Brian Thill contemplates the role of CGI birds in cinema:
Their first function seems to be in the service of some fairly straightforward notion of verisimilitude. After all, the world is filled with birds, so it shouldn’t be surprising that films would incorporate them. But it would be easy enough to have a sufficient measure of verisimilitude in your film about hobbits or zombies or supermen without needing birds. No theatergoer ever said of such a film, “It was okay, I guess, but it just wasn’t believable. I mean, where were the birds?”
When you scrutinize the shots that contain them, you begin to discover that they aren’t just there to make the unreal scenes feel a bit more real. These are instrumental birds.
Part of what they are there for is to indicate, by way of comparison, the scale and grandeur of the sweeping landscapes and vistas that are so central to establishing the proper atmosphere of awe and beauty in film. This has been a familiar tactic in painting for centuries. To take just one example: in the lower right corner of Frederic Edwin Church’s gigantic painting Cotopaxi (1862), which depicts an enormous volcanic eruption clouding the skies and the blazing sun, we find a tiny group of birds in flight in the bottom right corner, well beneath the vault of the high rugged cliffs in the foreground, minuscule against the backdrop of the sublime scale and power of the geologic world. If you didn’t look closely at the tumult of the enormous painting, those deliberately placed birds would be so easy to miss. …
Fake birds are important for their collective energy and motion, as objects meant to possess a vague kind of dynamic, living, animal presence, but they’re entirely unimportant in any close-up or individualized sense. It’s not the individual creature that has any standing or value, but the notion of the flock, of “Nature,” as set-dressing in cackling, aggregate form: philosophically unimportant as fellow living things, but cinematically (aesthetically) essential in the frame, functioning in much the same way that filmed images of clouds and rolling waves are supposed to. They’re shorthand for an emaciated natural world, a minor nature, beautifully and even lovingly rendered, but always subordinated to the comings and goings of man, the living object who matters.
Recent Dish on the role of birds in art here.
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