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08-30-2006, 01:52 PM
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Formerly Joey_numbers
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Houston, Texas
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Renaissance - Hype thread
http://www.renaissance-movie.com/
Think: A Scanner Darkly, Sin City, and V for Vendetta. Thats what this movie looks like. I was searching over Newsarama and it was the first article up:
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Originally Posted by Steve Fritz
In 2006, yes this year, a research project on the disease Progeria is scrapped. The head of the team, one Dr. John Mueller (Ian Holmes), destroys all notes and takes a job with a young, up-and-coming French company called Avalon. With his new riches he opens a clinic for the indigent, even doing surgery out of pocket.
In 2054, the effects of Mueller’s actions come to roost.
His protege, Ilona Tasuiev (Romola Garai), is kidnapped. Top detective Barthelemy Karas (Daniel Craig) is assigned the case. The only real connections are Avalon, its Exec VP Paul Dellenbach (Jonathan Pryce) and Tasuiev’s drug-addled sister, Bislane (Catherine McCormack). Karas knows none will tell the truth if they can help it.
As animation fans know, the glut of animated films hitting the screens this year is having its effect. It seems like movies have to come from Pixar to do huge box office. Hopefully this glut won’t stop people from catching Renaissance, the incredibly adventurous new French film being distributed by Miramax and makes its debut at the Toronto Film Festival next weekend.
A little background. It seems that when it comes to daring filmmaking, France is one of the too few places to foster it. This includes animation, where pioneers such as Emile Cohl and Vladislaw Straits did ground breaking work in the silent day and films like Fantastic Planet, the Moebius/ Jordowosky series and the works of Les Armeteurs (Kirikou & The Sorceress, The Triplets of Belleville and The Boy Who Became A Bear among many others), spring out at a surprisingly regular rate.
Renaissance marks the feature film debut of a young studio named Onyx, which is headed by an equally young director named Christian Volkman. Volkman made his mark shortly after graduating college, with a short film called Maaz (1998). His prodigious talent caught the attention of movie producer Aton Soumache and master animator Marc Miance. As it was, Miance was also making some interesting moves of his own.
“The year before (graphic pioneer) Olivier Renouard showed me a 3D black and white still picture he had produced,” Miance recalled. “This image was like the missing piece for what I was trying to do then: Animate paired down graphics and match them with extremely realistic animation, as close as possible to a classically shot film. I knew there was a radically new visual concept there.”
Miance took Renouard’s concept and applied it to his own work. He took his experiments to a film festival called Imagina G8. Volkman and Soumache also just happened to be showing Maaz at the same festival. Like Linklater’s Waking Life and Scanner Darkly, Volkman’s short featured live actors and then rotoscoped over them.
“Christian and I were living the fairy tale life from the Maaz success when I saw the 3D black and white test Marc had made,” Soumache recalled. “Those few seconds promised something captivating. Christian and I were hooked and felt we wanted to make a film using the concept. There we were, the three of us, a producer, a director who had made one short and a barely 23 year-old technical wizard.”
Soumache then managed to put Volkman and Miance in the same room with scriptwriters Alexandre Patelliere and Matthieu Delaporte, where they put together the idea for Renaissance. One must give the producer his props, he then succeeded in getting TV network France 2 and movie distributor Pathe to finance the project…just on the strength of the pitch.
Plot-wise, this film is an interesting cross between Blade Runner and Sin City. At its heart Renaissance is a hard boiled film. It’s taken from Karas’ viewpoint, who’s wonderfully played by the new James Bond, Craig. Karas is a classic tough guy, a creature of futuristic prisons with markers reaching the absolute depths of the Paris underground. He confronts the Parisian elite the same way he does street thugs, as a full-contact fight. Considered the best of the Paris police force, he draws incredible loyalty from his squad and contempt from his superiors.
But this case is one he wishes he never took on. All clues lead to Dellaporte, superbly played by Pryce. The exec is a power-manipulating super-suit who looks like Adolf Hitler without the mustache. All Karas knows is Dellaporte wants his scientist back, alive, at all costs. But as Karas gets closer to the truth he’s starting to look more and more like a liability. This is especially driven home to him by Mueller, who hints that if he saves the scientist, he’ll doom the world.
But what really sets this film apart is the animation. Like Sin City, it’s highly stylized and the colors are extremely polarized. Where the Rodriguez/Miller noir is rooted in a filthy, deranged and dangerous contemporary world, Volkman and company go a very different direction. His film is set in a Paris where the sewers and the subways still exist in all their rancid glory. There’s also gleaming antiseptic plastic, steel and glass Art Noveau, Deco, Bauhaus and lord-knows-what structures towering over the Eiffel Tower and Arc du Triumph. Volkman then has a field day with this setting, shooting it like a combination noir and French New Wave experiment.
What’s even more remarkable is even though the film is almost purely black, white, silver and gray (with very small dashes of pale ice blue and lavender), Volkman still manages to cram incredible detail into the shots. When you are in a dark alley, you can see the grainy detail of the deteriorating bricks that surround the characters. Every wrinkle in an old person’s face is hyper-realized down to almost painful idiosyncrasy. Then there’s the actual camera movement.
“We didn’t want hyperbolic camera moves like you sometimes get in 3-D films,” he stated. “Our visual references had more to do with the 40s and 50s film noir than with animation.”
“The world of Renaissance is made of china ink and volumes,” says Miance. “The lighting makes it so that the picture springs up in Chiaroscuro. This explains why the film has a modern and paired-down look. Its visual strength comes from the fact that it is not drawn, but lit in strong white light.”
“The black and white produces an Expressionist effect on the scenes,” says Volkman. “The handling of those two contrasting values in a picture produces a double effect: drawing the spectator gaze towards the lit element and exacting the imagination towards the elements left in shadow.”
Volkman’s graphic style helped the scriptwriters immensely.
“The relationship between the world Christian imagined and the technique Marc had developed was immediately clear to us,” says Pattaliere. “We knew what the movie would look like, and that helped us immensely in crafting the story.”
“We wanted to write a detective story,” adds fellow scriptwriter Delaporte. “Now, not only did we have the opportunity, but the story would benefit from an unprecedented visual environment which was both very modern in the technology used while also embodying a classic noir atmosphere.”
Even though it’s a futuristic world, it’s one where Mike Hammer or Sam Spade would have been right at home in. A typical street scene will have the everyday middle class Paris citizenry walking several stories up over transparent sidewalks while the depths of the city has holographic hookers attempting to seduce johns.
It also soon becomes apparent this world is even more youth-obsessed than our own. Avalon, through groundbreaking research in biogenetics, is the industry leader in the field. They’re animated billboards are everywhere, promising the company will always be with its customers, “for life.”
At the same time Renaissance comes with a haunting, jazz-toned soundtrack one would expect from a solid detective yarn.
As one can surmise, this is not a film for kids. Like Scanner Darkly, this film is a serious R, mainly for its violence and ability to provoke thought. So you parents are now warned.
As for comic fans, if you loved Sin City, this is a good point of comparison. Karas is the strong silent type that Frank Miller usually uses as villains and killers, not the good guy. The evil types are more scientists and corporate execs, and the tech utilized looks more like something out of 24 than Police Story. On the other hand, anyone reading this column should realize there’s some strong pulp roots going down. Heck, even the press kit is in the form of a comic book.
But in all, once the film got rolling, which it does very quickly, I had a hell of a hard time taking my eyes off the screen. Renaissance, like Scanner Darkly is one of those films for the ages. How it effects animation in the future, and I get a feeling it will, is yet to be determined.
Renassance makes its world debut at the Toronto Film Festival the weekend of September 7-10 as part of the Fest’s Vanguard program. It will be released in the U.S. on a limited basis starting the 22nd. Check out the website www.renaissance-movie.com for a downloads, teailers, and an opening date and theater near you.
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08-30-2006, 02:01 PM
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Dead Finks Don't Talk
Join Date: May 2002
Location: Hamsterdam
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It looks like Killer7.
It looks pretty cool, but seems kinda cheesy. I may check it out.
I liked the music in the trailer, though.
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08-30-2006, 07:06 PM
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#4 |
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Super
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: A Galaxy far far away....
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Joey I love you.
This looks, and sounds awesome.
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Mario's Bitch
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08-30-2006, 07:08 PM
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lolsassinator
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Co.Cork
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Honestly I didn't think it looked as good in motion...a little too loose and wind waker like.
But it still looks cool, and I'll definently be seeing it when it comes out.
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08-30-2006, 07:22 PM
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Banzai Bill
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Australia
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looks like something i will watch . ill keep this movie in mind
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Shinigami Leeman Asuran Justice for life
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08-30-2006, 08:26 PM
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#7 |
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Ristar! "Come on!"
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Redmond, WA
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Originally Posted by HNB
It looks like Killer7.
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FIRST WORDS OUT OF MY MOUTH.
Yea, I expect Dan to just bust out with his hand cannon and start shootin' it up.
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08-30-2006, 10:58 PM
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#8 |
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Formerly Joey_numbers
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Houston, Texas
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I didn't really get a chance to atch the trailer when i was at school but i just did and it was pimp all the way up until the end and i was let down alittle by the chick talking into the nothing. Over all I think i'm going to like this movie
Alot.
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08-31-2006, 05:38 AM
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 #9 |
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Piranha Plant
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: UK
Posts: 225
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 I'm really annoyed that it had a super limited release in the UK, it was only one for about a week at my local cinema, so I'm gonna have to catch it on DVD.
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In the words of Kanye West: "George Bush (Nintendo) doesn't care about black people (Europe)"
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