Day After Tomorrow wolves: so faux, so cheesy
I was kinda half watching the bore fest that is The Day After Tomorrow, which was on etv last night. I’ve seen it before, and it didn’t really rank up there as movies I enjoy – disaster movies are second only to period war dramas or epic biopics in terms of boreville to me. Still, there wasn’t much else on and I was tired enough to sit through most of it anyway.
One scene that got me thinking was the ludicrous scene with the wolves that escaped from the zoo. They were all to clearly CGI doggies, and not even brilliant ones either. Lame as they were, I still thought that it was so much better to see faux animals than real ones. You see, it really bothers me when I see live animals in movies and adverts – especially knowing the kind of thing that goes down with animals in entertainment. You only have to read a bit about how animals in captivity behave, especially those that are trained to ‘act’, and you will get an idea of how much life sucks to be a ‘famous’ animal in show biz. I don’t care if they are looked after, wild animals do not belong in zoos or trailers, and it is just not cool to use real life animals in tv or film. Especially not when there are other ways to get the same effect. I would rather have super cheesy wolves than have seen real wolves, that would have been tragic and depressing… and I’d rather roll my eyes and grimmace than feel sad.
The Garmin ads use CGI animals too, and I absolutely love those ads – the Wildebeest one and the salmon one are both awesome, and because they’ve used real life clips in some instances, you can hardly tell where the real animal begins and the faux one ends. Jurassic Park too, if they can make realistic dinosaurs, they can make realistic anything – let the poor monkeys go, and fake it!
This is just my 2 cents anyway, many will argue that the special effects are more important than animal exploitation. For me, I’d take cheesy over real any day!
