It's Digital. Can You Dig It?

By RICHARD CORLISS

ARE PEOPLE OBSOLETE IN MOVIES? HAVE we seen the last of actors--actual human beings playing fictional ones--who perform on a set constructed by burly artisans, under lights operated by fellows with quaint guild titles like gaffer and best boy? Maybe we have. Maybe it's time. I mean, if there's one thing that holds cinema back from being a 21st century art form, it's people. So let's go with pixels. They're cuter, cheaper, better behaved. They can simulate funny sea creatures (Shark Tale), re-create 1939 Manhattan or Shangri-La (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), visualize a future dystopia (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence) with a wave of a wand, the click of a mouse.

Traditional moviemaking, a toy of the Industrial Revolution, was a cumbersome machine from the start and remained so for a century. To a generation that got its visual schooling in front of the small, teeming screens of PCs and PlayStation 2s, the old filmic quest to make movies seem like real life, only cooler, is as anachronistic as a telegram in the e-mail age. Now a generation of directors is moving from analog to digital. They want to make films that hit the delete button on reality--films whose highest aspiration is to be cartoons.

And not your Uncle Walt's cartoons, the creaky two-dimensional kind with hand-made drawings and singing dwarfs and teapots. Even the most familiar looking of our new trio--Shark Tale, from the people responsible for the Shrek megahits--is in the computer-generated mode. Another DreamWorks cartoon that eerily resembles the work of its competitor Pixar (Antz to match A Bug's Life, Shrek to counter Monsters Inc.), this one goes underwater, as Pixar's Finding Nemo did, but with a more urban-contemporary tilt and much less craft and heart.

Oscar the fish (voiced by Will Smith) is a little dude with a big mouth who becomes a hero under false pretenses, by saying he slew a shark--a shark who happens to be the son of Don Lino (Robert De Niro), the sea's feared codfather. To propel the plot, Don Lino's sissy son Lenny (Jack Black) befriends Oscar and his adoring friend Angie (Renee Zellweger). At its jauntiest, as when it shows Oscar at work in a whale car wash, Shark Tale is the Jaws that refreshes, but too often it just piles on the gags. The film has a hectic, sitcom air and a full-of-himself hero who is as likely to grate as to ingratiate.

Sky Captain is every bit as much an animated film as Shark Tale. Kerry Conran's script has a plot lifted and sifted from lots of '30s films--The Wizard of Oz, Lost Horizon and a dozen sassy newspaper comedies. But the technique is the star here: Conran's devising of a Deco-meets-delirium universe that he projected onto a blue screen, in front of which the game, clueless stars--Jude Law as the intrepid flyboy, Gwyneth Paltrow as a plucky news gal--recited their lines.

Granted, they can't bring much life to their characters, since the movie's sepia-toned look almost literally drains the color from their faces, which are shot in light so diffuse they look as if they were painted on velvet. It's more important to Conran that they be figures in a landscape whose tones have the texture of a seeping, seductive gouache. In his vision of moviemaking as essentially a basement activity--a controlled environment as unpolluted as possible by the egos and quirks of performers--Conran is a lot like George Lucas from Star Wars on. Actors are cattle, and he's a vegetarian.

We're not diminishing Conran's achievement; we're simply noting that he hasn't attached his technical virtuosity to a ripping yarn or infused it with behavioral brio. The first of its kind often doesn't work; Sky Captain may be the Moses that leads other directors to a blue-sky, blue-screen promised land.

The Japanese anime director Mamoru Oshii has been perfecting his vision for a couple of decades now. Like the Patlabor series of videos and films and the original Ghost in the Shell (1995), his new movie takes a story of tough detectives tracking sophisticated robots and dresses it in some gorgeously painterly images. As Sky Captain is set in the proto-past, Ghost 2 is set in the retro future--Blade Runner territory. Like so many films inspired by the stories of Philip K. Dick, this one is awash in meditation on the basic Phildickian questions: In a world where men and machines coexist, what does it mean to be truly human? And in a future world of wondrous and terrifying possibilities, what, if anything, is real? Can it be that, as Ghost 2 suggests, "humans are nothing but the thread from which the dream of life is woven"?

The film's hero--make that heroid--is Batou, a cyborg detective with a face slashed out of marble and a platitude for every plot twist. "No matter how far a jackass travels," he muses, "it won't come back a horse." Batou encounters lots of fantastic creatures (like the crustaceous Crab Man), elegant vistas (pagoda skyscrapers) and bizarre machines (a plane that resembles both a dragon and Groucho Marx, with a cigar as his nose). It's smart, spectacular, luscious picturizing.

It's also static. French critic Michel Ciment called Ghost 2 "animation without animation"--a cartoon in which the images don't move much. On stolid figures and faces, only the mouths move, as in the old Clutch Cargo TV series. The action scenes don't move at a clip either. Sometimes Oshii preens a little, as when the camera tracks slowly around an object. It points out what's missing in his approach: fluidity of character line, the subtlety of expression that brought humanity to a Warner Bros. cartoon duck or rabbit.

That could be just a fogey's rant, mooning about the old days and ways. Viewers who resist the coming posthuman form of filmmaking may be as obsolete as the movies they loved. Get used to it, people: these new techniques will weave our deepest dreams into a cinematic coat of many colors. Thing is, it'll be worn by a cyborg.