As I read through Donald Grafton's article "Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928, Grafton explicated a trend which I find very common in contemporary cinema. Grafton notes that many comic strip artists's work had been produced into live action films. However after a while it became more common to produce an animated work from a comic strip, since the two mediums seemed to coincide on many levels. It seems after many decades, this idea of transforming comic strips into live action movies has had a resurrection in cinema with the likes of Sin City, Spiderman, and Watchmen having been turned into live action films.
This graphic novels have made a large chunk of money for the movie studios that produce them, and this is not a coincidence. Many have loved these comic books and are very happy to see them turned into movies, especially when they are well done. A film such as Sin City takes scenes directly from the graphic novel and turns them into a live action movie. Here is an example
We can see that the director, Robert Rodriguez, has taken scenes from the comic book and translated them into literal live action versions of the book. This is very similar to the technique used by people such as Lumiere to adapt Christophe's work "Historie sans paroles-Un Arroseur public". Lumiere has attempted to take the completely false world of Christophe's cartoon and turn into real life.
Similarly, Zach Snyder's Watchmen produced a similarly uncanny resemblance to the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The movie, although it skirts around certain plot lines and other parts of the graphic novel, does the book artistic justice by lifting much of its images directly from the artwork in the book. We can see that the strategy of turning comic strips into live action movies has come back, and from the look of the movies box office receipts, the comic strip medium will continue to be a mainstay of major studios for years to come.
I agree with your statement. It's amazing to see how certain directors interpret their views/visions to comicbooks. Like your picture example, The movie is just 3d with more shadows. Even with the saturday morning cartoons, the characters come straight out from the comics, drawn the same, just animated.
ReplyDeleteAnd now comic strips are being added to the list of comic movies. Like Garfield (however was also an animated show before, Dennis the Menance (90's but still) and a new movie called Marmaduke. It seems like the film industry is returning back to the time the article mentions. Like all the comics they were referring too seemed more like our strips today.