Spirit of Invention: The Fantasy Films of Robert Zemeckis, Part 2

Fig. 1 - A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemeckis, 2009).

At the beginning of 2022, the film industry news reported that writer-director Robert Zemeckis was already preparing a follow up to his then-upcoming Pinocchio (2022) with another fantasy movie, albeit one that might be described as a little more ‘sombre’ in tone, being an adaptation of the graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire. Of McGuire’s graphic novel, comic book creator Chris Ware has noted that “The rhymes and consonances, both visual and verbal, between pages and sections and images, compound with an intensity that is lyrical and romantic, yet also distant and dissonant” (2014). There’s something in Ware’s note that suggests the cinematic potential of the source material for s Zemeckis project. A quick acquaintance with the premise of Here, and by implication, anticipating its eventual film adaptation, suggests where some of the broader appeal of Zemeckis’ filmography is to be found, namely in in the way that a number of his movies play with the elasticity of time and fantasy of space: the Back to the Future trilogy (1995-1990), Contact (1997), The Polar Express (2004) and A Christmas Carol (2009) (Fig. 1) each offer an example.

In late 2018, I wrote a piece for this blog that now appears to have become ‘part 1’ of a two-part attempt to say something about some of the films that have been directed by, or written and directed by, Zemeckis. The focus of this follow-up piece, then, is to look closely at several Zemeckis films that actively dedicate themselves to fantasy. Indeed, we might even define them as fairy tale films. For this piece, I’ll focus on Welcome to Marwen (2018), The Witches (2020) and Pinocchio, with occasional forays into connections with the computer-animated films The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol. It seems to me that the recent Pinocchio sits well alongside these earlier ‘Christmas’ films, with The Polar Express fleetingly anticipating both Pinocchio and A Christmas Carol - just look closely at the details of the train carriage that’s packed with abandoned toys. We can, I think, say that the Zemeckis films discussed here are consistent with the concept of “animated fantasy” (Holliday & Sergeant 2018, 5).

After Zemeckis completed his ‘mocap’ trilogy (we might even call it the Zemeckis Christmas trilogy of The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol) he then refocused on live-action; albeit adult-orientated dramas that were thoroughly enhanced by digital animation and environment creation via the fusion of practical sets with digital extensions. As Zemeckis has said, all films are visual effects. Even the most unadorned close-up of a human face, therefore, is a visual effect. Certainly, Zemeckis’ movies adhere to what film theorist André Bazin defined as films with faith in the image rather than faith in reality (2004, xv). It’s perhaps more of a fusion of those two things though, and Zemeckis has often invoked François Truffaut’s definition of an engaging movie being one that combines a sense of ‘reality’ with a sense of visual spectacle. Again, that visual spectacle could ‘just’ be a close-up of a human face [as an additional note, the visual spectacle offered by production design and art direction as a way of expressing story is usefully explored in this piece about Pinocchio).

Fig. 2 - Zemeckis’ adaptation of the Disney Animation Studio’s 1940 adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s novel Pinocchio.

What is it, then, that the fantasy mode allows a filmmaker like Zemeckis to do that’s consistent in characterisation and visual style across a range of his movies ? In turn, how does the medium of animation allow for certain storytelling effects to be shown?  Zemeckis’s recent adaptation of the Disney Animation Studio’s 1940 adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s novel Pinocchio is of interest in this respect, then, but my hope is to say something more about the film as a ‘Zemeckis movie’ (Fig. 2). That said, there’s a historical note worth making here about the relationship between Walt Disney as producer and studio head and his emphasis on adapting existing stories and children’s novels. In her essay “Walt Disney’s Interpretation of Children’s Literature,” Jill P. May writes that “Walt Disney’s great entertainment films based upon children’s literature have gained him more recognition than any of his other endeavours. […] None was designed to reflect the literary elements of theme, characterization and writing style found in the original books.  What Walt Disney wanted when he bought the rights to a children’s classic was the basic setting and plot. [ …] Disney sought the memorable drama, the action and the villainy long-remembered by the reader after finishing the original of a well-known book. He planned his film versions around satisfying emotional experiences that would remain with the viewer” (1981, 463). With this in mind, recall the flight to Neverland in Peter Pan (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1953), for example, or the moment when Snow White finds herself lost in the forest in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937). Certainly, Disney’s own rural childhood made for an affection for animals, and he duly came to recognize just how much creative scope resided in animation as a depicting animals and deploying them in stories. As such, there’s a connecting thread there that takes us back to Aesop’s Fables and, slightly less further back, to the work of Charles Dickens. Disney read Dickens.

Fig. 3 - Zemeckis’ recent adaptation of The Witches.

Crickets! Charles Dickens had a cricket on the hearth in his story of the same name, and the Dickens connection - via Zemeckis’s assured adaptation of A Christmas Carol -  is present in Pinocchio, too. In this new movie, the idea of a protagonist being humanised echoes the original story of “A Christmas Carol” and in terms of the kinds of visual spectacle of which Dickens, Disney and Collodi provide plenty. The extended sequence set within Geppetto’s workshop that comprises the first act of the film relates neatly to the work done in the introduction of Ebenezer Scrooge in Zemeckis’ earlier A Christmas Carol adaptation (oh, how I wish that adaptation had been able to include a scene that had been designed and taken some way towards its full realisation: of a ship on a wintry, Christmastime sea). Both Ebenezer and Geppetto are lonely men who have shut themselves off from the wider world. As in A Christmas Carol, with the opening of Pinocchio, Zemeckis maximises the opportunity that animation offers to integrate fantasy, or non-human, characters with human characters. In both films, the adventure into the world that’s undertaken by each film’s protagonists pits the naïve against the cynical; the ordinary against the extraordinary. That is all key to the source material, and the Zemeckis films delight in visualising both contrasts. In Zemeckis’ recent film adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel The Witches (Fig. 3), a boy is confronted by the illusory appearance of a gathering of witches and it’s his generosity of spirit that comes to the fore. Zemeckis’ adaptation is a more obvious fairy tale movie, and it’s this same quality that’s found in Pinocchio. In keeping with that fairy tale feeling, The Hero Boy (the same name given to the protagonist of the film version of The Polar Express) in The Witches must make his way through a corrupt and deceitful adult world. This kind of journey made by the child protagonist echoes that found in The Polar Express and subsequently in Pinocchio. In each film, children find their insular life at home giving way to a much larger experience in unknown places. The train to the North Pole and Stromboli’s caravan to the next stop each provide a place that provides the instruction that can’t be given at home. The train and the circus caravan transport our protagonists, taking them away from the hearth in that fairy tale tradition. Indeed, there’s even a match between that marvellous journey that the train ticket takes in The Polar Express and the briefer journey taken by the flyer from Stromboli’s circus. The train carriages of The Polar Express function as places within which specific character forming and character illuminating set pieces occur (for example The Hero Boy taking a ski-ride with the hobo atop the train as an act of faith) and this is echoed in Pinocchio. Indeed, with Guillermo del Toro’s imminent release of his stop motion adaptation of Pinocchio, it’s worth noting that he too had originally planned on a stop-motion adaption of The Witches from his own screenplay adaptation.

Throughout Pinocchio, the animated (photorealistically rendered) characters are given plenty of subtle physical expression and also opportunities for broader humour. Their performance suggests something of a Warner Bros/Tex Avery attitude that’s distinct from the more hyper-realistic gesturing that is part of the Disney animated character style. In his conversation with me for a piece I recently wrote for 3D World magazine, Ben Jones at the VFX studio Moving Picture Company (MPC) noted that his team were encouraged by Zemeckis to move towards realising exaggerated gesture and performance for the animated characters. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see a connection between the physical humour of Honest John and Gideon in Pinocchio and Avery’s Golden Age animation. Jones also noted in that same conversation that in realising the character of Pinocchio, “There was a lot of concern at the beginning about how to make it look wooden and expressive in a realistic way and that posed the teams with particular challenges like how to make the woodgrain not stretch […] be physical and a bit more photoreal with it. But Bob (Zemeckis) was keen for us to have fun with it and embrace the animation style” (2022). This embrace of an animation aesthetic that moves across more than only the filmmaker’s most ‘obviously’ animated films was referred to very recently by Zemeckis’ longtime collaborator, the composer Alan Silvestri in a recent conversation with Glen Ballard about their work on the score and songs for Pinocchio. At one point, Silvestri recalled a note about an approach to storytelling that Zemeckis had once dubbed Toon Speed. It’s a phrase that goes back to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), yet seems perfectly applicable to a number of Zemeckis’ subsequent films. Silvestri described the term’s point as follows: “Bob has this motif about starting something in the real world and having it become faster and faster until it is no longer physically possible in the real world. And he would refer to that as ‘Toon Speed’.”

There’s a surfeit of imagination glimpsed throughout Pinocchio too, and I was struck by the bright-eyed smoky phantoms on Pleasure Island. Their fleeting screen appearance oh-so-briefly evoked Zemeckis’ longstanding horror genre sensibility as director and producer that includes his film as Executive Producer The Frighteners (Peter Jackson, 1996) and his earlier directorial piece, Go To The Head of the Class from the Amazing Stories television series (1985-1987) (I wonder if there was an all the more menacing scene or sequence for these smoky phantoms that had been intended but that didn’t make the film’s final cut?). That fairy tale / horror back and forth is there throughout Zemeckis’ movies, as Brian Tallerico noted in his recent review of The Witches. Tallerico argued that that “To its credit, it has some of the most unapologetically scary imagery in family entertainment in a long time, reminding one of its source material and, at its best, of Zemeckis’ work with twisted visions like Death Becomes Her and even the darker edge of Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (2020). This space in Zemeckis’ movies for varying degrees of the horrific and monstrous to be shown finds particular power in the films that he has directed that have been for young audiences: not a teen audience but a pre-teen audience.

Fig. 4 - Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Characters who have experienced loss also populate Zemeckis’ fantasy films, and the fantasy encounters that they each have offer them a way of dealing with the experience. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Eddie Valiant has experience loss (Fig. 4), just as Geppetto and The Boy in The Witches, and even Mark in Welcome To Marwen where as in Pinocchio, a doll or puppet as avatar of the human experience is key to understanding how loss is managed. In Welcome To Marwen, all of the protagonist’s neuroses are concentrated in the character of Deja Thoris; she is a character that has bewitched Mark, casting a spell on him, as he explains during the ‘battle of Marwen’ sequence late in the film. In each case, an encounter with an extraordinary, fantastical, ‘otherworldly’ experience becomes key to them transforming. With The Witches, the Hero Boy deals with loss and absence and finds a way to deal with the adult world and the power it wields within its horror film mode. In their ventures into the world beyond home, the children at the centre of The Polar Express, The Witches and Pinocchio find themselves understanding something of what makes them an individual.

Celebrating your own individuality is an idea that’s present in The Witches, and it’s very much there in Pinocchio; just as it’s also to be found in Welcome to Marwen (even though this is not one of Zemeckis’s so-called ‘children’s films’). In each story, a fantasy dynamic allows for allegory to dramatize and visualise the dilemma of how to find your place in the world. That dilemma is not so far removed from the dilemma that George McFly found himself contending with in the Back to the Future trilogy. As in Zemeckis’s earlier film Forrest Gump (1994), Fabiana in Pinocchio makes the world work for her regardless of the physical challenge that she is living with. She makes the world fit to her needs, and in this respect her choice shows Pinocchio that an apparent limitation can be quite the opposite. Her song gives expression to this idea. She tells a story to make her point. In a fleeting moment of screentime early in Pinocchio, we are also told that Geppetto has created Pinocchio the puppet as a response to having lost his own son. The ‘healing power of art’, then, and, by extension, the power exerted by invention (as Zemeckis himself describes as being articulated in Welcome to Marwen) is no less characteristic of Pinocchio. As such, it’s the latest instalment in a set of Zemeckis’s fairy tale films (Pinocchio, Welcome To Marwen, The Witches, A Christmas Carol) that celebrate the invention of both craft (within the stories of particular movies and also in terms of moviemaking as craft) and of the self.

**Article published: November 18, 2022**

References

Bazin, André. 2004. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Trans Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Holliday, Christopher, and Alexander Sergeant, 2018. “Introduction: Approaching Fantasy/Animation.” In Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, Taylor & Francis Group, edited by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant, 1-20. London & New York: Routledge.

Jones, Ben. 2022. “Interview with James Clarke.” 3D World (December), forthcoming.

May, Jill P. 1981. “Walt Disney’s Interpretation of Children’s Literature.” Language Arts 58, no. 4 (April): 463-472.

Tallerico, Brian. 2020. “Review of The Witches.” RogerEbert.com, October 23, 2020. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-witches-movie-review-2020.

Ware, Chris. 2014. “Chris Ware on Here by Richard McGuire – a game-changing graphic novel.” The Guardian, December 17, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/chris-ware-here-richard-mcguire-review-graphic-novel.

Biography

James Clarke is a tutor on the MA Screenwriting at the University of Gloucestershire and he has recently worked as a script reader for the BFI and Channel 4’s new writer / filmmaker schemes. James’s film journalism work focuses on visual effects and animated films. Twitter: @jasclarkewriter