max's 3-D animated "feature" Cyberworld isn't really a feature film; it's an animation festival with a thin framing story. Virtual host Phig (Elfman) pops into being at the beginning, addressing the audience directly and introducing them to the ultrafuturistic "Galleria Animatica," a virtual repository of computer animation clips "where art and science come together to create magic." But as she starts showing off those clips, the Galleria suddenly begins to malfunction. It turns out that Phig's software is infested with code-chomping "bugs" (Frewer and Smith) who are gleefully eating the Galleria and its contents one number at a time. After some fruitless calls to her computer-support tech (Foley), Phig takes matters into her own hands, hunting the bugs down with heavy weaponry. Meanwhile, the Galleria continues to disintegrate bit by bit (or possibly byte by byte), and its malfunctions cause doors to open and shut at random, letting more animation clips escape.
While the Phig vs. bugs "plot" takes up an inordinate amount of the film's running time, the short clips are the real point of the show. Two of the longest pieces may already be familiar: an excerpt from DreamWorks' 1998 feature film Antz (the ant-bar scene where Woody Allen's character "Z" first meets and dances with Princess Bala, voiced by Sharon Stone), and the entire "Homer3" segment from The Simpsons, where Homer Simpson, trying to avoid his sisters-in-law, escapes into a mysterious three-dimensional computer-animated landscape and promptly destroys it by accident.
Many of the rest of the eight pieces are short tours of various fanciful worlds: a gleaming alien city where the architecture incorporates rivers of shining water ("Flipbook/Waterfall City," by Japan's Satoshi Kitahara), an underwater world full of strange, cute and menacing creatures ("KraKKen," by ExMACHINA in France), a battered but beautiful space metropolis ("Tonight's Performance," REZN8, USA), a protean environment full of music, metaphors and typing monkeys ("Monkey Brain Sushi," Sony Pictures Imageworks and Inertia Pictures, USA), and an abstract space full of flying, spinning creatures, set to a Pet Shop Boys song ("Liberation," Pet Shop Boys Partnership/Eye Developments, England). Only one of these pieces, "Joe Fly & Sanchez--Mostly Sports" (Spans & Partner, Germany) actually features dialogue, as several emotional insects interact in a grubby old house.
A short visit to shiny happy places
According to the film's official website, the Cyberworld creators solicited submissions from the computer-animated industry, and ended up with more than 250 clips to choose from. It's unfortunate that they didn't end up using more of those submissions. Apparently a lot of them came from video-game companies and featured graphic violence, so it's understandable that Imax didn't want to fill a kid-friendly film with three-dimensional, five-story-high eviscerations. But the clips are the best part of Cyberworld by far, and animation fans are likely to have already seen the two longest entries--the Antz and Simpsons excerpts, which both focus on telling stories (which are incomplete here) rather than building arresting visuals. The abstract pieces, which are devoted entirely to eye-popping effects, are far more impressive, but don't last nearly long enough.
Still, Cyberworld's well worth the price of admission for sheer spectacle value. Computer animation may look artificial compared with the more natural movement of traditional cel animation (although Cyberworld does an impressive job of simulating cel animation in its code-destroying bug characters, when it isn't taking shortcuts to avoid animating them), but it beats cel animation in its sheer level of detail, and that detail becomes manifestly apparent on the giant IMAX screen. The environment pieces--"Waterfall City" and "Tonight's Performance" in particular--go a long way toward true virtual reality by placing viewers in the middle of a fully realized, fully believable setting and then moving freely around that setting to emphasize its depth and complexity. The beauty, creativity and sophistication of these mini-worlds is utterly breathtaking at times, and the 3-D effects are both convincing and used to good purpose.
