The problem with any big monster leaping motion is that there is no reality to base it on. I don’t mean lack of 25 foot gorillas, but that if you had a 25 foot gorilla it could not leap. It’s the square/cube problem. If the gorilla is 8x the size of a normal one his muscle cross section is 64x the original. That’s really great but his mass is 512x the original. It would be the same as a 180lb man weighing 1,440lb but without increased strength. He wouldn’t be leaping so much as struggling to breathe under his own weight.
Say you magically make his muscles 8x as powerful. This only makes him proportionally as strong as a normal size ape. Normal gorillas cannot leap several times their body length as Kong does. Now let’s magically make his strength enough to do those leaps. His launch velocity will have to be so fast that it will take less than a frame of film not to mention that the physical materials such as his own bones and the rocks he’s standing on won’t be able to withstand that force.
But that’s not why they can’t get regular human jumping right.
It’s theoretically easy enough to replicate Gorilla jumping to Kong scale - the physical impossibility factor would not enter into it, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to convincingly run around at all.
Jumping isn’t the only thing that CGI can’t do. Watching “Chronicles of Narnia,” it struck me that CGI movement in general still has a long way to go. For some reason, most CGI animators have a compulsion to keep everything moving, constantly. Even if Aslan is just standing there, his fur is billowing, his expression is shifting, his legs just won’t stay still. He’s a riot of movement. Compare this to the only two cases of fully-realized CGI characters- Gollum and King Kong. For both, it is the stillness of the characters that’s really striking. When Kong is standing still, there is only the slightest hint of wind rustling his fur. All of the movement is in his face, and even then, it is subtle- slight narrowing of the eyes, a tooth exposed by a curled lip. The stillness allows Kong’s performance to come to the fore.
Of course, that’s only when he’s not leaping around like Legolas.
What example can you give of a GC human jumping that didn’t look right and was also a physically possible jump. Humans aren’t tree squirrels, even the most athletic can’t make jumps that look as impressive as what we have come to expect in the movies.
In Narnia, when the humanoid bad guy creatures are on the battlefield and they jump off the hillock. In Spider-Man, whenever he does a simple leap to avoid something, such as when Doc Ock swings his arms under him. In Lord of the Rings, when we first meet Gollum, during his scuffle with Frodo and Sam, there’s a leap he makes using a rock face as a bounce board.
And that is just a small fraction of bad physics, caused by hand animation that just doesn’t seem to get it.
Did you notice the scene when the ship they were on left port in NYC? It was shown moving from left to right with the smoke coming from the smokestack being absolutely still. I got the impression that they were deliberately making some stuff look fake, as if to simulate the effects of 1930s filmmaking. Not that this is what was intended with the Kong movements, which weren’t, I think, supposed to be old-fashioned looking.
