The Year of Digital Fur Technology
Hollywood keeps making unnerving CGI catboys and catgirls—no matter the cost.
Happy lanyard season, MIFF goers! Truthfully, I haven't had a chance to properly look at the full program yet. All I know is that between Pig, Cow and Lamb, it's looking pretty good on the protein front.
Contemporary cinema has a complicated relationship with animals. We all know the old quote about never working with them, and this advice has now been taken to its logical conclusion. Gone are the Babes, Air Buds and Beverly Hills Chihuahuas of VHS bargain bins past; nowadays furry friends belong to the digital realm.
Poor Clifford isn't the worst looking CGI animal, and the artists are somewhat constrained by the source material. He gives off dodgy Instagram filter vibes, because he doesn't match his surroundings and there's no variation in hue found in natural fur. But he's also based on uniformly fire truck coloured illustrations and (at least in the film) becomes big through the magic of a sad child's tears, so worrying about whether Clifford looks "real" enough is maybe besides the point.
Still, I would count the big red dog under the most thrilling of new cinema terms: Digital Fur Technology. Born from Tom Hooper doing promo for CATS (2019), it's so much more than just fluffy CGI which looks a bit off. It's the exploitation of animators globally made visible; it's the tension between physical actors and a CGI setpiece; it's the imperfection inherent in any work of art created by human hands.
Okay okay mostly it is just fluffy CGI which looks a bit off.
My personal interpretation of what constitutes Digital Fur Technology™:
- computer-generated imagery;
- designed to mimic or represent photorealistic fur; that
- doesn't
So Clifford is DFT™ but, say, new Space Jam isn't. The latter has no photorealistic intention as it's essentially a Looney Tunes Digimon Movie.
An interview with Vulture digs for more info about DFT™, and Hooper's explanation of his 'thought' process re: prosthetics vs CGI is revealing:
And then you’re like, “So you’re only going to CGI the ears? If you’ve done that, then what’s the point of doing it selectively?”
The point, of course—besides budgetary consideration, trusting the ingenuity of practical effects artists, and not being directly responsible for the inhumane working conditions of hundreds of people—is that being selective is a director's job. Unless you're making Avengers 12 or whatever and everyone's costumes have to be checked off for merchandise purposes years after the fact, artistic decisions should be researched and locked in before you point cameras at people.
Also (and I know everyone knows this by now) he's wrong!! Chamber of Secrets managed it in 2002!
It still baffles me that the guy who made Les Miserables somehow had no idea how much film as a medium is about the beauty and emotion of faces, furry or otherwise.
Not that CATS would necessarily get away with it even with a competent director, production decisions and schedule. 2019's Lion King remake was so obsessed with photorealism (read: brown) that it's the performances which push it into DFT territory; min-maxing film production by putting all its points into visual fidelity and leaving nothing for emotional resonance save Beyoncé's voice.
Digital Fur Technology also has a little-known inverse, which is just as terrifying:
In a perfect world we could've had Detective Pikachu, CATS and Sonic in the same year—only cowards stopped 2019 from being a celebration of all things inflicted on VFX contractors.
In the right hands, we could see a furry film renaissance, another tool for filmmakers to best realise their dreams. But there won't be much joy to be found in fur technology, digital or otherwise, until every craftsperson is adequately compensated within a safe workplace.
For now, it's a new weapon in the ongoing war between Disney and any healthy artistic acknowledgement of adult human life. This clip of Splash, taken from Disney+, uses it to badly rotoscope out Daryl Hannah's thoroughly inoffensive bum:
Digital Fur Technology™ at its purest is compelling. Watching CATS in early 2020, I found it exhilarating to see a new benchmark in Hollywood ego bloat, a ginormous budget failure which everyone working on it could see coming from miles (and years, and millions) away. When you think about the missed opportunities, the lost art that money could have funded? Better to laugh than cry.
While 2019/20 may have been the peak of CGI fur-based crimes, I don't think the end is coming any time soon—if nothing else, Sonic 2 is slated for next April. I can't wait to see what will define cinematic years in 2022 and beyond. In the meantime, if you can think of other films to add to my Letterboxd Digital Fur Technology list please, please let me know. I'm off to ascend to the Heaviside Layer.
