Discerning between beaver vs. human gaze in “Hoppers”
Yes the Pixar movie...
I’m quite charmed by this stunt from the London-based Buffalo Zine, whose staff are apparently editing their next issue “live” in the window at Selfridges. Something something “proof of human effort is now the status object”? It also calls to mind the guiding impulse behind Twitch streamers who broadcast their eating and sleeping as inherently worthy content units; should more official processes of cultural production then be made available to be witnessed live in order to brandish its value? (Sadly, it hasn’t been a great week for British indie mags otherwise — RIP The Face! Surely someone will pick up that IP…maybe Dean Kissick has the time after breathing life back into the still-undead VICE…)
Theme of today’s issue is not totally unlike the 2016 Met Gala: much manus x machina on the mind. But to start off with something fun: I saw Hoppers — yes lol the Pixar movie — on the force of a recommendation from my friend Kazumi, and I can now also pass along my endorsement. (To be honest, half the fun is walking into the film with zero context, so I won’t blame you for skipping to the next block if you want your Hoppers experience completely unadulterated.)
The premise is kooky: Mabel, a gung-ho 19-year-old environmentalist, discovers a secret lab at her university that has perfected the technology of putting your consciousness into extremely life-like robot animals (yes, very Avatar-esque, which the movie acknowledges bluntly, which I respect), allowing one to communicate with and live among fellow animals. So Mabel “hops” herself into beaver form and sets about recruiting animals to help save a particularly cherished forest glade.
It’s a funny and unhinged movie; yes that’s Meryl Streep and Dave Franco and Jon Hamm and a bunch of SNL faves in the cast, and yes there is kind of a crazy random murder that occurs mid-way through and also you do see the face slide off of a human (robot), so it’s kind of weirdly advanced in humor. But a truly amazing running joke that pretty much carries the movie is that the beaver characters look and sound different depending on whether you’re seeing them from the point of view of a fellow animal (or animal robot) versus a human.
Per scenes from the perspective of the Beaver Gaze, for example, the beaver characters appear extremely detailed and cartoonish; in this form, they also speak English and we, the audience, can understand them. But in scenes where the beaver characters are viewed through regular human gaze (i.e. when Mabel-as-beaver tries to communicate with the human mayor, and he’s like, why is this beaver in my car), the beaver characters look cuter, fluffier, almost toy-like; we hear them make this sort of whimpering mewing sound instead of words. We might switch between Beaver Gaze and Human Gaze several times in one scene, and it is hilarious every time.
The dichotomy is both a joke/perfect design solve for the inherent problem of an animated movie where both human and animal characters can talk, but not to each other (and they both have to look somewhat realistic while doing so). It reminded me of this article about the Paddington puppet they’re making for the West End show out of the rationale that Paddington can’t look like an actual bear, but it also can’t be too cartoonish on stage with people. After seeing Hoppers, my friend Rachel and I (still brushing away our tears) decided that this dissonance is actually why all those Disney live action movies felt so stupid — when one watches Lion King, one don’t actually want to see a mangy life-like lion move his eyebrows and mouth in a zoologically accurate way to plot his brother’s death. Nor was I terribly interested in what an actual flounder BFF looks like, per The Little Mermaid. Animation as an imitation of realism, boring. Animation as a romanticization of what power-hungry forest animals might be like? Now that’s worth imagining.
The other thought (and sort of spoiler, though I guess you did see the photo above) I had about Hoppers is that it’s maybe the first movie I’ve seen that has actually mastered what we can call Phone Humor. In two pivotal scenes, the animals gain access to someone’s smartphone and figure out how to use text-to-voice technology to actually talk to a human; one beaver inevitably discovers the emoji board, and then all hell breaks loose. This was, as Rachel pointed out, the part where the kids in the theater laughed the hardest.
Okay went kind of long on Hoppers which, let’s be honest, is a way more fun use of time than parsing out the latest developments in the journalism industry’s ambivalence toward using AI. But parse we shall. Last Thursday, two big stories came out that had the media accounts atwitter: There was a piece from Maxwell Zeff in Wired about tech reporters using AI to help write and edit their stories, the tl;dr being that “AI workflow is especially enticing for reporters who have gone independent, losing valuable resources like editors and fact-checkers that typically come with a traditional newsroom. Rather than just prompting ChatGPT to write stories, independent journalists say they are re-creating these resources with AI.”
There was an extra layer of irony/goss per the writer Jasmine Sun, who is featured in the article and talks about using Claude as an editor, then added on X that she “used to be one of the humans” assisting Kevin Roose [also in the article] with a book on AI, “until he automated my job away with a team of Claudes.” Oh!
Meanwhile, WSJ’s Isabella Simonetti published a story that same day about Fortune editor Nick Lichtenberg who apparently used AI to publish more than 600 stories since last summer: “Initially, Lichtenberg would share bylines with Fortune Intelligence. Now, he typically takes sole bylines because he feels the work is mostly his own.” This piece got a lot more people mad because the time-honored tradition of manually catering to insane output goals set by your publication is supposed to be a rite of passage in journalism, but my main takeaway is that I think we’re going to see a clearer demarcation between types of journalism, mainly between utilitarian news items versus voicey writing. Writing as information (valued for accuracy, speed, scoop level and therefore very AI-optimal) versus writing as expression (valued for style, personality, a dash of parasocial je ne sais quois; very much not AI optimal because hello, the humanity is the point). So it might be a good idea for everyone to get clear on where their strengths are if we’re entering into an AI-assisted traffic race. Based on how things went down at The New York Times today, where a freelancer got axed for using AI in a book review — knowing what the assignment actually is might be the only real career skill needed ahead…
Does it depress you to think about how much time and energy you spent sorting yourself into a specific vocation-based identity and adhering to its strict constraints, only to find out that the Instagrammable multi-hyphenates will inherit the earth? Well, at least John Seabrook’s New Yorker story on goldendoodles and the inherent weirdness of dog breeds is ripe with metaphors galore…
The funniest thing about Charlotte Klein’s investigation of the Vogue wedding industrial complex is the reminder that Vogue Weddings is a web feature; those things don’t even make it into print! Honestly, warms my heart to think of rich people stressing over a digital media series….
Finally, I finally saw the “Hard Copy New York” show at the International Center of Photography on Saturday, where the curators played around with photo-copying selected works of sceney contemporary photographers (i.e. Jerry Hsu, Daniel Arnold) and stapling the resulting images up in interesting sizes and arrangements. Somehow, I felt neither old nor young enough to have any truly strong feelings about the grainy copy look that the show’s appeal mostly banks on; there’s a copy machine in the cafe area you can play with (for $6), which kind of gives away how exotic the medium is assumed to be for the intended demographic in mind. Mostly I liked Gray Sorrenti’s images in the show purely for the eye-tickling contrast of seeing iPhone photos, selfies, and Facetime screenshots replicated as photocopies. There, the graininess mimicked the way digital image quality degrades with every screengrab or repost. A reminder that it’s ephemera all the way down; here today, shredded tomorrow.