The One and Only Ivan – 2020-21
I’ll start this off by saying that Disney doesn’t put out bad material. Their visual effects are always… well, almost always… top notch. The main draw of these visuals is the talking animals, for which Disney is famous. The photo-realistic CGI animals looked fantastic. Like I said, Disney doesn’t put out bad material. But then, why did I only give the visual effects three stars out of five? Because, come on, Disney! We’ve seen it all before, and executed just as beautifully.
I’m basing my opinion on films that have been nominated for Best Visual Effects in recent years that used the exact same tricks. I saw no difference in the quality of the talking animals between this movie and The Jungle Book or The Lion King, or older films like The Golden Compass or The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Does that make me question the quality of the CGI effects here? Of course not. But I don’t get why the same visual effects keep getting Oscar nominations, when the actual quality has not improved, or gotten more innovative, or something!
Keep in mind, this is just my uneducated opinion, but I’d say there were certain effects that I felt crossed the line into slightly cartoonish. The main character of the silverback gorilla, Ivan, was great. It was alright if, every once in a while, his emotive expressiveness looked a little too human. After all, the movie is geared towards children of around five or six years old, and I understand that they might require a more recognizable display of emotion on the faces of the animals. And Gorillas have nearly human faces that can realistically mimic our facial expressions.
But the baby elephant, Ruby, was the worst offender. They went too far with the human expressions on the non-human face, and it was mostly in the eyes. To be sure of my opinion, I went on YouTube, and watched a few videos of real baby elephants. Ruby reminded me more of the animated Disney feature, Dumbo, than an actual live elephant. Real elephants have smaller eyes that are much darker and unexpressive. I understand why they had to make the eyes expressive on a near human level, but it took away from the realism they were trying to achieve.
And one other thing. The animals in this movie were too physically flawless. Part of what makes a painted, or CGI, image is the imperfections that are crafted into it. If there are none, it looks too much like an artificial image. And I think all the CGI character in Ivan suffered from this. They weren’t rough enough to be believable as real animals with human intelligence. They were too squeaky clean and flawless to make me believe they were real. This movie could have learned a lesson from the superior effects of the 2012 nominee, Life of Pi. When I watched that film, I was shocked to learn that the character of the tiger was 100% CGI. At times, I thought it was real, and I got all the emotion from its realistic face that I needed.