1st term paper

Glen Vilppu, a famous artist and teacher used to say: “There is no rule, just tools.” In the art world, many things depend on the imagination of artists. Sometimes, an object can fly by itself. At the other time, people become invisible, and a lot of other unrealistic things that we see in many sci-fi movies. Yet, all of them were based on real phenomena. To be able to create a believable, but unrealistic movement, artists have spent their time to study the real cases. This is where physics comes into the play. With the aid of physics, artists know exactly why and how an action, such as a fall or a swing, can happen. From there, they exaggerate and make it into the big screen. Yes, “there is no rule”, artists only use physics as a tool to help them create a believable world out of their mind. To explore more about how many talented animators translate the law of physics into the world where people can fly and things can freeze in mid-air, we will look at one of the recent 3D computer graphic (CG) animated movies: Tekken-Blood Vengeance (2010).

The movie is a Japanese animated movie, which was based on the famous fighting game Tekken. The movie starts with Anna Williams and her sister Nina Williams encountered and fougt each other. Anna was working for Kazuya Mishima and his G Corporation; on the other hand, Nina was working for Jin Kazama-Kazuya’s son and his opposite organization. Both parties were looking for information of a young man called Shin Kamiya. To do that, Anna then sent Xiaoyu, disguised as a student, to look for Shin at a particular school while Jin’s organization sent a humanoid robot, named Alisa. Both Xiaoyu and Alisa encountered each other and fought, but became friends after Anna interfere their battle. Together, they looked for information about Shin. It turned out that Shin was a test subject for something called M gene-a method for immortality, and Shin was the only survivor. It was even more surprised when the M gene project was created by Heihachi Mishima-Kazuya’s father. Shin then tried to fight Heihachi, but died in vain. The story went to its peak when the 3-way battle between 3 generations: Heihachi, Kazuya, and Jin happened. Ultimately, Jin was the victor after the fierce battle. Jin then left Xiaoyu and Alisa only to let them know that the future would change.

While the story was a bit hard to follow if you don’t play Tekken, I think the animation in the movie was expertly done, even lots of time when the artists over-exaggerated the effects. The effects in the movie sometimes don’t obey the law of physics. To make it easier to see how physics differs in the movie, I will break down into three categories: Speed and inertia, gravity and freezing, and force/impact.

1/ Speed and inertia:

In the first 15 minutes of the movie, there was a scene in which Xiaoyu was riding a panda with speed of a racing car. However, the panda stopped abruptly at the parking lot without any effort or hard deceleration. Plus, Xiaoyu didn’t fall off at all while she was moving with such high speed. If the law of physics had applied here, she would have been thrown over thanks to inertia, and the panda also should have an incredible force to stop suddenly. However, it wouldn’t be exciting to see a girl falling off and rolling toward the school’s gate in the action movie like this one.

 The panda also used its speed to even run on the water later on in the movie. It won’t work in reality, but it works in the movie since artists think that it is awesome and also a proof to show that the panda has an incredible speed. In fact, in reality, some people (a show called MythBuster) have tried to run water before without any special gear, and failed. 

In another scene toward the end of the movie, Jin and Kazuya were fighting. Jin was able to move fast enough with the speed of light. With this, he disappeared from his first position and ended up in front of his enemy in a split of second. Once again, the action neglected the law of inertia. With inertia, if he had moved in light speed, it would have impossible for him to stop suddenly. Instead he probably would have pierced through his enemy with that speed. So the animators took advantage of the law of inertia and speed to push the excitement of viewers more when they showed some incredible moves like that in the movie. 

2/ Gravity/freezing:

If speed works in a different way, gravity is another element that contributes the awesomeness of the movie. In the beginning, when Anna met Xiaoyu the first time, she threw a dagger toward Xiaoyu. Luckily, the girl avoided the dagger only the moment when the dagger almost hit her forehead. What happened was that the dagger suddenly froze in mid-air; this gave Xiaoyu a gap of time where she could flip her body backward to dodge the attack. Freezing is another trick or special effect that animators exploited to show that the girl was fast and flexible enough to do the flip. Without the effect, she would have died, and that’s not what the movie makers wanted!!! 

The freezing trick was used once more when Shin committed suicide by jumping off from a school building. Again, he froze and that let Xiaoyu see him, run upward on a tree and bounce off to catch him in mid-air. It would have been so boring to see a man dropping dead from a tall building because the gravity had pulled him down so quickly. In fact, Shin should have been slowing out instead of slowing in when he had been falling. It’s just like ball bounce. But viewers wanted something cool, and awesome, and the artists gave them what they want because they are the one who control the world of the movie. 

To raise the heat of the movie more, they used this technique in many fighting scenes. Particularly, in a 3-way battle of Heihachi, Kayuza, and Jin, Kayuza was falling from being taken the upper cut from Heihachi. Surprisingly enough, he fell so slowly that Heihachi could give him multiple hits in mid-air. No professional fighter can do such thing, according to what I know. Similarly, the purpose was to emphasize the super human strength of Heihachi when fighting. Plus, I think animators also tried to imitate the effect as in the video game where the player can execute a multiple combo like that.

3/ Force and impact:

According to Newton, every action always has an equal reaction. If we hit something with a really hard force, a similar force will be sent back to us. Yet, is it true in a fighting movie? I guess not. In Tekken: Blood Vengeance, action force is always larger than reaction. During the first battle, Kayuza used his bare foot to crush through many floors without any hard effort. The floors just got broken as if they are a bunch of plastic sticks, despite the fact that the floors were made by thick and giant blocks of wood. The reaction force of the floors here was so minimal that it didn’t affect Kayuza at all. In fact, he didn’t get any bone fracture at all when doing that. 

In several scenes later, Heihachi also utilized his superhuman power to kick Jin and send him fly away. This resulted in many giant broken pillars. The kick implied that the force of Heihachi’s kick was so great that it could break the pillars easily. If a normal human kicked a giant pillar hard enough, he would only break his leg instead (or hopefully the pillar would get chipped a little bit). However, Heihachi wouldn’t look strong if he got his bone cracked by only kicking the pillar. What’s more, according to the video game, he is a human with a monstrous power. If everything had been intact, it wouldn’t have been Heihachi’s fight. 

Jin was also similar to his grandfather and father, he possessed an incomparable power. With the intent to kill Heihachi, Jin was able to use his fist to hit Heihachi at his ribcage. The force was large enough (yet didn’t give Heihachi any internal fracture) to break through the wall behind him. From outside, viewers could view the impact as an explosion from inside. If we could measure Jin’s force, it could equal to the force of a grenade or tank’s canon. Again, this kind of impact can only work in the world of animation such as Tekken: Blood Vengeance. None can knock down the thick stonewall as Jin did.

Overall, in Tekken: Blood Vengeance, many of the actions/movement did not obey the law physics. However, artists and animators took advantage of the animation medium and pushed it beyond the boundary of reality. Moreover, viewers usually demand to see as many cool/fantasy actions as they want to from a single movie. Knowing that, artists exaggerated the law of physics in the movie so that they could give their characters many specialties, which will surprise the viewers. Many of the effects also help the viewers become involve in the story more and more when watching it. In the end, “there is no rule, just tools.”