde in einem Kindergarten wieder, der sie zwar auf den ersten Blick wieder ihrem Lebenszweck zuführt – jemand spielt mit ihnen – sich auf den zweiten aber als ein albtraumhaftes Gefängnis entpuppt, in dessen schwarzweißer Welt der zweigesichtige Plüschbär Lotso und sein Gehilfe Ken (“Ich bin kein Mädchenspielzeug!”) die Fäden in der Hand halten.

Was folgt ist, wie schon in den ersten beiden Teilen, eine emotionale Reise, clever gefiltert durch ein wohl kuratiertes Arsenal an Actionszenen, Gags und originellen Einfällen. In TOY STORY war es Buzz, der eine Identitätskrise durchmachte, in TOY STORY 2 folgte ihm Woody, diesmal ist es die ganze Gang, die sich im Grunde mit Beruf und Berufung in einer Welt auseinandersetzen muss, die sich unaufhaltsam weiterdreht. Die Tatsache, dass sich alles schlechter an einer einzelnen Figur festmachen lässt, gleicht der Film durch mehr Aktion aus, channelt unter anderem sehr effektiv diverse Heistfilme und Psychothriller für gewohnt genialen Popcornspaß, der eigentlich nur durch ein etwas schal wirkendes Bösewichtspsychogramm zeitweise getrübt wird. Zum Ausgleich gibt es beispielsweise ein alterndes Fisher-Price-Telefon als Fluchthelfer und – auch das sollte erwähnt sein – 3D-Inszenierung auf höchstem Niveau.

Als Sahnehäubchen drehen die Pixaristen zum Ende des Films den Spiegel in die Richtung des Teils des Publikums, das alt genug ist, um schon den ersten TOY STORY-Film (vor immerhin 15 Jahren!) im Kino gesehen zu haben. Denn letztendlich ist TOY STORY 3 nicht nur ein Film über die wahre Bestimmung von Spielzeug, sondern auch über das Kind in jedem von uns. Ein wenig Sentimentalität ist da schon erlaubt, vor allem wenn sie so makellos umgesetzt wurde.

erschien zuerst bei Screenshot online

“We’re the intermediary” – An Interview with Craig Hanna from Thinkwell Design

For my article about movie tie-in theme park attractions, I interviewed Craig Hanna in June 2009. Craig Hanna is Chief Creative Officer of Thinkwell Design, one of the leading design companies in the amusement park world, who have designed and built attractions all over the globe – also in Germany. The interview was done via e-mail and has been slightly edited.

Real Virtuality: How does Thinkwell go about designing a new movie tie-in attraction?

Craig Hanna: We start by meeting with the owner of the intellectual property to understand what the essence of their IP is. What’s the heart and soul of that movie or animation or product. Often, the owner of the intellectual property isn’t the developer of the project. The developer often licenses the intellectual property from a studio. We then serve as an intermediary between the owner/operator and the IP holder. We have to create an experience that meets the business, financial, schedule and operational goals while ensuring the creative and production on the project remains true to the original IP.

How do you decide what kind of ride to design or is there often a wish from the client?

Sometimes the client knows what kind of attraction they want, but typically we start with the IP and decide what will be most appropriate to go with the IP and if the project is going into an existing park, we’ll look at the overall mix of attractions to ensure what we’re creating is complimentary to the other offerings. Obviously, making sure the attraction type fits perfectly with the IP is key. To understand our process, the best way to learn it is to to go to our website.

What makes a good (movie) attraction (whether it is a coaster, ride, show, etc.)?

When considering an IP for an attraction there must always be an inherent attraction or ride already residing within the IP. “Serious” films without action or dramatic stories with lots of dialogue don’t work very well for attractions. Animated films, action films, big sci-fi films and films with great chase, stunt or fight sequences obviously work great. Of course, the IP needs to be popular and known with the general public, otherwise, why bother?

Is Disney’s Imagineering still the big role model?

Disney is always going to be the role model, but Universal is as well. Universal have done more movie-based attractions in the last two decades than Disney has, bringing blockbuster films to life. When the Harry Potter land and attractions open at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando, it will be the culmination of all the work in creating IP attractions that has come before it.

How important is good Theming to a working theme park, especially when you get to build a whole park from scratch as in Korea? How do you achieve it?

Theming is expensive. So, you start with looking at the overall financial considerations for the park. How much can the client spend to build the park? That gives you a general rule of thumb in terms of overall quality. Most parks add theming for theming’s sake. There’s little correlation between this land and that, other than to provide some character and give visitors a chance to escape from the normal world. When we develop theme parks we look at theming as part of the storytelling of the park, what we call Environmental Storytelling. It is all part of a unique process we developed called Content Masterplanning. Just as an architect will develop a land-use plan and an overall park masterplan, we masterplan the content of the park. Every aspect of the park – every land, building, attraction, store and restaurant-must support and work synergistically with that story. Every element, visual and audio cue the guest experiences, sees, hears, touches or even tastes, must reinforce thet story. Anything else is extraneous and often contradictory to the message and must be discarded in design phases.

How important is it that an attraction ties in seamlessly with the existing intellectual property (i.e. shooting footage of the original actors, music etc.)?

Ideally, an IP-based attraction would incorporate all elements from the original film, but that’s often not the case. Typically, an IP is licensed long after the film is produced, because most clients don’t want to take a chance licensing something before it’s popularity is proven. Given that, being able to work with the original actors is a lot harder. A new deal must be made, oftentimes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more!). Most studios don’t include attraction rights and waivers in their contracts with producers and actors, so each IP must be vetted by legal and the appropriate deals made.

How does a ride keep up its appeal? When does it get obsolete?

A good attraction is timeless, often outliving the appeal of the original intellectual property. Take “Waterworld” at Universal Studios Hollywood and Japan, for example. That film was considered a “bomb” by Hollywood standards, yet the stunt show is considered one of the top-rated attractions at both parks. The Men in Black movies have been out of theatres for nearly a decade, yet the ride at Universal Studios Florida is still one of the most popular.

Could you explain, how the proceedings were when you were contracted to do the “Ice Age Adventure” in Germany? How did you develop the property, the ride, how did you expand the movie into the ride?

We were contacted by Star Parks because of our expertise in creating IP-based attractions. They had to remove the Warner Bros. intellectual properties because their purchase of the park didn’t include the WB IP. Star Parks had to remove the Looney Tunes attraction. We brokered the relationship between 20th Century Fox and Star Parks to bring Ice Age to the park. Star Parks was worried about the cost of licensing a blockbuster IP, but we convinced them it wouldn’t cost as much as they feared. The project was less than nine months from start to finish, which is about a third of the amount of time it would typically take to complete such an attraction. Fortunately, we kept the existing ride system and reworked much of the existing scenery from the old ride to work with the new IP.

We never want to simply recreate the original IP. That becomes too much of what you’ve already seen and offers no new surprises. We create what we like to call a “1.5 sequel”. Not really a sequel (we leave that to the Hollywood movie writers!), but something based on what you know and love from the original blockbuster movie, but then goes beyond it. That’s what we did with „Ice Age Adventure“. Fortunately, unbeknownst to us, our storyline was very similar to what Blue Sky Studios was developing for the sequel, Ice Age 2. We worked closely with Fox and Blue Sky to develop the story, got their approvals quickly and went to work completing the design and fabrication to make opening day for the new season as Movie Park Germany.

Blue Sky was very helpful. They provided their 3D computer models of the characters to us to allow us to do CNC carvings for the figures rather than traditional hand sculpting, which saved weeks, if not months, in production. I flew to New York and met with the producers and director of the films, got to meet the animators and understand the essence of the IP. Later, our designers worked with their animators to pose the characters from the film for our ride. It was a great process. In the beginning, to save time, we sent a team to Movie Park, where we worked on-site in temporary offices they provided for us. We quickly developed the initial concept and full presentation to executive management, complete with layout, storyboards, scene descriptions and script in one week. We nearly killed ourselves on that project! The night before opening, the last shipment of animatronics arrived from the United States and we all were in waders walking through the filled trough carrying animated figures through the ride to get them loaded in, installed and wired in time for the park’s opening the next day!

Was working in Germany different from working anywhere else?

Working in Germany was excellent. The people at the park in operations and maintenance were very helpful. The weather was extremely cold, which isn’t very familiar to a group of people from Los Angeles, but we work all over the world and are used to all kinds of cultures and climates.

Any other challenges you ran into during that period?

The cost to license the soundtrack from Ice Age was prohibitive, so we hired a composer from Cirque du Soleil and created our own that was reminiscent of the movie’s theme, but was actually a wholly-new piece.

We also had to hire German voice actors to do the voices of the characters for the ride. The ones that did the voiceovers for the movie in German were too expensive, so we hired other sound-alike voices. It ended up those actors were famous German comedians that were more popular than the people who did the voices from the movie originally (NB: The comedian who voices Sid the Sloth in the German version, Otto Waalkes, is something of a national institution in Germany, probably in the way the Pythons are in Britain, the other voices aren’t, A.G.)!

When the ride first opened we had a preshow scene where the cave paintings from the movie came to life and told the backstory of each character of the ride, just in case you weren’t familiar with the Ice Age movies. Not long after opening, Movie Park executives decided to change that scene to something with a live narrative. I miss those original “magical petroglyphs” because it was a special moment that wordlessly explained the entire backstory of the film. We spent a lot of time on original animation to do it and the folks at Blue Sky Studios really liked what we had done to expand the story.

This is one part of a four-part package on film tie-in attractions in theme parks. The other three are a feature article, a post on how the article came about, and an interview with Barry Upson (formerly Universal Studios).