August
2
Oscar Watch: Animation Tempest Over Beowulf
[Posted by Peter Debruge]
It's never too early to start debating Oscar, and over at the Gold Derby, Tom O'Neil is stirring up trouble by quoting Jeffrey Wells' thoughts on the animation category (which happens to be my beat over here in the Variety features department). Tom reports:
Jeff saw a reel of footage yesterday and it "may not, according to the Academy's 'Rule Seven,' be an animated film," he warns. "It's a real eyeball-popper and clearly something else in the realm of animation — each and every frame is, in fact, animated by the standard of digital animation — but the Academy seems to be saying that any film that starts with live action footage and then uses digital animation to enhance or augment that footage (like Richard Linklater's 'Waking Life' and 'A Scanner Darkly') is not eligible."
This is a non-issue. Beowulf isn't "animated over" traditional footage, the way Oscar-eligible "Waking Life" and "Scanner Darkly" were. It's a performance capture-based film, just as "Polar Express," "Monster House" and (Savion Glover's dancing scenes from) "Happy Feet" were. That doesn't mean that the animation community is crazy about motion-capture movies (the "Ratatouille" end credits featured the following quality assurance guarantee: "100% genuine animation. No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film"), but then, they resisted computers at first, too. Nor should it suggest that traditional keyframe techniques aren't featured heavily in motion-capture films (the word "shortcuts" is misleading, since more time and expense is ultimately expended in trying to translate live-action performances through CG than would be true in either the hand-animated or live-action versions of the same film).
The "Beowulf" footage Wells saw in Comic-Con (read my reaction here) is impressive to be sure, but falls right in the uncanny valley. I'll withhold any speculation about "Beowulf's" Oscar chances until I've had a chance to see the entire film, but there's no question the film is eligible (I personally hope Paramount submits the 3-D version of the film, something no animated feature has done with the Academy to date, despite the night-and-day difference the process made with "Polar Express," "The Ant Bully" and others).
A quick phone call to the Academy confirms that Wells' core concerns are true, however. The Academy has rewritten the rules to the animation category slightly, making it highly likely that if "A Scanner Darkly" had been released this year, it would be disqualified. If debate is what you want, I suggest the pundits start with another of the Academy's vague guidelines: "a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time." Last year, the Weinstein Co. submitted the half-and-half "Arthur and the Invisibles," which the animation branch rejected. Where does that leave "Alvin & the Chipmunks," "The Spiderwick Chronicles" and other such hybrids? The line is getting fuzzier, not clearer, as technology evolves.
P.S. Is it wrong that I'm more excited about the 2008 animation slate? Get a load of Fox's new "Horton Hears a Who" teaser.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
It is wrong that you are excited about anything when you should be hanging your head in shame
Posted by: Don Murphy | August 02, 2007 at 04:36 PM
Wow, what an incredible jerk. How drunk do you think he was when he posted this?
Posted by: David C | August 03, 2007 at 10:09 AM
not a single jerk
Debruge is the jerkwad
fer sure
Posted by: Don Murphy | August 03, 2007 at 11:25 AM