Fantastic Fest: A Scanner Darkly, Strings, Sin City

The theater lobby didn't hold any fascinating costumes and sci-fi models for Fantastic Fest on Saturday, and the metal detectors were gone, but that didn't mean that the programming flagged.

The first event I attended wasn't a full-length movie screening, but a panel discussion. Normally the very word "panel" can send me shrieking into the night, but Fantastic Fest handled panels/presentations very well. This one consisted of rotoscoping animation specialists from the upcoming adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater and shot/animated in Austin. Producer Tommy Pallotta was accompanied by lead animator Lance Myers. They showed a brand-new trailer and two clips from the film. However, most impressive of all, while the guys fielded questions from the audience, Myers started to rotoscope frames of the film using the software that animation director Bob Sabiston developed. The monitor of his Mac was projected onto the screen so we could watch him trace Robert Downey Jr.'s head in black, then fill in sections with color. It made me ponder a career in rotoscoping, except that I can't draw.

Pallotta explained that a live-action version of A Scanner Darkly had been shot in about five weeks on consumer-quality digital video. The animators received a final cut from the live-action shoot and went to work. The clips we saw from the film were still rough, but I got a good idea of the general effect. The animation is the same rotoscoping technique used in Linklater's Waking Life, but the scenes from this film appear more kinetic in tone. What was particularly odd to me was to see how the technique transformed such well-known actors in the film as Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder.


A Scanner Darkly has a storyline that lends itself perfectly to this type of look. Pallotta told the audience that the plot involves a "scramble suit" that transforms characters into other people, which would be expensive to render in a live-action film. Also, the filmmakers felt that the rotoscoping technique would provide the perfect look for the "scatter suit" scenes, as well as some scenes involving hallucinations. Although the production has employed as many as 75 animators, and the film stars well-known actors, Pallotta estimated that the movie has cost only about $8.5 million so far. (The actors all worked for scale.)

I was not all that fond of Waking Life but I liked what I saw of A Scanner Darkly in this presentation. The movie is tentatively scheduled to release in Spring 2006. I wonder if (I hope) it will be included in the SXSW film lineup next March.

After the panel ended, I spent an exciting hour browsing nearby stores and making phone calls before the next film started. If someone would only open a coffeehouse, or bubble tea shop, or anything like that in walking distance of the Alamo on S. Lamar, with free wireless access, that business would clean up, especially during film festivals.

The next movie I saw was the one film I had been dying to see ever since I found out it was on the schedule: Strings, a 2004 Swedish movie made entirely with puppets. Twitch published a review some time ago that I had never forgotten. I had no idea I'd ever have the opportunity to see the movie in a theater. Harry Knowles, who introduced the film, apparently went crazy over the DVD and had pushed to include it in the Fantastic Fest schedule. He said it has only been shown in a U.S. theater one other time, at the Seattle International Film Festival. This might explain why the print we saw had French subtitles.

Before Strings began, Alamo treated us to another bizarre trailer, this time for The Puppet Masters. Then we saw the Henry Selick-directed short animated film Moongirl. Selick is best known for his work on stop-motion animation films, like The Nightmare Before Christmas, and this is his first film created with 3D computer animation. I thought the kids in the short looked great, but the cat looked odd—perhaps too much of an attempt to make it look realistic in a surrealistic film. It was a sweet little short, with music by They Might Be Giants.

Strings, however, was not sweet or cute or any similar adjective you might associate with puppets. It was outstanding. So far it is my favorite film from Fantastic Fest and I'm not sure what might top it. The film was dubbed in English by a number of excellent actors (including James McAvoy, whom I'd seen the day before as Mr. Tumnus during the Narnia preview). Since the puppets' mouths do not move, the dubbing was easy and believable.

One of the fascinating aspects of Strings is that the puppet characters understand they are puppets. Their strings give them life—severing the head string kills someone in this universe. The birth scene, in which a baby receives its strings, is surprisingly poignant. The plot is simple: a prince whose father dies vows to seek revenge on the rebels whom he thinks killed them, while his uncle schemes to usurp the throne. It's an old story, but executed brilliantly in this puppet universe.

You can rent Strings on DVD in the U.S. (and you should) but I'm especially pleased I was able to see it in a theater, because some of the details with the puppet strings showed up clearly on the big screen. Everyone I spoke with at the festival about this film praised it to the skies, and the Saturday screening was very well attended.

I decided to see one more short film on Saturday, or rather part of a film: the second recut segment of Sin City. One of the highlights of Fantastic Fest was the theatrical screening of the recut version of Sin City, which will be released on DVD on Dec. 13. If you saw the original cut of the movie, you know it was made up of three stories, although one of them was a wraparound for the other two. Robert Rodriguez decided to recut the movies into three separate segments that would match the structure and look of the stories as they appeared in Frank Miller's graphic novels.

Fantastic Fest programmer Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, speaking before the Sin City segment I watched, confirmed that the editing changes were meant to make the movie "more linearly faithful to the stories themselves." I don't know why such slavish fidelity to the source material is necessary, but I haven't ever read the graphic novels myself. Only about two dozen people were in the theater; most people wanted to see the Japanese horror film Pulse instead.

The segment I saw was the one focusing on Mickey Rourke's character, Marv, which was my favorite part of the original cut of Sin City. I honestly couldn't tell you what changed, except that one scene was added in which Marv goes to his Mom's house to get his gun. I can see why the scene wasn't in the original cut; the tone didn't quite match, and seeing Marv tiptoe into the house, boots in hand, didn't work at all. Marv ought not to be a tiptoer.

The segment was over in less than an hour, which was a pleasant way to end a day of moviegoing. However, I don't have any interest in seeing any of the other segments of the recut Sin City, and I'm glad I didn't attempt to sit through the full three-hour extended session.