By Katey Rich
There's been a fascinating debate going on since the Academy announced the thirteen films eligible for the Best Animated Feature category, tossing the motion-capture Beowulf right in there with the more traditionally CGI Ratatouille and Bee Movie and even the good old-fashioned cel-animated The Simpsons Movie and Persepolis (though both probably have some CGI in there somewhere-- anyone know for sure?). John Lasseter, head of Ratatouille's production company Pixar, reportedly was against Beowulf's inclusion, arguing that motion-capture is a separate category from animation entirely. Now at Jeffrey Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere, Beowulf producer Roger Avary has struck back, and it's getting ugly:
"Lasseter, who is a master filmmaker, shouldn't allow himself to feel threatened by the future. Perhaps he's insecure and feels that his films can't hold their own against live-action films in a single, merged 'Best Film' category that is inclusive of all movies [...] To segregate animation in this day and age to its own separate award category is to ghettoize it. But then, maybe that's what Lasseter wants. Maybe he feels that a smaller field will increase his potential to reach a goal. We're not intimidated like that."
Wow. It almost makes me dread the moment when the actual nominations are announced-- if Ratatouille (a shoo-in) and Beowulf (not so sure about that one) both make the cut, will there be fisticuffs during the nominee photo-ops? Part of me wonders if this argument is just silly because Persepolis is going to swoop in and steal the award from all of them, but Wells raises an important point in his post: this isn't the last time we'll see this kind of debate. When it comes to blending animation and live-action, we probably haven't even fathomed what they're going to come up with.
Using live humans as templates for animation has been a technique since the earliest days of the form, when "rotoscoping," or literally tracing human action, was part of early experimental shorts. Even Snow White and the Prince were partially rotoscoped in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though there's no telling how much of the rotoscoping went into the final product. After a while, though, animation started moving away from what human actors could accomplish into the realm of the impossible, which brought us things like singing pigs, gun-toting rabbits, and Wile E. Coyote running in mid-air.
CGI has been bringing animation back to a standard of realism for a while now, giving a clownfish a voice while placing him in a strikingly beautiful ocean environment. Humans have always been the great challenge, though, and it seems that motion-capture animation will both overcome this hurdle and put the genre in an entirely new dilemma. What, then, is animation? It's a question best left to the genre theorists, surely, but thanks to the Academy's Best Animated Feature category, they must debate it too, and hear from plenty of irate movie bloggers who think they have a thing or two to say about it.
There's no doubt that the motion-capture technology Zemeckis has championed can be used to striking effect-- Wells calls Beowulf "an eye-filling mind-blower"--and even if Remy the chef and Beowulf the monster-slayer can make nice for now, this issue is bound to come up again, probably the next time Zemeckis flexes his technology muscles. I personally don't mind Avary's suggestion of putting animated films back in competition with everybody else, if only to put to rest this kind of squabbling at the expense of giving Marjane Satrapi an Oscar for her brilliant Persepolis. That won't solve the issue, but it will render it a curiosity, not a fiery studio back-and-forth. As much as Remy deserves his turn walking the red carpet, he doesn't deserve the indignity of having to fight on his way there.
No comments:
Post a Comment