Annihilation (2018) and Anthropocene Effects

Fig. 1 - Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018).

What does animation when utilised in cinema have to do with the Anthropocene? This term emerged in the scientific community at the turn of the millennium as a way of categorically establishing the impact of humans (or Anthropos) on Earth by naming the current geological era after them. I seek here in this blog post to think about the relationship between special effects and a geological era characterised by human activity on Earth – global warming, the sixth mass extinction, mass migration. In this cultural imaginary, humans have both attained a mastery over nature while becoming a force of nature. Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018) is a film that puts a range of visual effects to use as a way of visualising the transformation of nature and of the human (Fig. 1). Some of these effects are practical – an animatronic mutated bear head that the actresses respond to live on set. Other effects are created in post-production using digital technologies, such as the albino alligator that the team of scientists encounter once they enter the contagious space of “The Shimmer”. The combination of practical and digital effects that make up the environmental and creaturely curiosities of Annihilation suggest that reckoning with the physical changes of the environment requires confronting the possibility that physical models of representation might not quite be satisfactory in gauging these changes. This post will therefore consider how digital effects can display the realities of the Anthropocene that humans are normally unable to perceive. A closer look at the creative decisions behind the digital and practical effects of Annihilation in particular reveals the tensions between thinking of the Anthropocene as both material in its consequences but abstract in its e/affects.

Within popular discourse, Annihilation has already been discussed in relation to the Anthropocene. In fact, the title of Lewis Gordon’s Little White Lies article even asks: “Is Annihilation the first true film of the Anthropocene era?” (2018). As a film that thinks about the merging of humans with nature, embodied in the character of Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson) who transforms into a tree towards the film’s climax,  Annihilation mediates the central thematic of Anthropocene: the idea that one day humans will just be another geological layer in the history of Earth, a relic collecting dust. Anthropocene aesthetics turn around the tension between understanding anthropogenic effects on the planet as a reality that we must confront, as the insistent progression of the Extinction Rebellion movement demonstrates, against the knowledge that human coordinates of knowledge can no longer be taken for granted.

As Toby Neilson discusses in his earlier blog entry on this site, Anthropocinema, as Selmin Kara puts it, is characterised by the use of digital technologies to display temporalities and existences that are beyond the human understanding of history. Despite this emphasis on the digital, Annihilation is nonetheless characterised by material props that refer to instances of change and mutation within the physical world experienced by humans. Yet layers of digital visual effects are added within the film to suggest the transformation not only of Anthropocene bodies – deer, alligator, bear, tree, human – but the modes of perception that are required to apprehend them.

Annihilation’s Albino Alligator Attack

Many supposedly “live action” films use, to some extent, a combination of digital and in-camera effects. I would like here to think briefly about how the combination of physical and virtual effects contributes to the way anthropogenic environmental change is imagined onscreen. The shots of the albino alligator, as effects artist Andrew Whitehurst notes in an interview with MovieMaker magazine, are predominantly CGI (see left). However, he explains that a physical model was built during the production of Annihilation so that the creature could interact with the water, for example through a “launching mechanism” as the alligator springs out of the water to attack the scientists (2018). That is, an element that embodies the contagion and mutation thematised by the film is drawn back to having a material body so that it can interact with the world of the film. The monstrous and distorted forms of Anthropocene phenomena register both physical and immaterial effects in the way they register something within, and beyond, the world as we experience it.

Midway through the film, the band of scientists exploring the shimmer are assaulted by a marauding bear. In another interview with The Verge, Whitehurst describes the interplay between the special effects team and his own visual effects team in the construction of the mutated phenomena of Annihilation. The bear was modelled, according to Whitehurst, on a tardigrade – the microscopic creatures that scientists send into space to test how extreme life forms can survive. Whitehurst reports that Garland said that he wanted the creature to look like a “‘giant water bear.’” (2018) The design process made possible by digital effects enlarges the tiny nonhuman creatures that make up the world into a size that the human must confront. Describing the interaction between practical and virtual effects, Whitehurst goes on to say:

With the bear, we designed that in visual effects and then gave a 3D model to Tristan, and his team built a full-size animatronic head and neck that could be puppeteered on set. So for any kind of close interaction between the cast and it, we used that, because we got some sense of performance out of it, it gave the actors something to work against, and you get all the interactive shadows and lighting in the right places in the plate. Then we replaced it with CG in the finished shots.

Fig. 2 - The bear prop in Annihilation.

The animation workflow for Annihilation is not unusual and is in keeping with other big budget science-fiction films over recent years including Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017). Following Lisa Purse, the animation of Annihilation follows the aesthetics and styles of photorealism, the need for visual effects to align with the lighting and shading of the physical, profilmic world in which they are inserted, and as captured and mediated by lens-based media (2013: 60). But the tension between effects that perform the realism of lens-based media and those that suggest the disintegration of the world is an interesting case study in Annihilation, which is fascinated in its very narrative with the representation of the human’s demise.

As Whitehurst’s interview with The Verge makes clear, the design process of Annihilation was both meant to generate the sense of “corruption”, but also to create a sense of coherence in a story that is “telling a series of journeys”. Paradoxically, the way in which some of the effects were generated in the workflow, which shifted back and forth between in-camera and visual effects as with the creation of the alligator and the bear, both contributes to the theme of mutation and human annihilation in Garland’s film, as well as the need to generate a robust fictional world that the human characters can be shown to interact with (Fig. 2). A sense of the unravelling world of the human body and agency is checked by the need to generate a realistic experience of this same unravelling for the human characters in the film.  Furthermore, the political demand of the Anthropocene is characterised by, as the paradoxical name implies, a decentring of the human while generating a productive position to think and act from in order to acknowledge both our transformation into something nonhuman, but also to ensure the continuing story of something we can call human. This is the double demand of an Anthropocene imaginary, and is dramatized by the clash of animation and the fantasy of practical effects. As a film that troubles the unity of the human body as it collides and interfaces with its environment, Annihilation indicates a helpful case study for understanding Anthropocene filmmaking. Fantasy/Animation, here, is defined by the paradoxical logic of expanding worlds beyond the human for the human.

**Article published: January 24, 2020**

References

Bishop, Bryan. 2018. “How Annihilation’s visual effects artists created those terrifying mutant creatures.” The Verge (February 28, 2018), available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/28/17059970/annihilation-visual-effects-interview-andrew-whitehurst-bear

Gordon, Lewis. 2018. “Is Annihilation the first true film of the Anthropocene era?” Little White Lies (March 13, 2018), available at: https://lwlies.com/articles/annihilation-alex-garland-anthropocene-era/.

Purse, Lisa. 2013. Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Selmin, Kara. 2016. “Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions.” In Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film, eds. Julia Leyda and Shane Denson, 750-785. Sussex: Reframe.

Williams, Ryan.2018. “Inside The Shimmer: Oscar-Winning VFX Supervisor Andrew Whitehurst Takes Us Behind Annihilation’s Stunning VFX.” MovieMaker (February 23, 2018), available at:. https://www.moviemaker.com/archives/moviemaking/other/annihilation-vfx-andrew-whitehurst-interview/.

Biography

Joseph Jenner recently passed his PhD viva in Film Studies at King’s College London. His research is on posthumanism, spectatorship and the science fiction genre, and he has recently published articles and a book chapter, including an article published with the journal of Science Fiction Film and Television, entitled "Gendering the Anthropocene: Female astronauts, failed motherhood and the overview effect", as well as with the Film-Philosophy journal. Joseph works as a BA Coordinator at London Film Academy.