Toon Zone Talkback - Oscars: "Motion Capture Is Not Animation"

Y

YaNkEeS!!!

New member
This is the talkback thread for Oscars: "Motion Capture Is Not Animation".

That is such a BS ruling on the Academy's part, and one I believe is guided largely by Pixar of all people.

Think about this note. In 2006, the nominees for best animated picture was Cars, Happy Feet, and Monster House. Had the ruling taken place before that ceremony, not only would Cars be an Oscar winning movie, but the other two, including the winner Happy Feet, wouldn't even be nominees because they both employ mo-cap animation.

Plus, James Cameron made such a hissyfit when a lot of people suggested that Avatar was an animated movie, stating it's not, as if animation was beneath him. The animators ended up winning the Oscar for their efforts, and Cameron left the night empty-handed.

So, yeah. Bad call, Academy.
 
I recall controversy over Beowulf too. So yeah, it's been a debate for awhile I guess.

Like I was just commenting, the academy's standard poses difficult questions for characters such as Gollum in Peter Jackson's awesome LOTR movies and the various characters in Avatar. Gollum wasn't exactly a costumed character, but they say that the motion capture techniques used to bring him to live technically aren't real animation for their purposes. So if Gollum was technically not animated and he's technically not costumed, what the heck was he?

Also, what about Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings, vintage 1978, which used rotoscoping?

I'm not gonna say that the issue isn't debatable, nor will I claim that I've necessarily thought it through as deeply as others probably have. But I do think the Academy's exclusionary definition begs plenty of questions...questions that, perhaps, the academy's mentality is very hard-pressed to answer.
 
Quite frankly mocap movies make for nothing more than Visually Arresting Clap Trap. I think it seems sound since it isn't really much of animation at all.
 
I'm sorry, I have to agree with the AMPAS on this one. MoCap is a very lazy way of making a movie since there is no actual artistry going into it. Robert Zemeckis' recent excursions into the format are enough to suggest that.
 
I believe that any type of mo-cap animation that attempts to be "realistic" and "detailed" has no actual artistry in it. Yes, it is lazy when animators and directors (Robert Zemeckis, as you said) do that.

However, when a film, like Monster House and Happy Feet, have some sort of artistry or style embedded into the animation, then you can tell they spent some time into making the film.
 
Reading the rules, it seems to me that the rule is there mostly to exclude things like James Cameron's Avatar from consideration for a Best Animated Feature Oscar, but only because of the requirement that, "animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time." Depending on what they mean by "a frame-by-frame technique," a studio might even be able to argue movies like Happy Feet or Monster House or maybe even Appleseed into the running. There were no penguins mocapped for Happy Feet -- animators turned human performances into dancing penguins. Zemeckis' stuff starts getting really questionable, though.

If I have to criticize anything, it's that the language is still not very clear on what's included and what isn't. If anything, I think it makes it worse. The fact that I could envision Happy Feet making it in just means that the next Avatar could qualify just by making CGI backgrounds; those mocapped actors turned into aliens are about as different as making people into penguins, aren't they? I could easily make an argument that something like Richard Linklater's Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly aren't animation any more under these rules, just as easily as claiming that they still are because an animator went over each frame of film to convert the rotoscoped characters into fully animated ones. I would also ask about stuff like machinima or even Flash animation -- if you're programming a computer model to move from one part of the screen to another, does that qualify as a "frame-by-frame" technique?

And I still say that mocap is a perfectly valid way to create animation, just as rotoscoping is. It's a technique that can be used well or used badly, just as anything in animation can. The fact that the overwhelming majority of it has been bad doesn't mean it's a completely worthless technique. The Fleischer Bros. rotoscoped those old Popeye and Superman cartoons and they're awesome, but they also rotoscoped the title character in Gulliver's Travels and that one sucked. I think most of Zemeckis' stuff was horrible to watch, but I still liked Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina and Waking Life.
 
As an actress I have to disagree, I find MoCap amazing and to be beautiful in theory. The way people move is an interesting study and when I did a MoCap exercise in school I liked to experiment with different walks and stances and just characters in general.

Whether or not you think it's used well (Monster House was great :D) there is artistry used.
 
I'm gonna agree with Brad Bird; so long as the mo-cap is used as a tool - and one of many tools at that - it's fine. Relying entirely on what the computer can render isn't the ideal, it should all be about the performance.
 
I don't know what to make of this. I don't really consider it animation, but I don't think it's live action either. I guess just treat it as a non-animated movie, but it's a tough call.
 
I'm going with the academy's decision...
Really you want an award for ANIMATION, then you need to actually to some ANIMATION. Mo-cap has more in common with acting than it does animation i'd say.

awards for 3D modeling? yes
awards for lighting and Rendering? Yes
awards for acting? yes
But NOT awards for animation...
 
Back
Top