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Bear
facts of AI
by Neil Young
Last
week's UK box-office champ A.I. Artificial Intelligence has divided audiences
and critics like few releases this year. The futuristic Pinocchio retread
follows android David's (Haley Joel Osment) epic quest to become a real
boy, accompanied by his very own Jiminy Cricket: a walking, talking, 2ft-tall
teddy-bear.
Even
the film's harshest detractors admit Teddy is a remarkable creation. He's
been described "AI's hero," "the most touching movie character
created without a physical actor since E.T.," and "an R2D2 for
the new century." Stan Winston's special-effects team, one reviewer
wrote, "should win Academy Awards for Teddy alone," while another
went further: "he should be up for best supporting actor in the Oscars
this year. Or better yet, get his own Teddy movie."
Osment
and nominal co-star Jude Law can consider themselves well and truly upstaged,
but Teddy could so easily have been the most off-puttingly Spielbergian
element about the whole enterprise. The fact that he is, instead, so "wonderfully
matter-of-fact" and "miraculously un-cute" is largely due
to the growly vocal chords of 70-year-old Jack Angel.
Speaking
from his San Francisco home - under the plastic gaze of the three different-sized
tie-in bears produced by Hasbro - Angel is still amazed by the response
he's received for what he describes as "far and away the best experience
of my career," even if the film didn't live up to box-office expectations.
"It opened big then it went straight down the toilet," he says,
wondering if a blockbusting success might have led to the bonanza of voice-over
work that greeted 2001's Douglas Rain (HAL) or Star Wars' James Earl Jones.
Few
"VO" artists achieve that kind of renown, but Angel has worked
with the best, from Woody Woodpecker's Daws Butler ("he was a great
friend of mine and I admired him no end") to the Mel Blanc, the legendary
'man of 1,000 voices' ("he was brilliant, but when I met him he was
a crotchety, nasty old man, not likeable at all.") Angel also picks
out the ABC network's longtime announcer Ernie Anderson - "he had
this great huge rich voice" - now better known as the father of Magnolia
wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson.
A
former radio announcer, Angel's credits include Scooby Doo most of Hollywood's
animated features of the last decade. But you'd need eagle eyes to spot
his name in the 'end crawl,' as he's mainly contributed fleeting bit parts
and general background hubbub: what's known in Britain as 'rhubarb-rhubarb,'
and in the States as 'walla-walla.'
He
specialised in roaring, fantastical creatures in obscure TV cartoons:
"But I've gotten to the point in my career now where I don't want
to do those monster voices any more. I've been hurting my throat badly
from doing that - if I go out a work for a day, I cough for four after."
Spielberg
selected Angel for audition after listening to 100 taped applicants. "Everything
was shrouded in secrecy - I thought it was a cartoon series of some sort,
they gave no indication of what it was. They gave me some made-up name,
Prince something-or-other, and they didn't even say it was going to be
a bear. They just said it should sound like Eeyore, except not so dumb,
so I dropped my voice down to its lowest register.
"Everybody
else would have gone for a more high-pitched, squeaky toy-bear voice,
but mine was nothing like that. When Robin Williams was recording his
little part [holographic oracle Dr Know] he said, 'Oooh, Teddy sounds
so malevolent!', and I said, 'When you get to know him, he's such a nice
bear you love him. I asked every person on the set if they were casting
the part of Teddy, would they have chosen my voice, and they all said
no. Steven loved that - he marches to a different drummer."
Teddy
is, of course, an old bear, even if he is the resilient 'super-toy' referred
to in the title of Brian Aldiss's original short story 'Super-Toys Last
All Summer Long.' But he seems to have had an extra significance for the
project's original director Stanley Kubrick - who inserted a very similar
bear right at the end of Eyes Wide Shut - and thus for Spielberg in turn.
Kubrick-watchers have traced the 'bear' motif back to The Shining and
beyond, and giving David's mentor such a deep American growl was, perhaps,
Spielberg's subtle homage to his own wise, not-un-bear-like mentor.
Angel
was in a unique position to observe Spielberg's painstaking fidelity to
Kubrick's intentions (his usual instruction was a simple "less emotion,
less emotion") - Angel
he recorded the vast bulk of his lines in a single day, but was asked
to remain on set for the duration of the shoot: "We were pretty much
side-by-side for the whole of the four months, and we developed a lovely
relationship. It was in the middle of the US election campaign, and he
spent a lot of time on the phone with Al Gore. Some days when he was busy
on set I'd tell him about what Gore had been up to, what they'd been showing
on TV.
"I'd
try different readings and when he heard what he liked he'd look right
at me and turn on those highbeams of his, and he'd walk away - but you
could take that heat and go melt an iceberg." But such privileged
access had its downside: "When I saw the finished movie, I was terribly
disappointed. I was shocked by the number of Teddy scenes they'd eliminated
- it was just wholesale slaughter. Of course, it's a long movie as it
is, and if they'd left all that stuff in we'd still be watching it."
Angel's
frustration will be shared by A.I.'s viewers - the film takes off whenever
Teddy is on screen, and while few of the ponderous thematic and philosophical
preoccupations add up to very much, Teddy is by far the most sympathetic,
expressive, intelligent character on view - human or man-made - and thus
easily the most intriguing.
He's
the only aspect of the film, one suspects, that would have found favour
with artificial intelligence's literary master, Philip K (Do Androids
Dream Of Electric Sheep?) Dick. Especially if they'd left in a remarkable-sounding
moment when Teddy as roused from slumber, still half-'asleep,' muttering
'I am not a toy!' to his dream-world doubters. "It was such an integral
part of establishing who Teddy was, but it just hit the deck," regrets
Angel who, like Teddy's legion of worldwide fans, can hardly wait for
the DVD.
by Neil
Young
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