Most of what are considered animated films are done entirely on computers these days (Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and there are films such as the Fantastic Mr. Fox which uses stop-motion animation. And then there are films like ‘Avatar’ where large swaths of the movie are done using CGI, which cannot be though of a s anything other than computer animation.
At what point can we say a movie is an animated movie? What about a movie like Sky Captain and the World of Tormorrow that used real actors but completely compter generated sets. Or how about Waking Life?
If Avatar wanted to be considered for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, it could petition its case and, given the sheer amount of pure CG involved, probably win a slot as a nominee (though Cameron would probably think that’s slumming, category-wise). For me, I consider it partially animated because for large swaths of the film, it felt like I was watching a cartoon and not something genuinely “there”.
Waking Life I consider animated because they take live footage and alter it (through rotoscoping, etc.) to intentionally give it an animated look.
Avatar is (at least intended to be) photo-realistic. Ergo, it’s not animated, it’s a special effects bonanza.
This is an important distinction, I might note. A move like Avatar could have been done 50 years ago using 2D animation, but to Americans, anything which smacks of animation is kiddy fare. It would have been no worse a movie, but it wouldn’t have made a billion dollars (but then it also wouldn’t have cost a quarter of a billion dollars to produce).
I think the big difference is that for movies like Avatar or Beowulf, they film the actors in motion-capture suits and then use that as the basis for the CGI. As opposed to animated films like “Up” where the animation is all done more or less from scratch.
Archive Guy, I felt just the opposite. When I saw promos for “Avatar” on TV, I thought it looked very much like a cut scene from a video game - kind of cartoony looking. It looked nothing like that on the big screen, IMHO.
To me, this is a pretty pointless exercise. Certainly a Scanner Darkly (or those financial ads that run on Sunday mornings), or some of the scenes in Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, which are rotoscoped so closely as to be virtually photographs are straddling the line. By that point, it’s an irrelevant distinction. What purpose does it serve to sort these things into a bin of “animation” or “live action”?
The question wan’t is it an important distinction, the question is what is the disctinction. Of course it isn’t “important” but then again it is just a question on a message board.
Avatar was filmed basically. It’s difficult to call it animation because the actors were actually filmed on a set and run through a real-time CG filter so that Cameron’s viewscreen saw them in their ‘Avatars’ moving around on Pandora.
I took the “important” comment to mean “makes no difference.” we’ve entered that realm where the two have merged in some films, with many more to come.
the only “makes a difference” i see is in awards categories, and later in union contracts.
it’s a interesting moment in film for sure. and an important one in that it will change how films are made from here out.
Actor-wise, I’d compare the mocap technique to something like filming actors in dark suits manipulating puppets. That’s not animation. What sounds really cool is Cameron’s ability to send the actors home for the day and then “walk through” the already captured takes, testing camera angles and perspectives. That is super-cool and has some interesting implications. But still very much in the “real world” where actors are creating the performance.
Of course there was a ton of pure animation involved in Avatar, in the animal kingdom especially. I tend to agree with the sentiment that in an animated film, the human actors provide only their voices, rather than an entire physical performance. So Avatar is not strictly an animated film any more than The Matrix or one of the new Star Wars films are. Some of the actors are just wearing virtual wardrobe in addition to performing on virtual sets.
What if you made an otherwise ordinary movie but used CG to give all the cast an impossibly stylized appearance, like the way people are drawn in graphic novels? Women with implausibly long legs, hyperdetailed musculature, exaggerated facial features, etc.?
I didn’t like the movie myself, but when it comes time to hand out nominations, I think it more likely that Avatar gets a “Best Picture” nod over “Best Animated Feature” because it made a huge amount of money and is ostensibly aimed primary at an adult audience, which isn’t quite true of most of the films nominated in the latter category.
Animation just doesn’t get that must respect in the U.S. Heck, Beauty and the Beast getting nominated for Best Picture was downright surprising.
That’s pretty close to what they did with the motion capture in Avatar. I was watching one of those “behind the scenes/making of” features and not only did they do regular motion capture (suits with bright points that the cameras and computers use to key on) but the actors wore small cameras aimed at their own faces which did motion capture of their facial expressions. All that was then used to animate the Navi models.
I never cared for sf stories about robots, androids or chimpanzees that blurred the line between human and not. Like Blade Runner or Millennium Man.
…but this is a real example of society having to define what it means to be human.
My initial impulse was to say that the protagonist has to be animated for it to count as an animated film… then I considered: Lord of the Rings (Short Hobbits and Gollum) Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Lead character non-animated, titular character animated)
…and *Beowolf *(animated, but some of the characters are essentially human in appearance and action.) Spiderman (the costumed character is animated a large part of the time.)
So I don’t know where the line is.
–If the lead character looks and acts human and the world is essentially our own then it’s not animated. (Whether or not it’s computer generated.)
If the lead character is human but is almost the only thing that seems “real” then it is animated. (Such as the Toontown scenes in Roger Rabbit.)
There is? I know the sequence when he goes to ToonTown and becomes subject to its screwy laws of physics, but I don’t recall a moment the character wasn’t human.
It seems folks here are of the opinon that it i s the use o f actors at some point that makes the difference. So a movie like Sky Captain that was done in front of a green screen is decidedly not an animated movie?
It’s a very short bit where he’s in the animated taxi and it goes zooming down an alleyway towards the camera. Not sure about DVD or VHS but on the CLV (frame by frame laserdisc, which I have) you can watch a couple of frames with a hand-drawn Bob Hoskins. I don’t know if it was done as a joke by the animators or if it was just easier than filming Hoskins moving at high speed and then compositing the animation over him.
On the same laserdisc you can also see the infamous “Baby Huey fingers a lady” and “Jessica Rabbit bottomless” shots which they edited out of the DVD and VHS releases.
I was home sick one day and spent an afternoon going through that movie finding the naughty bits
