posted
Cars, while perhaps not Pixar's strongest film in recent years, does count as a fully animated movie.
Happy Feet and Monster House however are almost entirely the creation of motion capture...no animator created the performances...basically the live action was covered with a CGI puppet.
Across the various journals, blogs, and message board specific to animation, many animators are stating that they feel the nominations demean and diminish what an animator does.
Some even see these nominations as a sign the Academy just doesn't care about the differences between the two processes. Which they find insulting.
Certainly, WB and Sony cried out loudly how their respective films were NOT traditional animation, but performance capture. But I doubt they'd like that being used as means for disqualification.
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posted
Do thise varions journals, blogs, and message boards have a better category that these movies fit into?
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Every nominee that was not created solely by the use of thousands of hand-drawn cells should be eliminated.
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posted
Hate to tell the complaining animators this but the characters in the classic WaltDisney movies are also motion capture. ie Actors were filmed performing the scripts, then artists translated their movements and expressions into drawings. And even when actors hadn't been hired to perform scripts for other classic cartoons, directors&animators&etc were certainly mugging/performing/modeling the action&dialog so that the artists could know&create what the director was aiming to achieve.
Other than gluing dots onto actors and onto framework*bodies to allow stupid computers to do the drudge work portion of translating motion into animation, presentday motion capture in and of itself is fairly close to the classic process.
* The computer equivalent of the classic posable man/dog/etc.
posted
Someone still had to create and imagine the backgrounds without hooking things up to a set. The background to me is what really makes an animated film beautiful.
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posted
I don't know too much about the specifics of these particular movies, but the only stuff they would have motion-captured is the characters themselves, and the penguins in particular would have taken a lot of artistry to translate from human movements. You also typically don't motion-capture facial expressions — you use reference for them, the same way animators have for generations.
These complaints sound like they stem from ignorance about how motion-capture works. It gives you broad movements, timing, etc. But it doesn't give you intricacies, and it takes a lot of skilled animation work to turn the original motion-captured data into something beautiful.
This is like criticizing a sculptor for using store-bought clay and a live model, rather than making the clay himself and using only his imagination.
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quote:Originally posted by aspectre: Hate to tell the complaining animators this but the characters in the classic WaltDisney movies are also motion capture. ie Actors were filmed performing the scripts, then artists translated their movements and expressions into drawings. nnequin/]man[/URL]/dog/etc.
Using live action reference has never been considered the same thing as rotoscoping...the animators are claiming performance capture is CG high tech version of the latter.
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quote:Originally posted by Puppy: You also typically don't motion-capture facial expressions — you use reference for them, the same way animators have for generations.
I dunno about Happy Feet, but the Monster House DVD is fairly open about how motion capture was used for the facial expressions as well as character movement in that film. There's some borderline grotesque footage of the actors with dozens of tiny spheres covering their faces.
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quote:Originally posted by rivka: The bloggers are right of course.
Every nominee that was not created solely by the use of thousands of hand-drawn cells should be eliminated.
They see it as the difference between what a puppeteer does and what a cartoonist does.
For the hand-drawn versus CGI-drawn debate we'll have to enter the WABAC machine for the late 80s/ early 90s. Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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posted
Well, what I'd say is that the direct motion capture/puppeteer movies can go up for Best Movie and Best SFX/Graphics.
The traditional hand drawn or hand animated ones can go up for Best Animated. The whole thing is moot anyway, it's silly that they only have three films nominated, and of the three, I don't even think the best three are there.
Hoodwinked and Over the Hedge should both be there. Maybe even Open Season.
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quote:Originally posted by rivka: The bloggers are right of course.
Every nominee that was not created solely by the use of thousands of hand-drawn cells should be eliminated.
They see it as the difference between what a puppeteer does and what a cartoonist does.
For the hand-drawn versus CGI-drawn debate we'll have to enter the WABAC machine for the late 80s/ early 90s.
You are missing my point. The arguments they are making are awfully reminiscent of the complaints about CGI animation 15-20 years ago. Those also claimed that the difference was of kind.
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quote:basically the live action was covered with a CGI puppet.
How is that not animation? Or, if it's not, would rotoscoping also not be considered animation?
LOL, this has been a huge debate in the last decade or so in the animation community. With the onset of computers the definition of animation is becoming more and more blurred. It all boils down to what you or they the nominators felt defines animaiton since there is really no set standard for what defines it in the film community anymore.
Personally, I thin any film that uses live action in it is not seen as animation. "Roger Rabbit" would not be an animated film it would be a hybrid. I haven't seen or read about "Happy Feet" yet so that one I am not sure about. "Cars" is most defintely an animated film. Rotoscoping is an animation technique so any film that is animated using rotoscoping like "Waking Life" would be animation as long as there is no live action footage as background or what not. Posts: 871 | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
Why can't Miyazaki just put out a movie every year. Then I could just say, "His movie should have won." and avoid this entire debate.
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