Through animation the director has more freedom in the creation of a superhero

1989’s The Abyss (Dir James Cameron) saw the advent of the acceptance of computer animation in mainstream films. Subsequent developments and improvements of the technology have led to the process of computer animation becoming absolutely integral to the production and the marketing of modern blockbusters. The trailers for summer blockbusters such as Fantastic Four (Dir Tim Story, 2005) and X2 (Dir Bryan Singer, 2003) are designed and edited to showcase the visual effects. This is designed to create the feeling that the ‘big films’ with the ‘big’ effects need to be seen on the ‘big screen;’ to quote the anti-piracy campaign currently running in British cinemas, ‘It’s the experience that counts.

The ability that animators have to make to imagined real is incredible. Directorial vision that was imagined but simply unattainable is now within the grasp of the computer animators. Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of the 1933 classic King Kong (Dirs Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack) was able to realize in glorious detail scenes that where rejected from the original script as unfilmable; such as the sequence in which Kong (Andy Serkis) battles with three Tyrannosaurus Rex in a giant spider’s web. It seems these days that anything that can be written can be rendered on a computer and put onto the big screen.

The past five years have seen the release of a whole host of large budget action films based on popular comic book series. By the end of 2006 there will have been 13 major films based on characters from marvel comics since 2000 as well as the resurrection of DC Comic’s film franchises of the Batman and Superman characters. This essay will look at how animation has progressed to realise the directorial vision of filmmakers and the asses just how much freedom it has afforded them in the creation of superhero characters and superhuman characteristics. The examples will be Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series.   

Spider-Man (2002) tells the story of schoolboy Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire,) whom after being bitten by a genetically modified spider develops superhuman strength, precognitive reflexes, the ability to jump great heights and distances, the ability to stick to surfaces and climb buildings and the ability to shoot a sticky web like substance from his wrists which he uses to swing from sky scrapers. This is the origin of the characters nickname ‘web-slinger.’ After gaining these powers Peter graduates from high school and moves to New York City to Study at university, work as a photographer and fight crime.
Previous attempts at making a live action version of the amount to the sum total of the CBS television series The Amazing Spider-Man (Dirs Various, 1978.) The effects were hideously unconvincing. The’ web slinging’ was merely a man swinging on a rope and any scenes of Spider-Man climbing up the sides of the buildings looked like the camera had been tilted 90 degrees. In the comic books the character leaps and bounds like an acrobat and it was just not possible to recreate that with live action. While this series gained a cult following for its ‘camp’ appeal,  ultimately it could not recreate the excitement of the comic books and was unsatisfying.

After the success of 2000’s X-Men (Dir Bryan Singer) the potential to be made in comic book adaptations became apparent. An adaptation of the marvel comic character Spider-Man had been an on/off project for Sony pictures for ten years and it was felt that the technology was finally ready to do justice to the character and satisfy the audience.
Computer animation was used to convincingly show all of Spider-Man’s abilities. Whilst strength can be exaggerated and superhuman agility can be illustrated and is seen as standard in many of today’s blockbuster films, Raimi also used the technology imaginatively to get a real sense of what it is like to be gifted with

Spider-Man’s powers

In one scene Peter accidentally starts a fight with school bully Flash Thompson. (Joe Manganiello) As he tries to open his locker he is at first unaware that Flash is behind him and in the middle of throwing a punch. There is a cut to an extreme close up of Peter’s eyes to make this shot subjective to his own awareness. The camera then quickly pans ninety degrees and moves through the school corridor quickly and freely like some sort of insect point of view shot. The camera occasionally slows to bring a chosen object into sharp focus and inspect it for a moment before settling on a close shot of Flash’s fist and pulling back as the fist moves towards the camera indicating that a punch has been thrown.

This is a hyper realistic exploration of a computer-generated environment. The camera speed movement and focus all combine to graphically and explicitly illustrate in Peter’s precognitive powers or ‘spider-sense’ in the most visually arresting way possible.  
The film mocks the poor ‘special’ effects of earlier screen adaptations such as the amazing Spider-Man series. In an early scene not long after Peter has acquired his powers we see him teaching himself how to ‘web-sling.’ After shooting a web line at a crane Peter awkwardly swings from the end of the line with his feet frantically wavering beneath him as he crashes straight into a wall. The stunt is performed only six stories of the ground and clearly looks like a man hanging from the end of a piece of rope.

As Peter becomes more assured with his abilities so does the camera work for the scene at the end of the film where Spider-man is swing through Manhattan a special ‘Spydercam’ rig was used to get aerial shots of Manhattan. This rig attached an unmanned camera to a harness that could be moved about hundreds of feet in every direction between the Manhattan skyscrapers so that the camera could be as high as 200 feet or as low as 20 feet. The speed of the film through the gate was slowed so that it appeared faster when played back.
On top of this rather unique footage of New York, animators were free to follow an animated Spider-Man who swings throughout the frame, from up to down, left to right and close to wide simultaneously.  Traditionally special effect sequences are done using close shots and fast cuts to hide anything that looks fake or forced. The beauty of this final shot is that it is continuous and wide. Its credibility is held together purely by the quality of the animation. The kinesis of the shot and the action perfectly illustrates Spider-Mans abilities to the point where the audience almost feels as if they are right behind him. The technique was so successful that it was use throughout Spider-Man 2.

Bad effects take audiences away from a films diegesis and remind them that they are watching a fabrication. Computer animation can also legitimise the fantastic things that an audience witnesses and make the unreal seem real. For example Spider-man’s ability to climb walls is made credible in one extremely close shot of Peter’s finger tips in which we see thousands of tiny barbed hairs protrude from his finger tips. Although the events we are seeing are impossible, the computer animation makes them look real enough for the audience to believe and invest in them.

Sam Raimi’s vision for the film Spider-Man and the character Spider-man was ultimately realised thanks to the use of computer animation technology. However the freedom that he had in the creation of his superhero and his powers were very much limited by the commitment to the source material.
The publicity for the first Spider-Man made much out of the fact that the director Sam Raimi was a childhood fan of the character and the comic books, and also that he had a painted Spiderman montage on his bedroom wall as he was growing up. As such it was clear that if anyone could bring the character and the story to life it was he. However, what was also clear to Raimi was that he was dealing with a much beloved character with forty years of well-known back-story. As such the ‘freedom’ that he has in creating the superhero and his powers was limited by what the audience was expecting to see. The rest of this essay will look at the influences external to the director’s vision and computer animation that have been integral to the creation of the character. 
It is absolutely vital to know the target audience and be mindful of their expectations when making any film. The fans of the comics will already have a vision in their heads of how they see Spider-Man moving and talking. They will also have a vision of how they expect the hero’s powers to work. However certain concessions often need to be made for the sake of credibility. In the case of Spider-Man’s web shooting ability there was much outrage at the decision to turn this from a man made gadget to an organic mutation. But as Sam Raimi is quoted as saying ‘it was just much more credible than a school boy developing an adhesive that the 3M company couldn’t produce!”
Although changes like this are necessary in the believability of the character, if you diverge too much you risk losing what made the character popular in the first place such as the sanitised 1995 film version of 2000ADs ultra-violent anti-hero Judge Dread (Dir Danny Cannon)

The director also has to give up some of his vision of the character to an actor who in turn will bring his or her own interpretation to the role. Although where live action film is impossible computer animation is used, it is preferable where possible to get live action footage. A live actor can emote and move in a way that evokes emotion in away that animated characters cannot achieve. Even fully animated characters such as Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy rely on a human actor a motion capture for the performance itself.
When considering which actor to cast to embody a character much must be considered. According to O’Sullivan, Dutton and Rayner in their book ‘Studying the Media.’ The choice of a star for a given role has particular narrative and generic implications that must be considered. “The star is the physical manifestation of a set of values or debates that the text’s character embodies.”  They suggest that a given star comes with a public persona that implies certain character attributes. For example Arnold Schwarzenegger's public image is one of strength, power, masculinity and neo conservative militarism.
None of this seems to have been taken into consideration in the casting of Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. Maguire is a character actor who has appeared in films a diverse as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Dir Terry Gilliam, 1998) and Ride with the Devil (Dir Ang Lee, 1999.) It was his role as Spider-Man that raised his profile into becoming a star.

Although a given star for a given role does come with certain semiotic associations about their personality. In the case of casting for a film being made from well-known source material the stars persona becomes subordinate to the character itself. In many cases the characters are much better known and loved that the actors portraying them. What is implied in the quote is that it is the narrative associations of a given celebrity that is important in manifesting a character as a real being, in fact the important thing is that the actor has the ability to deliver the right performance.
In the discussion of star and genre O’Sullivan, Dutton and Rayner go on to argue that audiences identify with stars and see there films because of the identification with a particular star image. “This is part of the ‘knowledge’ that audiences bring to the films and is exploited through the way in which films are market and appeal to them. It would seem in the case of Spider-Man it is the character rather than the star that the audience is identifying with.   

Whilst the super hero sub-genre and its parent genre of science fiction are largely the domain of the adolescent male, Spider-Man appeals not only to teenage boys. This is because the film also retains some genre-hybridity or what is more commonly referred to as crossover appeal. The superhero film is a sub-genre of the action-adventure film, which traditionally holds slightly more appeal to women than science fiction. The ¬Spider-man films also contain elements of a love story between Peter and Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) that is established in the first film and resolved in the second film. Spiderman 2 is also a drama about Peter’s own personal struggle to balance his public responsibility to use his powers for good against his own selfish desire for a ‘normal’ life. Character based drama is seen as the domain of the more mature filmgoer and lifts the material up out from the label of ‘kids stuff.’ Lastly there is also a thick vain of humour that runs through both films and is liked by both sexes and all ages.

The crossover appeal of the Spiderman Films is obvious from its box office receipts, both films sit within the top twenty highest grossing films of all time. Genre theory is useful in quickly categorising films and associating them with like material, however it does not tell us anything about the quality of the material that it is categorising. As the Spider-Man films illustrate although a particular audience may enjoy a genre, good writing, good characters and great storytelling can open a genre film up to a wider audience.    

So why has the character of Spider-Man got such broad appeal. The entry in online encyclopaedia Wikipedia suggests that it is because he is a divergent from traditional infallible unflappable superheroes such as Superman. “Spider-Man has been portrayed as an everyman hero, showing poor judgment and being overwhelmed by the combined responsibilities of his personal life and mission as a superhero.”  Everyone is mindful of their own shortcomings and is grateful to recognise them in others as it makes them feel unalone.
Although; as this essay has suggested there are certain characteristics of the Spider-Man films that are atypical of the blockbuster format, they are still essentially summer blockbusters. As such they are reflective of the representation of the American ideology that has been a hegemonic export of the Hollywood movie since its birth in 1975 with Jaws. (Dir Steven Spielberg) O’Sullivan, Dutton and Rayner identify these values as “the traditionally dominant values in American society: individualism, patriotism, equality of opportunity, justice, etc.”  The protagonist of such a movie is strong and heroic.

As a Hollywood film the character of Spider-Man must embody these values. The plot of Spider-Man 2 revolves around Peter Parker’s desire to give up being a super hero and live his own peaceful life. However he finds that when he does so the people he loves get hurt and only he has the power to save them. The film is only resolved when Peter realises the responsibility that comes with his powers and reconciles the two lives.
A hegemonic reading of this text in the context of 9/11 and the Iraq war allow this film to be read as a justification for the war. The might of spider-man is analogous to the might of the US army. The justification for the war was pre-emptive action on a future aggressor. In Spider-Man 2 Peter misses the opportunity to pre-emptively stop Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) and as such Mary Jane is kidnapped. The film is about the consequences of allowing aggressors the opportunity to strike.

Spider-Man’s nationality is alluded to constantly through the rich iconography of the New York skyline, the yellow cabs and the Thick accents. In certain scenes he is seen web slinging onto flagpoles that wave the stars and stripes. Spider-Man is a distinctly American hero who fights for the American values. As such he is the glamorous hero of Hollywood mythology that is revered by the American film narrative.
Spider-Man is at once an everyman and a glamorous hero. His appeal is universal because he shows that everyone makes mistakes and at the same time everyone is capable of greatness. This is at the essence of the character in the comic books and in the essence of the most loved of Hollywood heroes. 
Ultimately the development of computer animation has opened up the possibility for filmmakers to take source material such as Spider-Man and the Uncanny X-men and make the impossible, possible on the silver screen. However the process is expensive, the budget of the two Spider-Man films has been estimated at $139 million and £200 million respectively.  A flop film can incur major losses. In order for the film to be successful it must appeal to the largest possible audience whilst retaining the characteristics that made the source material that made the character popular in the first place. When making a superhero film a director must consider his audience against his source material and against his budget before getting carried away in the endless possibilities of computer animation. The development of the character of Spiderman in the Spider-Man films was for Raimi a process of loving recreation of the source material as apposed to the creation of a singular directorial vision.

Bibliography

Websites

Films

Abyss, The, (Dir James Cameron, 1989, US)
Fantastic Four (Dir Tim Story, 2005, US)
Jaws (Dir Steven Spielberg, 1975, US)
Judge Dread (Dir Danny Cannon, 1995, US)
King Kong, (Dirs Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933, US)
King Kong  (Dir Peter Jackson, 2005, New Zealand, US)
Spider-Man (Dir Sam Raimi, 2002, US)
Spider-Man 2 (Dir Sam Raimi, 2004, US)
X-men (Dir Bryan Singer, 2000, US)
X2 (Dir Bryan Singer, 2003, US)