An Animated Movie for the Deaf

Originally posted on July 17, 2006

As a deaf young man with a strong passion for the art of film, we do get treated to a major motion picture featuring a deaf character once in a blue moon, bur rarely as a leading character like Marlee Matlin was in ‘Children of a Lesser God‘ and ‘Hear No Evil’. Last winter, a movie titled ‘The Family Stone” which I found to be somewhat bittersweet, and I liked how they integrated the deaf character into the storyline, but still underused. The cast’s efforts to sign were noteworthy, as it showed how a family with a deaf individual should be portrayed.

Only God know how many times I have to see a movie where the method of lip-reading is used instead of signing, but the strange thing is, according to some sources, lip-reading even by the best lip readers are more likely to recognize no more than 30% of what is being said. Yet the deaf characters understand absolutely every spoken word in the movies. It’s just completely unrealistic, I don’t know any deaf people who are capable of reading lips like they can in the movies. I do know some deaf people with residual hearing who are able to understand nearly every word with a hearing aid on, but not by reading lips. Sure, I can understand that it’s necessary to take liberties with the storylines and characters to keep the movie pacing smoothly and more entertaining, but lip-reading is a cliché and need to be eliminated from the movies because it’s just not believable.

My family is all hearing, and they can sign to communicate with me. Just like the family does in the movie, ‘The Family Stone’. I know of many families with deaf individuals where they are expected to lip-read or wear hearing aids, many of these deaf individuals often find themselves alienated and frustrated because it takes a big effort to comprehend the spoken words especially when they were born deaf with low residual hearing. Hard-of-Hearing, now that’s a whole different story because they are more likely to succeed at understanding the spoken word with little effort later in their lives while it will continue to be a big frustration for the deaf in their adulthood. I’ve seen how many of these individuals communicate with their parents who cannot sign by making small gestures and mouthing words hoping they’ll understand. I just cannot imagine myself having parents who barely understand what I’m saying. Not only that, it would probably had changed my outcome in a big way. Would I be working as a full-time graphic designer for a media corporation today if it wasn’t for my parents’ efforts to communicate and encourage me to pursue a higher education and a professional career? My instinct tells me the answer would have been a big no.

What I’m saying is, Hollywood need to take less liberties with deaf characters and start creating a more realistic and suitable environment for the deaf rather than using a bunch of clichés. ‘The Family Stone’ took a big leap in making that effort, and I hope it’ll influence the other filmmakers to start researching the lives of deaf people. It is true that there are an incredible amount of different lifestyles among the deaf community, but we are seeing too much of the same thing over and over in the movies.

Which is why I think creating an animated movie featuring deaf characters would be a grand idea. Sure, it’s a financial risk; but how do you know it won’t succeed if you’ve never tried it? The best way to make an animated movie featuring deaf characters would be to go down the same route the filmmakers did with the movies, ‘The Polar Express’ and ‘Monster House’. These two movies used real-life actors; they wore utilized costumes and dots all over their faces. It’s quite a fascinating technology, and it’s still underused at the moment. Don’t worry about the ‘Dead Eyes Syndrome’ that you saw in ‘The Polar Express’, they’ve fixed that problem. There are a lot of details I could write down on how and what they do with the technology, but that would take a good while. To simplify it, they capture the movements and facial expressions of the actors onto the computers, they are now able to take these movements and turn it into a 3-D character model, you can even revolve the cameras around the 3-D models which give them the big advantage of improving the cinematography, and it definitely would give them the advantage of making the transition from real-life signing to animated signing much easier and smoother.

I can imagine the reasons why the executives in Hollywood would be reluctant to take such a risk, but look at the risks they’re taking on these days and many of them are flopping. Poseidon had a budget of $160 million and it made only $59 million. I think Hollywood should take the chance and make an animated feature with the deaf characters in leading roles. They can always do what Mel Gibson did with his movie, ‘The Passion of the Christ’ since it didn’t have a single word from the language of English, and they can subtitle it for the hearing audience.

So, what do you think?