A Scanner Darkly

The Film

A government agent in a near future in which a fifth of the world's population is addicted to the mind-altering Substance D, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is in a dangerous position. Tasked with infiltrating a group of known users and dealers, he himself has become hooked on the substance, adding yet another layer of deception to his already complicated dual life as he attempts to conceal this from his superiors. As Arctor continues to lose control of the situation, he struggles to differentiate between one persona and the other, and between fantasy and reality...

If ever there was a film in which the cinematic technique threatens to overshadow every single other element in the mix, it's A Scanner Darkly. Virtually every review of this Richard Linklater-helmed adaptation of Philip K. Dick's paranoia-fueled 1977 sci-fi thriller has spent no small amount of words either praising or condemning the decision to first shoot the film in live action and then "animate" over the raw footage to give it a hand-made, comic book appearance, and this will be no exception. The technique on display here, first attempted by Linklater in his 2001 talking heads mind trip Waking Life, is essentially the latest iteration of a process that is almost as old as animation itself, known as rotoscoping.


The earliest documented experiments with rotoscoping in animation are those of brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, who found fame with their Betty Boop and Popeye cartoon shorts. In 1914, they used live action footage of Dave Fleischer dressed as a clown as reference for the character of Koko the Clown, which led to their now-famous series of experimental shorts, Out of the Inkwell, with combined animation (freehand and rotoscoped) with live action. The Fleischers continued to use rotoscoping in many of their cartoons, perhaps most famously in a trio of Betty Boop shorts featuring the music of Cab Calloway and his orchestra, and in their later Superman cartoons in the 1940s. The techniques pioneered by the Fleischers quickly became popular throughout the animation industry, including with Walt Disney, who employed rotoscoping for many of the more realistic human characters in his feature films between the late 1930s and early 1950s (although he was always rather secretive about this fact). The benefits of rotoscoping are fairly obvious: not only is it cheaper and less labour-intensive than creating original movements from scratch, it also requires considerably less animation and talent on the part of the artist. It also theoretically allows for more realistic, believable motion by accurately replicating the movements of real people - although, as has been seen throughout history, reality has a habit of putting the kibosh on theory.

The simple truth is that rotoscoping does not in fact make animation more lifelike - quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that animation's strength lies in presenting, in the words of Walt Disney, "the illusion of life" rather than a slavish reproduction of it. Characters like Captain Hook in Peter Pan, Chihiro in Spirited Away, Woody in Toy Story, Tom & Jerry, Daffy Duck, Ren & Stimpy and so on are memorable and believable not because they act and move like real people do, but because they convey the essence of human behaviour. A real person who moved like Bugs Bunny would look very odd indeed, just as would Bugs Bunny if he moved like a real person. As has been seen with animated productions that have made heavy use of rotoscoping, such as Ralph Bakshi's Wizards and The Lord of the Rings, the technique has a habit of drawing attention to individual quirks and twitches, causing movement to strobe and look overly "busy", while the less said about He-Man and the other ghastly Filmation products of the 1980s, which also made heavy use of the technique, the better. Indeed, throughout much of the animation profession, "rotoscoping" is essentially a swearword not used in polite company, not only because of the less than stellar results it produces but also because, much like the recent trend towards motion capture, it has a nasty history of putting animators out of jobs.


Richard Linklater, I suspect, sees animation in much the same way that many live action directors do: as an offshoot of live action, when in fact the exact opposite is closer to the truth. As a result, his experiments with the medium have never harnessed its full potential, instead merely attempting to slavishly imitate live action, the point of which is rather questionable. He, like fellow live action directors Robert Zemeckis with The Polar Express and George Miller with Happy Feet (both of which made extensive use of motion capture), have succeeded in creating a style that borders on looking clumsy, if not downright grotesque. There is a subtle difference, however: while Zemeckis and Miller's respective films seem to have been intended to convey the impression of something synthetic (in this case computer-generated character models) being real, Linkater, with both Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, has taken live action footage performed by recognisable actors like Julie Delpy and Keanu Reeves, and, by overlaying it with hand-traced outlines and flat washes of paint, attempted to make the real seem otherworldly. It's a stylistic procedure which, in the case of A Scanner Darkly, is somewhat justified by its surreal, drug-induced narrative, but which ultimately, for this viewer at least, is merely distracting, drawing attention to the film's mechanics rather than effectively conveying a sense of confusion and otherworldliness.

It's for this reason that I've spent so long discussing the film's visual style and said so little about the actual content. To put it bluntly, A Scanner Darkly is, for me, more interesting as a failed experiment than as an actual film. It's a gimmick that tries and fails to obscure a plot and characters that are, quite frankly, flat and tedious - a strange combination of science fiction, acid trip and slacker comedy which never quite manages to succeed (of the various elements, the latter is the most effective). I should probably point out that, as someone who has never used drugs (unless the occasional Paracetamol to cure a headache counts), I'm probably missing something that will resonate more deeply with those who have. As adaptations of Dick's material go, it's certainly no Blade Runner, and it's not even a Minority Report. Both of these films did a far better job of conveying paranoia and government conspiracy in a technologically-dominated near future than Linklater's film, while the various quirks and personality traits of his troupe of characters are not well-served by the animation. Robert Downey Jr, in particular, is simply too understated to be effective, while Keanu Reeves does an admittedly believable but hardly impression imitation of a plank of wood throughout the running time. As part of a technician's demo reel, A Scanner Darkly constitutes a flawed but intriguing test. As a narrative film, it's close to being a total disaster.

HD DVD Presentation

It's a little difficult to rate the transfer of A Scanner Darkly, because the material is so flat and lacking in detail that it's difficult to tell just how faithfully it has been encoded. In any event, I noticed no major problems with the 1080p, VC-1 encoded transfer, which, like all Warner's high definition (and, for the most part, standard definition) releases of 1.85:1 films, is presented in a ratio of 1.78:1. The bold black outlines look suitably clean, and there is no evidence of edge enhancement. Additionally, while the standard definition release was ridden with compression artefacts, there are none to be seen here.

The only audio mix provided is a 640 Kbps Dolby Digital-Plus 5.1 track, and it's functional without being particularly impressive. The film is certainly dialogue-heavy, and even the various hallucinatory scenes, which you might expect to feature something more in terms of 5.1 audio design, sound fairly flat. Clarity is generally not a problem, although Robert Downey Jr's constantly dry, monotonous mumbling is at times a little on the incoherent side. English, Enlgish SDH, French and Spanish subtitles are also provided, although only for the film itself, not the extras.

Extras

Replicating all of the bonus content of its standard definition counterpart, the HD DVD's extras begin with an audio commentary featuring Richard Linklater, Keanu Reeves, producer Tommy Pallotta, author Jonathan Lethem and Isa Dick-Hackett, daughter of Philip K. Dick. It's a largely dry affair, but quite informative, with Dick-Hackett especially discussing her father's intentions and relating them to their treatment in the end product, while Linklater makes a valiant (but, for me, ultimately unconvincing) attempt to defend his decision to go with a quasi-animated look for the film. Meanwhile, the contributions of Reeves, who makes it clear within the first couple of minutes that he has never even seen the film, are largely disposable.

After the commentary, the mean making-of feature is the 26-minute One Summer in Austin: The Story of Filming A Scanner Darkly, the title of which is pretty self-explanatory. Beginning with archival footage of an interview with Philip K. Dick, it quickly establishes itself as a serious attempt to break down the themes of the film and the book upon which it was based, providing a considerably more substantial look at these concepts than your average piece of EPK fluff. A considerable portion of the featurette also provides something of a fly-on-the-wall video diary of the principle location photography. All in all, this is a pretty decent piece.

More interesting, at least from this animation nut's perspective, is The Weight of the Line: Animation Tales, a 20-minute featurette examining the film's unique look from a technical perspective. While I am not a fan of this visual style, the production process is fascinating, and I don't mind admitting that I actually enjoyed this featurette more than the film itself. It was here that I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that a team of artists actually digitally traced every single frame of the film by hand, rather than going through the considerably less labour-intensive method of running it all through an automated process. Either way, it provides a fascinating insight into just how labour-intensive the process was, and gives a brief yet tantalising glance at some of the raw, unprocessed footage shot with the actors on location.

The theatrical trailer is also included, although presented in plain old upscaled 480-line mode. Ironically enough, the trailer in many ways looks more eye-pleasing than the 1080p main feature, since it is derived from a film print rather than a digital master. This use of film adds a much-needed "analogue" aesthetic to the material, which in turn makes it look considerably less "plastic" than it does when digitally sourced.

Overall

A solid presentation of an extremely flawed film, this HD DVD release of A Scanner Darkly should please those who enjoyed the film. While this is not a title that shows off the prowess of high definition to any great extent, it is an undeniable improvement on the standard definition release and, if nothing else, a curious novelty in that it is one of only a tiny number of animated (or, in this case, quasi-animated) titles to be available in HD.

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