I’ve just spent the last three days watching Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed on DVD with my kids. It’s not a bad movie, and for the most part, the actors do a pretty good job in their role replicating cartoon characters. But it occurs to me to wonder…why do the movie studios want to do this?
I mean, actors need to be paid and directed. Life-size sets need to be built. Special effects need to be added, including Scooby himself being entirely CGI. Isn’t this a heck of a lot more expensive than just doing a feature-length cartoon of Scooby Doo? Same question would apply to the Flintstones movies with John Goodman, Mister Magoo with Leslie Neilsen, Garfield with Bill Murray…
Why are live actors + CGI to duplicate the cartooniness better for studios than actual cartoons?
I think there’s a large audience of people that remember these old cartoons from their youth, but would not pay to go see a feature length version done in the old style animation. However, you make it a live action version, and if you cast it well, people will go see it. For instance, when I heard that John Goodman was going to play Fred Flintstone, I thought that he would be perfect in that role. So I ponied up my 7 bucks. Well, he wasn’t perfect, but he was very, very good.
Don’t underestimate tbe hubba-hubba factor. How many of us who grew up chastely lusting after Daphne went to see Scooby Doo just to check out Sarah Michelle Geller in the role?
Live actors can do the talk show circuit to promote the film. It probably takes one quarter of the time to make a live action movie vs an animated one. You still have to voice cast it so you have to get actors anyway.
And Popeye was such a success they have to copy it.
Not at all, but I would still have thought it’s a good deal cheaper than the salaries of A-list (or at least high B-list) actors (plus all their personal staff, feeding them, providing on-site amenities), special effects (and isn’t CGI a form of animation? so they’re not dispensing with the expense of animation entirely), stuntmen (insurance?), life-size location sets…
Zebra:
Didn’t realize how time-consuming animation is…does that apply to TV as well? Because the Simpsons and their cohorts seem to produce at the same rate as live-action sitcoms.
And true there would need to be human beings behind the voices, but that could be accomplished with lesser actors as the stars, and it dispenses with the need for a director to handle all the action. (I know there’s direction in animation as well, but it’s different.)
TV animation is farmed out to overseas studios (typically in Korea for some reason) that use a staff of hundreds of artists to turn work around quickly. It would be impossible to run a studio on that scale in America.
Disney used to have a “no stars” policy for their animated features, but sadly it’s been abandoned and few in the industry are willing to buck the trend. (Though hiring Sarah Vowell for The Incredibles was a pretty surprising left-field choice.) Animated movies are now sold on the star power of their voice casts as surely as live action films are. It’s now typical to see footage of the actors recording their parts in the movie’s commercial; such illusion-shattering would’ve been unthinkable back in Disney’s salad days.
BTW, in most movies today—certainly in a movie like Scooby-Doo—“all the action” is handled as much on a computer as it is on a set; the line between live action and animation is blurring to such an extent (cf. Sin City) that the distinction will likely soon be completely insignificant.
I think there’s also a stereotype out there (albeit a false one) that animated shows are for kids. (In fact, I know it exists…my dad won’t watch animation). Since movies like Scooby Doo 2 have as their target market teenagers as well as adults who grew up with the cartoon, they might prefer live action for that reason.
I don’t think Pixar’s films count, since AFAIK they make their casting choices in-house, based on the suitability of the voice. It’s safe to say that before The Incredibles, Craig T. Nelson wasn’t on anyone’s list of “hot celebrities” – certainly not on the order of a typical Dreamworks CGI movie cast.
rjung, Disney has done it with non-Pixar animated films as well…Robin Williams in Aladdin, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Jeremy Irons and James Earl Jones in The Lion King come to mind.
Goes back even farther than that, if you count some of their “Not-Quite-So-Golden-Age” offerings, such as Bob Newhart and Zsa-Zsa Gabor in the Rescuers movies, Joe Flynn in the original, George C. Scott in Rescuers Down Under, Billy Joel in Oliver and Company (not a movie star, I know, but a pretty big name nonetheless), Mickey Rooney in The Fox and the Hound. While Walt still lived, Peggy Lee voiced three characters in Lady and the Tramp. Of Course Peggy eventually had to sue to get her rightful monies for co-writing a lot of the songs, so maybe that’s where the no-stars rule came from.
I know; my point was simply that Pixar doesn’t do it (or at least, not deliberately).
The biggest stars Pixar has ever used were Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, but according to John Lasseter on the Toy Story DVD commentary, they were cast before they became big box-office stars. Which was convenient, because they were signed at their cheaper rates at the time…
