[DOOR BELL]
Uh, Scott Pilgrim?
Hi, I was thinking about asking you out
but then I realized how stupid that would be.
So do you want to go out sometime?
Superheroes might rule the box office today,
but the visual mechanics of the medium that spawned them
have been mimicked considerably by directors for decades,
to varying levels of success.
Faux panels, speed lines, and sound effects
can be traced as far back as the Batman 1966 TV show.
However, a lot of fallen short or been used out
of pure kitsch.
Told you comic books was bad for you!
With one major exception.
Scott Pilgrim is one of the only movies
to ever successfully use comic book storytelling
in a live action film.
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World was co-written
by Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall,
and based on comic book series Scott Pilgrim.
The film has a keen visual language all its own,
as does most of Edgar Wright's works.
It uses energy, style, and ingenious transitions
better than, well, most films not made
by Edgar Wright in the 10 years since the film's release.
Despite the film's commercial failure at the box office,
it has since found a solid foundation of love
among both the film fans and genre hounds alike.
For the uninitiated, Scott Pilgrim
follows the eponymous character as he
begins dating manic pixie dream girl incarnate Ramona Flowers.
Do you know this one girl with hair like this?
Yes, that's Ramona Flowers.
And soon realizes that he has to literally battle
her ex-partners in order to be in a relationship with her.
Much of the film's now iconic and
beloved visual stylistic aesthetic
stem from the decisions that director Edgar Wright made.
He chose to attempt to stay true to the source material
in a way few directors do.
The strengths of Scott Pilgrim Versus The World
is that the visuals that the story uses
are organically pulled from that source material.
The film is steeped in both video game
iconography and comic book storytelling mechanics.
The film draws heavily on the six volume
series, pulling not only its story, themes, and characters,
but many of its visual gags and cinematic tricks directly
from that source material.
It literally reproduces gags and jokes verbatim.
Which normally would be tiring, but with these filmmakers
in control is exhilarating, and something
that we've seen in anime for a very long time.
Right from the beginning of the film
it sets you up for this to be a different experience.
We hear a narrator delivering a set up voiceover
and we see text.
This is not pure exposition like many other films.
The way this is handled is intentional,
in order to get the audience accustomed to the idea
of seeing text integrated on screen.
This stylistic motif builds to the use of caption boxes.
This is a second level of the film using the comic book
visual language to pull the audience deeper
into the world of the film.
It's all building, slowly pulling the audience further
and further into the stylized world,
getting the viewer accustomed to things that are familiar
and that we recognize, but not exactly our lived
in experience.
Let's take it a step further when Kim Pine screams--
We are Sex Bob-omb!
We see her words manifest literally.
One, two, three, four, in midair.
The text is also not a cold black and white font,
it's a diffused digital printed look.
Almost half video game and half Ben-Day Dots,
paying homage to the twin mediums
that spawned Scott Pilgrim.
While they're playing music, we get the added visual motion
lines, or action lines, that give everything
a stylized and hyperkinetic feel.
This appears to be a fun, stylistic flourish here,
but later in the movie, it will prove
to be a vital storytelling technique.
Each one of these visual ideas is building on the other.
They're all working in concert to create something greater.
From here, we get introduced to one of many now iconic scene
transitions.
Edgar Wright is known for his intricate transitions and whip
pans, so we won't belabor the point,
but this whip pan transition here
does something else which is fairly interesting.
As Michael Cera's Scott Pilgrim is talking on the phone
to his sister in split screen, another comic book trope,
we whip to the left and we fade into an exterior
of a school with the bell ringing,
and we see the onomatopoeia of the bell.
This transition, which is really three distinct visual ideas
piled on top of each other, creates
a bit of visual complexity.
It also pieced together that moment of narrative.
Or take pee bar, which is taken directly from the comics,
but is actually a video game reference.
It works really well because it is
animated to hang within a fixed point
and glide away from Scott.
That animated bar representing the protagonist's urine
might be one of the finest stylistic ideas in the movie.
And as an added piece of world building,
you can see the pee bar in the mirror.
Making it not just a graphics overlay,
but something that literally lives in the universe.
It's pretty well done.
All of these visual ideas, and some we didn't mention,
are building towards the first act climax.
The point at which the true conceit of the movie kicks off.
It's where we get to the aspect of Scott Pilgrim that
succeeds, where most other comic book inspired films fail.
The fight scenes perfectly mix live action footage, video game
iconography, and comic book storytelling
to create a visual world all its own.
A visual identity.
In Scott's fight with Matthew Patel,
speed lines, poke, pow, onomatopoeia,
and video game tropes unfurl and set the stage
for the rest of the film's runtime.
(ECHOING) KO!
KO!
[COINS JINGLE]
Every fight for the rest of the movie
uses these ideas and builds on them further.
They all flow directly from the characters
and they build and expand the world of that story,
just like the comic would.
As an added bonus, film also uses Bryan Lee O'Malley's
drawings to tell Ramona's back story
about how she dated Patel.
This helps the whole film feel a little more handmade
and have a personality in a way that
couldn't be achieved otherwise.
They even go as far to include O'Malley's drawings
in the shot where Scott explains his past relationship with Envy
Adams.
There are so many visual ideas in this film
that it could have become cluttered or overcrowded,
but instead it feels more like an explosion of creativity
because of how intricately these ideas are
overlaid on top of one another.
And a few other films have tried this.
Examples are things like Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, Ang Lee's
Hulk, and Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's beloved Sin
City.
Both Tracy and Sin City opted to use filmic language,
but altered the visuals of the world
to be as close to the source material as possible,
to varying levels of success.
However, Ang Lee's Hulk is the only other major motion picture
that really swung for the fences in terms of incorporating
comic's language into a movie, and it
didn't go quite as well as Scott Pilgrim,
and that distinction is clear.
Ironically, the way that Lee approaches the multiple angles,
just like a comic book visual motif,
is the same underlying idea as the transitions
in Scott Pilgrim, but just not as well-executed.
It's the go-to solution for someone who doesn't actually
read comics.
Lee's idea of having multiple filmic points of view
on a single event is flawed at times.
It shatters the illusion that what you're watching
is a document of actual events and mutates it
into an artificially performed reality, which viewers usually
reject.
And after looking at these examples,
you can see why scenes like this, or this,
get different audience reactions than that aforementioned Hulk
film.
[GLASS SHATTERS]
Puny human.
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World succeeds
where a whole lot of other films that attempted to do this
have failed because of one simple reason, its intention.
The individuals behind the camera, Edgar Wright, Bryan Lee
O'Malley, and loads of people involved
all understood what it was conceptually they wanted to do.
They got the voice of the source material
and they were attempting to channel that.
Through ensuring that the comics language elements
weren't artifice, that they were intentionally built
into the universe of the movie.
They grow organically out of both Wright's
stylistic proclivities and the fact
that the movie itself exists in a world that
is heightened and stylized.
Despite the fact that comic books are the primary source
material for a lot of Hollywood at this point,
it's sometimes frustrating how little respect
or genuine investigation goes into their mining
by the filmmakers at the helm.
There are a lot of die-hard fans of both O'Malley and Scott
Pilgrim.
And when a film adaptation was announced, a lot of people
were concerned they wouldn't be able to capture the voice
and the tone of the book.
Many were convinced they would screw it up,
like a lot of other adaptations.
Because who in their right mind could have predicted
that a book this personal would get an equally personal
adaptation?
And yet, there was a packed theater
at San Diego Comic-Con, filled to the brim
with thousands of cheering fans.
Who, most of which, were immediately
put at ease when the film started and it obviously
was going to carry over with that stylistic, tonal, and
technical facility of the book.
Seeing a film surrounded by that roaring fan base
that literally cheered every time a caption box,
or biff, bang, bow showed up on screen,
was probably a great way to experience this film.
But the perfect evidence that the narrative fidelity
that Wright and company had opted for
was absolutely the best, and maybe
the only path for a film like this.
Which is why Scott Pilgrim is one of the only movies
to ever successfully use comic book storytelling
in a live action film.
Well guys, that's it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]