Incredulous
Like many thirtysomethings these days, I grew up on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons. And, like many of these thirtysomethings, I remember the brash novelty of Aeon Flux, and I remember falling in love with it. Initially, there was no dialogue, no insipid banter to diffuse the stylized action, subterfuge, Orwellian utopia, and sexual tension. I was an instant fan of Peter Chung.
Someone eventually decided to give a voice to Aeon and some of her counterparts, when the ephemeral became serial. It worked, because the animation tightened without losing its energy, and the plots and dialogue were accessibly bizarre in a fashion not unlike those of Twin Peaks, so that, even if you saw every frame and heard every word, you were still left feeling used, toyed with, and just lost enough to keep you rapt.
As other good things before and after, Aeon Flux inevitably ended. Peter Chung continued building a career around his off-kilter writing sensibilities and stylized characters. Not long after, he developed a short-lived series, Phantom 2040, based around the classic character The Phantom. The hallmarks of a Chungian production remained: a future built on a tender mixture of utopia and dystopia, rendered in a characteristic, instantly distinguishable visual style. Whatever else it might or might not have been, Phantom 2040 was a welcome relief from most else broadcast TV had to offer, live-action or animated.
Seems Peter’s gonna test my tolerance. There is, now in post-production, a movie adaptation of Aeon Flux, as well as a complementary video game. Each features Charlize Theron, chosen ostensibly for her supposed catty sexuality I imagine, confirming that the producers don’t get it (or they don’t get what I get, which, truth be told, is much more critical). Aeon may have been clad suggestively, but it was always the archetypical dichotomy of a virile, violent essence in feminine form that appealed to me, at least, and I’d wager that’s what appealed to most to whom she appealed at all.
Such is life, though. Rarely is an inspiring source adapted without a loss of quality. In recent years, we’ve seen quite a bit of a certain kind of quality loss: the loss of style, generally visually. The last five years represent a particularly brutal time during which movie producers slaughtered the visual style of penciled and animated works: Spawn; X-Men; Spider Man; The Hulk; and, now, Aeon Flux. That is not to say that there were no successes. I think, by and large, the original The Crow managed its material well (though I hadn’t read The Crow previously, so that might be a bit too liberal a pronouncement for some). Such lossiness is endemic to the adaptation process.
This loss, though, will be more pronounced for Aeon Flux than was the case for any of those other features, even Spawn, the pencils for which Todd McFarlane laid down long ago. For none of those was the visual style itself such an integrated element of the work as was Chung’s vision of Bregna, its citizens, and its most infamous terrorist. Dropping this style for the necessarily baser, more ordinary presentation of live action—or worse, the unwieldily naive design common to many video games, which advances the modeled elastic physics of tits over artistry—is tantamount to leaving out a character central to the development of the story.
I would much rather have seen a feature-length animated movie produced, or nothing, than to witness what can only be a pale, wanting imitation.
No Comments Yet