Never Quite the Right Size: Scaling the Digital in CG Cinema

Abstract

In contemporary digital culture, computers are shrinking in size while computer networks grow increasingly large. At the same time, individuals have an array of technologies at their command, but are also faced with overwhelming options and information, and are subject to extensive and intrusive data collection. This article explores dichotomies between the miniature and vast or gigantic in recent films with narratives of scalar difference, including Jack the Giant Slayer, Pacific Rim, and Wreck-It Ralph. The author suggests that the representations of scale in these films offer implicit commentary on the digital technologies used to produce their scaled effects and images, and further serve as allegories of containment and excess, control and the uncontrollable, as pertaining to digital imagery and technologies.

Massive movie waves and the anthropic ocean

“…So it is too with and on film. 4 Grappling with matters of scale in depicting fantastically monstrous ocean waves has been aided by the rise of computer graphics and animation, which permit filmmakers to fuse filmic and computational materials in composite images, which bring different orders of magnitude into the same frame (though see Davis, 2014). Even as filmmakers can avail themselves of physics simulations that render water surfaces with mathematical exactitude, though, they are also able to leave some properties of material water behind, to indulge their and their viewers' imaginations of what a wave could look like.…”

The 3-D Animated Codescape: Imperfection and Digital Labor Zones in Wall-E (2008) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

“…Through differences in scale, as well as juxtaposition of miniaturized avatars with the vastness of networked videogame space and the external world of the arcade, Ralph explores themes of instability and the loss of self in a digital world, within a digitally animated film. (Davis, 2014: 127)…”

“…Limited to and generally controlled by the code of the program, they still show genuine, though make-believe feelings. In sum, ‘ Wreck-It Ralph explores affective associations with videogame worlds in a manner similar to the way Toy Story explores the world of childhood through toys’ (Davis, 2014: 133). When ‘the phantasmagoria is breached, and the structure of the game peeps through’ they still inhabit the characteristics of the DNA of the computer code, and the digital world that binds them to it.…”

“…His autonomy and disobedience establish him as the protagonist and generate the film’s dramatic conflict, recalling Bukatman’s (2012: 146) argument that ‘the spark of life that separates an automaton from a living being is precisely its assertion of autonomy. The creation that disobeys does not just come to life: it takes on a life of its own.’ (Davis, 2014: 134)…”