The main difference between 3D animated filmmaking and 3D computer games is that the latter must present scenes in real-time, because they have to respond to changes in state from the game’s logic and from the user’s input. In fact, OReilly’s animation has always been jealous of video games. But once you’ve watched them, it becomes clear that the little asshole of an alien would not be out of place in any of OReilly’s often NSFW films. On first blush Jonze’s futurist chic and OReilly’s jackass glitch seem like unlikely stylistic bedfellows. The animator David OReilly was selected to direct the “Alien Child” game sequences after Jonze had seen and appreciated OReilly’s aggressively unusual, award-winning 3D animated shorts. The game itself was not real, but an animated film made to look the part-a video game as a set or a prop. Why would one dog-paddle a computer when instead one can flirt with Scarlett Johansson to operate one? At the same time, the film juxtaposes that ungainly interface with the natural, seductive draw of Samantha. His cumbersome inner life is expressed through his awkward interface with a computer game. The effect defamiliarizes the game even as it casts Theodore as a washout. Theodore plays David OReilly's mock-up of a video game in Her (Warner Bros.) The act is ridiculous it looks like dog paddling, or rifling through paper files, or prancing like a show horse. In a burlesque of recent “natural” physical interfaces like Microsoft’s Kinect, Theodore moves the game character by walking the fingers of his own downturned hands to operate the character’s feet. The viewer sees the game’s uncanniness most clearly when Theodore controls the helmeted creature in its holographic world. The same could be said of the film’s high-waisted trouser fashions, improbable high rises and mass transit in future Los Angeles, and Theodore’s job as an outsourced personal correspondence writer. Called “Alien Child” by the filmmakers, the game seems familiar enough to be plausible to viewers, yet foreign enough to induce estrangement. Near the start of his relationship with a computer operating system in Spike Jonze’s Academy Award-winning film Her, Samantha the OS (Scarlett Johansson) helps Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) play a videogame.
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