The Spawn of "Scooby Doo"

I went to the "Guardians of Ga'Hoole" movie last night - the title has been through a few changes due to marketing shenanigans, but this is what any kid familiar with the books is going to identify it as. "Guardians" is a beautiful new CGI animated film from Animal Logic, the Australian effects house that did "Happy Feet." It's a little light on the story side, but easily the best bet for a family movie currently in general release. However, I want to devote some digital ink to what I found in the previews. During the fifteen minutes of coming attractions, trailers, and pre-show material I sat through, I came across no less than three different CGI projects based on characters who were originally 2D cartoon characters.

The first, appropriately, was a "Scooby Doo" made-for-television film, set to premiere on Cartoon Network in the near future. This is the latest of a series that pairs the antics of live-action actors playing the Mystery Inc. gang with a CGI animated Scooby Doo character. It's being billed as a quasi-prequel to the "Scooby Doo" theatrical film that hit the screens in 2002. When "Scooby" became a surprise hit, it fueled the recent trend of resurrecting older 2D cartoon and comic-strip characters, and giving them CGI face-lifts to appeal to a new generation. As studios raided their archives for nostalgic toons, we've been barraged with CGI versions of "Garfield," "Underdog," "Marmaduke," and "Alvin and the Chipmunks," with more on the way soon. One of the trailers I saw last night was for "Yogi Bear," with CGI doppelgangers of Yogi and Boo Boo.

This is a actually a continuation of an older trend from the 90s that rebooted cartoon properties with live-action actors. You might remember "The Flintstones," and "Inspector Gadget" as some of the more notorious examples of these films, but there were a few decent ones like "George of the Jungle" and "Casper." Before turning exclusively to CGI to bring inhuman cartoon characters into the third dimension, a few films tried using comedians in elaborate character suits, such as Jim Carrey in "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" and Mike Myers in "The Cat in the Hat." I still cringe just thinking about them. Primarily live-action cartoon-based feature lives on to this day, but lately Hollywood has moved on the action-oriented series like "Transformers" and "Speed Racer," which some younger fans don't even identify as cartoon-based.

The reboots featuring CGI characters, however, are in a class by themselves, and not in a good way. I haven't seen a single one of these films that I have liked for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is that they're just not very well made. At the most fundamental level, these are projects that really embody the current studio mindset of pushing familiar brands over story and character. They're aimed at the youngest segment of the audience, retaining just enough of the original property to ping on the radar of busy parents as something familiar and nostalgic. The films themselves follow a simple formula for family-friendly comedies that involves a lot of slapstick, bodily humor, and pop culture references. Kids aren't very discerning and tend to like anything with a lot of noise and color, which these films happily provide.

There's also another deeper level of resentment because the characters are familiar, often ones that I grew up with like the Chipmunks and Garfield. Clearly the new films are not made for the original fans, but the projects only gain traction because the studios recognize that there is some goodwill and affection for Yogi Bear or the Smurfs that can be exploited for monetary gain. Each new announced reboot of a beloved character is met with exasperation and sometimes frustration from grown-ups who were fond of the originals. It's no secret that the adaptations are terrible by any measure. Yet parents dutifully bring their children to the latest "Alvin" movie, the way our parents brought us to all the lousy movies of our youths, and the studios keep making more because the profits keep coming in. Such is the power of heavily-marketed children's entertainment.

I'm sure there's potential for these films to be better. Nobody sets out to make a stinker, of course, but the odds against the emergence of a good "Yogi Bear" or a good "Smurfs" are very high, because of the awful formula that these movies can't seem to get away from. Beyond that, of all the usual techniques used to modernize older characters, it's still the use of CGI that bothers me the most. Some of the redesigns come off better than others - Yogi and Boo Boo actually look like their animated counterparts, unlike the awful Chipmunks. Yet something about them still rankles. I've tried to ignore the differences, tried to pretend that I was watching new characters, and tried to explain away the problem as being due to cultural disconnect or visual dissonance. The problem was really highlighted for me when I watched the new CGI Coyote and Roadrunner short that premiered before "Guardians of Ga'Hoole"

"Fur of Flying" is one of three new Warners' shorts that are being released in theaters this year with WB kids' films. It's the latest bid by the studio to revive the Looney Toons characters. Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner were up to their usual tricks. The gags were good, the quality of the animation was decent, and I enjoyed it. However, the CGI was incredibly distracting the entire way through. It was fun to have the camera swooping around after the Coyote, giving us new angles on the pursuits and the inevitable arcs of descent. However, the humor was drastically undercut by all the new bells and whistles. The elegant visual simplicity of the Coyote plummeting to his doom was lost, as my eye kept wandering to little things like fur textures and the background environments and what the virtual camera was doing.

2D characters just don't work as well in 3D as they do in 2D, and doubly so for the ones dependent on 2D humor. Most of the cartoon characters that are adapted into CGI began their lives as simple line drawings, as caricatures. These don't always translate well into the 3D realm, and it takes a strong creative talent that understands how both universes operate to do it right. Most of the cheap cash-grab pictures take shortcuts or don't even bother to try, leading to odd Franken-creatures like the recent feature film versions of Scooby Doo and Garfield, which were partly modeled on real-world animals, and lost much of their exaggerated quality in transition. Meanwhile animated characters conceived in three dimensions to begin with, like the owls of "Ga'Hoole," or Scrat from "Ice Age" feel like less of a clash.

My hope is that as CGI animation improves, and competition for younger audiences heat up between the multiple CGI animation studios currently in business, then "Scooby Doo" and its ilk will find themselves squeezed out. "Marmaduke" bombed a few months ago and "Yogi Bear" will be up against stiff competition during the holiday season. Alas, there's sure to be a third "Alvin and the Chipmunks" movie and there are tons of cartoon characters that haven't been exploited yet. The studios may insist on trotting out new versions of each and every one of them, from Hong Kong Phooey to Spongebob Squarepants, before finally letting this genre die. Maybe by that point 2D animation will have come back into style and we can start having them convert all the 3D animated characters into 2D.

And then all the kids of this generation can take our places, to complain that Hollywood is ruining their childhoods.