I could see a “Wilhelm Scream” kind of thing, where inserting a particular, recognizable CGI “actor” in minor roles in multiple movies becomes an in joke for a particular studio, or even the industry as a whole, but I don’t see that happening with major roles.
Except in Japan.
I was going to mention Hatsune Miku as well - “she” is entirely computer-generated, including her voice, and she’s already been in “live” concerts, been “photographed” and “acted” in lots of promotional materials for various things, and has her own manga series.
If a computer-generated vocaloid created specifically to market voice-technology software can have that sort of impact (granted, in Japan), I can’t see why there wouldn’t be an impact and an interest in having Frank Sinatra or James Dean showing up as current “actors” even if people are well aware that they are computer-generated rather than real people.
What would really be interesting is if CURRENT actors submitted to having their voices captured and their appearances recorded and their motions/mannerisms/physical expressions captured so that they could “hire out” their computer-generated double for films they aren’t really interested in, or for a lower price than if they did it themselves, or if they were only going to have a minor part. It would be an interesting scenario.
Now if you mean visibly cartoonish characters being actual agents and acting across mediums, that’s going to be more limited. I can see something like Homer Simpson “acting” in a cartoon as a gag or a meta-commentary on commercialism, but American culture at the moment doesn’t seem to consider cartoons to be actual adult art/culture, hugely branded exceptions like Mickey, and TV juggernauts like Family Guy and The Simpsons notwithstanding. Cartoon “actors” seems like something that would have to wait for us to be more ok with cartoons in adult entertainment (which we’re getting there) but right now would be way more likely in Japan where animation is simply another entertainment medium with no specific age-restricted audience.
As a side-note, Barbie has a booming industry of appearing in various mangled and abused fairy-tales and operas as various characters, but she’s always presented as “Barbie in xxxxxx” so there is the idea of her as a character “acting” in these presentations. I have not yet been forced to watch any of them, so can’t say if the conceit is present in the actual productions, but it IS present in the picture-book novelizations of the movies.
In a limited way, this is already being done in certain types of animation. MLP:Friendship is Magic, for example, is Flash-animated, and every major character has at least some unique movements and expressions associated with it. When animating a scene, they don’t draw it frame by frame, they put the character models in it and essentially say things like, “okay, you move over to this spot and look quizzical”. The character uses whatever its normal movement is to get there, then presents its characteristic expression. If you took the character and changed its colors and mane–by way of analogy to an actor getting makeup and a haircut for a different role–it would still be recognizable by the way it “acts”. The “actor” has body language and quirks of expression that carry over.
(There are, in fact, resource kits that people use to produce fan-made animations. Sometimes they use the characters unaltered, or they may change their appearance to fill a different role, or create new characters entirely.)
My daughter used to watch those “Barbie in XXXXX” movies. “Barbie Rapunzel”, “Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus”, “Barbie Nutcracker” and so on. I forgot about them.
This seems to be something close to what the OP was imagining. Here we have a computer model representing a doll, acting various roles in various movies. But the model wasn’t always the same–just as there are various models of Barbies with different hair colors and styles and ethnicities, the “Barbies” in the movies would be different Barbies. Same physical model based on the dolls, but with enough variation that it doesn’t seem be supposed to be the “same” “actor”. And the voice actors are different as well, although all with a very similar sound.
Nice. The example, not the actual movies - my daughter went through a big phase of those; sigh…
Doonesbury already explored this concept, decades ago. When Boopsie recognized that what semblance of an acting career she had was soon to hit a sharp decline as she aged, she had all of her bodily measurements scanned for use in computer games, so she could still sell the rights to them even after she couldn’t get work personally. Years later, they revisited the topic, and revealed that she was indeed turning a trade in selling her likeness, but piecemeal: I think it was claimed that the latest version of Lara Croft had her abs, or some such.
That’s as close as we get with “normal” examples, and even then the characters is still Barbie.
As many noticed, Buzz Lightyeat can only play that specific carácter, he can’t be “Johnny the Pizza Guy” on a film noir movie.
Roger Rabbit wasn’t CGI. He was animated in the traditional ink-and-paint manner.
This reminded me of something similar. A few years ago, I saw an exhibit at the SFMoMA. Apparently, in Japan, there are animation studios that create and animate characters, and license them out for advertising. So, say you own a car dealership, and your holding the Japanese equivalent of a President’s Day sale. You can go to this studio, and and pick a character from their archive that they’ll animate and put into a commercial for you. So it’s possible to see the same “character” show up in different advertisements from different companies.
The exhibit i saw had been set up by a collective of artists who had bought the rights to one such character outright from the studio, and then created a number of different works using her as the focal point. When the project was done, since they’d bought the right entirely, instead of just listening them, the character was allowed to “retire” from acting.
Details of Japanese commercial practices are dimly remembered from an art plaque I read five+ years ago, so take that story with a pinch of salt.
But any CGI actor who you’d do this with would be used because he stood out as a character. There are tons of examples. Groucho the actor played Groucho the character in tons of different roles. Bob Hope did something similar. Mickey Mouse also played the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, remember. I think Bugs Bunny is another good example, since the Bugs character was put in a lot of different environments, including Wagner opera.
I have.
It’s what I thought of. In those movies it’s always Barbie and some of her supporting cast playing the back up parts. Usually the bad guys are new, but a lot of the handsome price and Barbie’s sisters and other girls are the same sprites with different roles.
Surprisingly, they’re not entirely terrible.
Licensing costs would be a big problem. If Buzz Light Year appeared in various moves then the license fees would get ridiculous, Plus they have to pay the voice actor too.
Anyone remember Max Headroom? Theres an example of an animated character that appeared on multiple shows and computer games. But he was always the same character.
One hurdle stands in its way - I seriously doubt SAG/AFTRA would go for it.
Case in point: in the first season of the animated series Whatever Happened to Robot Jones?, they used a computer voice as the title character (credited as “himself”). Not only did Cartoon Network hire an actor to do the voice in the second season, but they had the actor redo all of the character’s lines in the first season episodes.
I still wonder how Disney got away with having a computer be the voice of the ship’s computer in WALL-E.
Wasn’t a movie about the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae done in CGI ?
Maybe the computer joined SAG?
SAG could yell at anything, but I don’t see how a computer voice would violate a SAG contract, any more than Roger Rabbit did - or more specifically, a toon extra without a voice actor behind it.
Howard Chaykin’s 80’s comic American Flagg! starts with the main character being forced to become a lawman. He was an actor, the studio replaced him with a cgi of himself and kept making movies. It was a future/corporate/dystopia type series so peons (meaning just about everybody) could just suck it.
I can pretty much guarantee lawsuits and bribes galore if this appears to start costing jobs.
There was a movie, Looker from 1981, that dealt with this possibility. It starred Susan Dey as a model/actress who got plastic surgery to make her even more beautiful. There was a scene where she had to stand nude on a platform so that a computer could scan her image and then her image could be manipulated to perform in various commercials, TV shows, movies, etc. The drama began when other model/actresses who had also under gone the knife were being killed by a secret corporation who didn’t want the real women alive to cause trouble, I guess. Being the early '90s, the special effects were not impressive, but the idea is there.
And there was a book a fair time ago, Little Heroes, that had CGI music and acting stars… Great book if you can find it. It also has ‘people kibble’ in it =)
Well, technically, a computer was used to synthesize the voice of the ship’s autopilot. The ship’s computer was voiced by Sigourney Weaver.
Probably, the fact that the autopilot is a relatively minor character with very little actual dialogue. In the TV show you mention, they used a computer for the voice of the lead, which meant a human voice actor didn’t get a job. In Wall-E, given the small amount of voice work necessary for the auto-pilot, and the heavy distortion needed to get that mechanical sound, they’d probably have had the lines recorded by someone already working on the film as another character.