Darkly Scanned
The problem with a “review” is that it’s expected to be definitive. I saw this film, and these are my thoughts. Now here they are for your consideration. Of course you’re free to draw your own conclusions, later. But, nevertheless, here is my opinion, now. There’s something that’s always bugged me about that.
Having just watched “A Scanner Darkly”, I am compelled to write down my thoughts immediately.
I wanted to see a Scanner Darkly for having seen a Waking Life. I know that Richard Linklater has made other films. But I can’t think of any of them right now. A friend gave me the DVD for my birthday a few years back, and I have watched it many times, in all sorts of company. I have shown it to many people who had not seen it before. And it is accurate to say that I shared it with enthusiasm.
I knew that A Scanner Darkly was supposed to be a sequel to A Waking Life. But it never occurred to me to wonder exactly how a movie might even be a sequel to A Waking Life. I wish that someone who had also seen the first movie and was looking forward to the second just like I was, had asked me to speculate about this beforehand. I think I would have enjoyed that conversation. It seems to me now that I might have wondered, what things could even be inherited by a prospective sequel to A Waking Life. I might have wondered if they were calling it a sequel just because it had an animation technique in common with the first film. I might have wondered whether I’d be seeing any of the characters from A Waking Life again. I might have wondered whether dreaming was going to persist as a theme. For not having wondered in advance, I had no theories or predictions to confirm. I had but one hope, however, when I plunked down my cash at Borders the other night, and that has been satisfied. A Scanner Darkly will take its place among the small but precious collection of DVDs I play only when I entertain, lol.
I want to talk about the animation a bit.
The basic animation style will be recognizable to anyone who saw the first film. It takes only a moment to realize that what you’re watching has a basis in some other original form, in film or on video tape. The “animation” is not so much animation in the traditional drawing sense, as manipulation of an original. This technique is called rotoscoping, a word I first heard in connection with Heavy Metal in 1981.
“Drawing on film” (though only in a digital, metaphorical sense) is more descriptive, but “manipulation” helps me make my point better. In A Waking Life, there was a wide range in the level of manipulation, from scene to scene. At moments, the underlying “actors” readily emerge and appear almost as they would in regular “live-action” films. At other moments, the digital goop is applied so liberally that the viewer detaches from the physical reality of the actors and the set, and the film becomes just a cartoon.
The degree of rotoscoping in A Scanner Darkly comes in somewhere between cartoon and live-action. They’ve turned it down a few clicks even from a Waking Life, and the performances of the actors are amplified as a result. I liken this to the effect of caricature, the aim of which is to expose truth by exaggerating definitive details. There is a cognitive science, I can’t recall the name, that studies facial geometry in human expression. I’m sure the effect I’m talking about has an explanation in there somewhere.
With that science in mind, it seems an extraordinary addition to the filmmaker’s tool chest to be able to draw (literally) on the faces of one’s actors. It warrants closer scrutiny of the interplay between performance and digital enhancement. Linklater’s brush was noticeably less additive in a Scanner Darkly than in Waking Life. It would be interesting to see a film in which the digital manipulation of the actor’s original performance was even more subtle, perhaps nothing more overt than the intensification of an embarrassed blush, the timely dilation of a digital pupil, or just re-creating they way people you love seem to glow in the dark sometimes — 
December 22nd, 2006 at 3:55 am
[…] “Drawing on film” (though only in a digital, metaphorical sense) is more descriptive, but “manipulation” helps me make my point better. In A Waking Life, there was a wide range in the level of manipulation, from scene to scene. At moments, the underlying “actors” readily emerge and appear almost as they would in regular “live-action” films. At other moments, the digital goop is applied so liberally that the viewer detaches from the physical reality of the actors and the set, and the film becomes just a cartoon — a scanner darkly review […]
December 22nd, 2006 at 7:13 pm
[…] I walked into Borders the other night to get a copy of the the Scanner Darkly DVD, and impulse-bought Newtype Magazine, as I was checking out. I’m only on page 3, and already I am hooked. The magazine looks and feels great. But a big part of the appeal is that I’m actually on page 158! Yes, you guessed it, the magazine is printed back to front, just like in Japanese. The magazine’s editors had this to say about it “Let’s get something clear here: People in Japan have been reading and writing a lot longer than us English-speaking folks — so don’t even think about calling this book backward. This is a magazine that focuses on Japanese pop culture, so it’s only fitting that it follows a similar format” Well, how fucking cool is that — […]