(Tron, 1982, Steven Lisberger)
The hardest part of writing this blog has always been the fact that sometimes I watch a film and afterwards I just don't have anything to say. I strive to make these posts a reasonable length (meaning that when I wrote about Fight Club I seriously edited myself, and when I wrote about Big Night I really stretched those words), but sometimes all I can think to say is "that was a good film," or "I guess I didn't like that one so much." Usually when I stumble across one of those films I just try to expand on that basic idea and explain why it was a good film or what exactly made me not like it so much, but that's about all I can do. Those usually aren't the most interesting posts, but I made a commitment to write about every film, so I can't just exclude the films for which I can't think of any interesting personal anecdotes or intelligent discourse. What happens when I encounter a film like this is one of these two things: 1) I quickly pound out a post in the style I explained above, just trying to make "that was a good film" into 5 paragraphs, or 2) I put it off for a couple of months and hope it'll just go away, which it never does. Ladies and gentleman, Tron was one of those films, and I'm sure you can tell that I fell into that second scenario.
About a month ago I got an e-mail informing me that, despite 5 months of worry and panic, I actually had been accepted to the University of Oregon's Master of Arts program in English. For a couple months I had resigned myself to not getting in due to what I believed was a fatal error on my application. Suffice it to say, I was deeply relieved to find out that not only had I not made a fatal error, but I had also proven to the acceptance committee (which I imagine to be something like the Imperial Senate) that I was worthy of admittance to their program where I could continue to say pretentious things about Shakespeare and Anthony Burgess and get college credit for it. While all of this was very grand and exciting, it has also forced me into something of an introspective funk (I swear this is going somewhere). As a side effect of this introspective funk, along with the validation that comes along with being accepted into a graduate program, I decided that it was once again time to try to tackle this blog. I sat down to start writing about Tron and words were just not coming to me. I would try to write an opening sentence and it would feel flat and lifeless, as if it was written by a fifth grader with a limited grasp of the English language. "Snap out of it," I'd think to myself, "you're a graduate student now! Surely you can write a few paragraphs about Tron without completely embarrassing yourself." However, after about twenty minutes I decided once again that it was futile and I abandoned all efforts, firmly believing that in a few days I'd be able to make my brain work a little bit better.
A few nights later I finally had a Tron breakthrough. I was halfheartedly watching Conan, staring at my open Facebook window, when it suddenly struck me: watching Tron in the 21st century is a fascinating study in all of the things that my generation takes for granted. Tron was one of the first films to employ computer animation, and even then it was only used for about 20 minutes of the final film. Even more remarkably, the computer the filmmakers worked with only had 2MB of memory, which is astounding considering the fact that every day I carry over 30GB worth of music around in my purse. What about the other 76 minutes of the film that weren't computer animated? Well, any of the scenes that are black and white with orange and blue accents were rotoscoped and colorized, which required more work than even a standard cel-animated film. The technique was apparently so difficult and costly that it was never repeated. However, when I watched the film it was hard not to laugh at how cheesy and basic the computer animation looks. My mom repeatedly assured me that Tron was mindblowingly advanced when it was first released, but I live in a world that has films shot almost entirely on a green screen (Tron: Legacy being a fine example of that) so it was almost hard for me to take her seriously even though I knew she was telling the truth.
Now, I'm not saying that today's computer animated films are easy to make. What I am saying is that nowadays when a big computer generated tidal wave takes out the entirety of New York City audiences barely bat an eye at the work that went in to making that happen. It's hard for us to be impressed with computer animation when practically every film we see has computer generated special effects and we carry in our pockets devices that are more advanced than all of the technology used to make Tron combined. The first time I saw Gollum in The Lord of the Rings I didn't think to myself, "wow, that's some incredible computer animation" because I was too busy thinking "wow, what a creepy little critter he is." Some would say that's the mark of good computer animation, and to an extent that's true, but there's a tragedy in the fact that we take such remarkable technological achievements for granted. In all honesty, if I'm without my cell phone for a day I feel like I'm missing a part of my body (and not a silly one like my left pinky finger, a big one like my entire right arm), but I never really take the time to think about the work that went into the technology that makes my life convenient and my films enjoyable. Even though it took me a while to realize it, Tron taught me a valuable lesson to not take the technology in my life for granted because 28 years ago the most advanced computer animation companies in the country had a computer with only 2 MB of memory.
Now, I'm not saying that today's computer animated films are easy to make. What I am saying is that nowadays when a big computer generated tidal wave takes out the entirety of New York City audiences barely bat an eye at the work that went in to making that happen. It's hard for us to be impressed with computer animation when practically every film we see has computer generated special effects and we carry in our pockets devices that are more advanced than all of the technology used to make Tron combined. The first time I saw Gollum in The Lord of the Rings I didn't think to myself, "wow, that's some incredible computer animation" because I was too busy thinking "wow, what a creepy little critter he is." Some would say that's the mark of good computer animation, and to an extent that's true, but there's a tragedy in the fact that we take such remarkable technological achievements for granted. In all honesty, if I'm without my cell phone for a day I feel like I'm missing a part of my body (and not a silly one like my left pinky finger, a big one like my entire right arm), but I never really take the time to think about the work that went into the technology that makes my life convenient and my films enjoyable. Even though it took me a while to realize it, Tron taught me a valuable lesson to not take the technology in my life for granted because 28 years ago the most advanced computer animation companies in the country had a computer with only 2 MB of memory.
If I ever am lucky enough to teach a film class I'm going to show Tron to my students (if I can even find it, that is. For a film everyone's heard of it sure is a challenge to your hands on). Not because it's a particularly great film, but because it took real work to make it. All of those scenes that are laughably primitive to us now were painstakingly made back then, and it's eye-opening to reach that conclusion. Tron helped pave the way for CGI characters like Gollum or the Balrog, and for that it deserves to be remembered.
