バイオハザード ダムネーション / Biohazard: Damnation / Resident Evil: Damnation

Not much need to write a whole lot about Damnation, Capcom and Sony Pictures’ second computer-generated animation in the Resident Evil franchise. I’ll say this: it was more fun than Degeneration. At least it was full of action and didn’t drag on, which despite not having a bad script that film did. It was thin on plot and high on rocket launchers making tyrants explode, and already puts it above Degeneration in terms of action, but it had a terrible script and very unlikeable characters, so it ended up pretty dreadful and too often unintentionally hilarious.

Leon – here horrible characterized as a highly irritating wise-cracker who fits in quips before taking action – is dropped into Russia to investigate biological weapons. He finds them, of course, and some Russian mercenaries (or similar) who he befriends. Meanwhile, Ada Wong is doing her usual infiltration business to find out who sanctioned getting in dangerous viruses. Most of the film is just Leon and co fighting their way from one place to another.

It still looks clunky. Despite some beautiful renderings of a church – internal and external – and clear effort put into making it look good, it moves in an awkward motion-captured way, the lip-synch is all still iffy and the zombies look more comical than anything else. Only the tyrants look good, huge and lumbering – though the lickers aren’t bad.

Ultimately, the film is basically a tie-in to Resident Evil 6, and if you’re not interested in that – as I’m not – then it’s unlikely to have much for you. 

Hotel Transylvania

Despite the impression that this is just one in a long line of forgettable CG comedy films, it was actually one of the best little Hallowe’en treats in a while. Sony is still getting on its feet as an Animation department, with The Smurfs not exactly well-received and Arthur Christmas (as well as The Pirates!) probably more closely associated with Aardman than with Sony, but this was a big step in the right direction. They took the wise decision of getting in someone with TV animation pedigree – Genndy Tartakovsky of Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack fame – and though his pedigree with CG feature-length films isn’t exactly glowing (The Clone Wars film), this is more in-keeping with the tone of his prior work.

And it was good. There were a few misfires – bad fart jokes, a rather underdeveloped scene where the main characters end up in a monster festival and a male romantic lead who it took a very long time for me to find likeable, but that’s far outweighed by what the film got right.

Icons of horror have long been prominent in comedic animation. From Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies through Count Duckula and Doctor Zitbag’s Transylvanian Petshop to last week’s Frankenweenie, the icons of gothic literature and Hammer Horror films are the right mixture of strong characterisation and silliness and basically write their own stories. And here’s one that’s a classic storyline but neatly 21^st-century.

In the world of Hotel Transylvania, the monsters are terrified of the humans. Angry mobs and pitchforks have taken their toll, and Dracula himself lost someone very close to him. Retreating to an extremely well-hidden hotel, he raises his little daughter Mavis and keeps her so close she’s stifled. Though he promises her freedom on her 118^th birthday, he keeps tight control even then, going so far as to have his zombie minions pretend to be pitchfork-wielding humans in a nearby village to give her the impression that they’re all out to kill monsters. However, when a happy-go-lucky young human called Jonathan finds his way to the hotel during a big birthday get-together, Dracula finds himself struggling to keep control.

Monsters bring with them lots of obvious humour – The Invisible Man is sensitive about things people can’t see, the Wolfman has doggy habits and a whole brood of uncontrollable welps, and Frankenstein’s monster for whatever reason has a very Jewish bride. Dracula here is a very entertaining character, immense power hidden behind a very daft, insecure and controlling personality, non-violent and only vaguely threatening and very likeable, which is not only a credit to his design and writing but to Adam Sandler’s performance. His daughter Mavis, voiced by Selena Gomez (who I’m not sure I’ve seen in any of her Disney-related things or heard singing in any conscious way), was adorable in design, in character and in bat form, and it was cute that Sandler’s wife and daughter voiced the family in flashbacks.

The film’s mixture of humour and sentiment is a bit oddly-paced and free-wheeling, but that keeps things rolling along at an even keel and is in the spirit of the film’s message that controlling too much is bad and sometimes you should just enjoy yourself going with the flow. There were some random things, but most of them were also funny, like Dracula randomly throwing out a rap involving just about every possible rhyme for ‘Zing’, including ‘The Lion King’. That was one of the pop culture references thrown in there that might date the film very quickly, as well as a dig at Twilight – and I’m sure more than one viewer will make the comment that this was ‘still a better love story than Twilight’, which was certainly true.

Unlikely to go down in history as epoch-changing or essential viewing, this was still a very good example of a fun, family-friendly CG film with a few images that ought to endure. 

Arthur Christmas

With Chicken Run, Aardman unexpectedly brought their claymation style to a much wider audience. They had been charming British audiences for years, of course, from the Creature Comforts shorts to their celebrated Wallace and Gromit films. Despite my initial fears, this film also does not signal the end of their relationship with the medium – the claymation The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists comes out within a few weeks. So what is Arthur Christmas? An experiment? A side-project? A Sony animation with the Aardman name added to give it a sense of familiar, homespun eccentricity?

Ultimately, it looks like Aardman writing and humour packaged up by Sony’s slick CG animation put through the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs character design filter. A union that works well, impressive but remaining silly-looking and with some good humour – though perhaps some more cuteness in the design side would have helped.

The story is a slightly cheeky take on Christmas traditions. Santa isn’t a being who lives forever – ‘Santa’ is more a title, handed down from father to son. The current Santa is getting on a bit, though his eccentric and ancient father is still alive. His successor is likely to be his eldest son Steve, who has come up with an incredibly efficient system to deliver presents to every child on Earth, involving a vastly supersonic spaceship with an underbelly that mimics the night sky, numerous video streams and specialists for every situation. Steve’s younger brother Arthur is clumsy and useless, but works hard in the letters department, writing back to children to instil them with a sense of wonder. However, when one child is missed and the current and incumbent Santas will not deal with it, it falls to Arthur, his mad old grandfather and the elf from the wrapping department who discovered the missed present to solve the problem – the old-fashioned way.

It’s unwise to attribute too much of an agenda to the film. It’s less about putting technology and heart in opposition than in contrasting ruthless corporate efficiency with caring about the individuals – without suggesting for a moment that life could go on without those who run complex operations with precision and tight controls. The ending may give priority to those who care about the children rather than the well-oiled machine, but the machine still has to be there.

Arthur Christmas won’t be for everyone – it is twee and full of cartoony designs but never quite gets to loveable, which it possibly could have done by making Arthur younger and less comical. It is not highly original, nor ever all that emotional. And it suffers from having its goal achievable in half an hour, then having to be stalled by things like misreading of maps and having to make the right first impression, which all gets a bit artificial – though missiles flying gave the climax oomph.

Aardman give the film the slight edge it needs to stand out – a very British setting and British humour. The most obvious place this happens is in the Christmas meal. While everyone knows the jokes about families getting together at Christmas only to squabble and fight, it’s actually very rare to see this in a Christmas film, and having it in one about Santa's family strikes me as amusingly subversive. There are also a lot of great little visual gags, like the poor seal that happens to be where the spacecraft is rising up out of the icy water, or a model elf appearing where you expect poor Bryony to end up. There are some nice little moments with random elf extras in mission control, and the grandpa character gets great lines.

It also helps that the cast is great. Jim Broadbent is peerless in the ‘wet and hapless but instantly likeable old man’ role, and Hugh Laurie steals the show in a return to characterisation many miles from House that ought to amuse and bemuse American audiences unfamiliar with his comedy work. Bill Nighy has a lot of fun, and James McAvoy pitches Arthur nicely between sensitive and daft. Michael Palin has a superb little cameo as a daft old communications elf, with some of the funniest moments in the film, and Ashley Jensen pitches Bryony just right (as long as Americans can understand the accent). Everything was just right – though perhaps Justin Bieber’s ending song could have been something more…timeless.

This feels neither like the start of a great renaissance for Sony Pictures Animation nor like a reinvention of Aardman, but if they collaborate a few more times, I feel like they might just make a real classic.

バイオハザード：ディジェネレーション/ Biohazard: Degeneration / Resident Evil: Degeneration

Resident Evil doesn’t exactly have a reputation for great big-screen adaptations. The live-action versions were blockbusters of a kind, but few people I’ve spoken to have ever said they thought they were any good – a consensus reflected by critics’ reviews. On the other hand, people have said good things about this CG animation from Japan.

I’m, I suppose, a lapsed fan of Resident Evil games. I got the first one for the Playstation, and even got the US version from an import store because the UK one was censored. I played it until I’d seen every nook and cranny, and then did almost the same for the second game, though the difficulty towards the end annoyed me. But since then I’ve not really had much interest in the series, nor more than a passing awareness of events.

But that’s about all that anyone needs to understand Degeneration, which unlike the live-action films is a continuation of the games. Claire Redfield just happens to be in a particular airport where there is a new T-virus outbreak, and finds herself with two important people to protect – a sweet little girl she had been meeting and a pompous senator. A special agent is dispatched to rescue them – the perfectly-coiffured and laconic Leon Kennedy. They escape, but not before uncovering a conspiracy within a pharmaceutical company, where the deadly viruses of the games may well be kept.

The film’s visuals are disappointing. This film came out in 2008, and I expected the CG to be of the standard of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within at least. But it looked like the old PS1 intro to the second game. The animation was clunky and the models looked plasticky. The lip-synch was no good at all: it was so bad in English that I got hold of the Japanese version, only to find that even worse! In addition, there really is no point to this film being animated: a lot of work went in to something unnecessary, for other than one sweeping shot of the interior of the building and I suppose how well certain big boss monsters fit into the overall look of the piece, there was nothing that could not have been achieved by live-action filming, which would have looked far better anyway.

The film is, I think, a statement: this is the kind of script that the live-action films should have had, rather than the made-up nonsense we got. That’s both valid and quite true, but unfortunately isn’t enough to make a good film.