Over in the
Beowulf trailer thread, there has been a fair bit of discussion about the motion capture process used to make it. Personally, I find it downright
creepy.
Here's a brief article titled:
Motion Capture is not Animation, that suggests that motion capture films like
Beowulf shouldn't be eligible for the Animated Picture Oscar.
I'm definitely in the "motion capture is evil" camp (or at the very least: a decade away from being ready for prime time)...
Quote:
Motion Capture is not Animation
June 30, 2007
Ratatouille premiered yesterday, and as is the case with all Pixar films me and a few million of my closest friends all went and enjoyed it.
An interesting thing happened at the end of the film, after all the credits had rolled. There was a retro icon that proclaimed that the movie was "100% Animated! No motion capture or shortcuts were used in the making of this film".
More than anything this feels like Pixar's way of telling the people who pick the Oscars that they need to wake up. The only part of the Academy Awards that I need to see are for animated short and animated film. While I don't know that Cars needed to win last year, I sure as shootin' know that Happy Feet should not have even been nominated.
Happy Feet was completely motion captured, the actors' movements recorded with expensive cameras on a sound stage and then transfered to the digital actors. The talent required for this type of film is a fraction of what's needed for Pixar's brand of hands-on magic.
Give us another category in the Academy Awards to include motion captured work, but please keep them out of the animated films section. They simply are not animated.
