Move over Brad Bird, give way Ron Clements and Johns Musker. J. Cameron has come to Toon town.
"When completed, Cameron expects Avatar to be about 60% CG animation, based on characters created using a newly developed performance capture-based process, and 40% live action, with a lot of VFX in the imagery." ...
Taking this into account, ... [here's] the Academy's rules for what is and what isn't an animated film, at least in Oscar's eyes:
... An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of at least 70 minutes, in which movement and characters' performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. In addition, 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 ...
... All the creatures in Avatar are animated as are the lead characters with the most screen time. The environment is nearly 100% animated and instead of make-up effects they make use of CG animated costumes. You'd be hard-pressed to convince me Avatar is absolutely not an animated film ...
Let's stipulate that much of the above is semi-silly. The fact is, any blockbuster of the last several years has generous dollops of animation embedded in it. Stunt work, crowds of extras, all the effects and whole environments are animated. Secondary characters are animated.
But it's more radical than that. Go to your standard-issue live-action programmer and hang around for the ten minutes of back-end credits. You'll see two or three effects studios listed, with squads of animators and digital matte artists and effects specialists. And half the time you sit there and think: "What? Did I miss something? Why are they using all those effects people? What did they do, exactly?"
The cold reality today is that almost every big picture has animation in it, more often than not lots of animation. If they were making Wizard of Oz in 2009 the feature would be overflowing with animated work ("Flying monkeys? We can give you thousands!") If Gone With the Wind was on somebody's production slate they would be dialing ILM to animate the burning of Atlanta.
So yeah. James Cameron is an animation director. Isn't everybody?
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14 comments:
Pfft.
If it's not key-framed, it's not animated. Mo-cap/cleanup doesn't count.
Sounds like animation needs to be defined with clarity for the academy.
So then Gulliver in "Gulliver's Travels" isn't animation.
Nor the prince in "Snow White".
Interesting.
nor anything stop-motion.
When everything you see and hear in a movie or tv show can be reduced to a byte, the term 'animation' becomes entirely irrelevant, save for backhanded compliments and labor jurisdiction disputes.
A useless word. It describes nothing.
So then Gulliver in "Gulliver's Travels" isn't animation.
Nor the prince in "Snow White".
Interesting.
You got it. Rotoscoping is not animation.
Now all u gotta do is convince studios, the press, and the acadamy awards
I'll let Brad Bird do that.
Are you seriously comparing "Gulliver's Travels" and "Snow White" to "Avatar," or are you just mocking the "official" definition? What's the point, anyway?
Avatar could never compete with "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
One is a silly romp with ugly/unappealing cartoonish characters designed by Thomas Kinkade, and the other was Walt Disney's first animated feature.
If Avatar is a blockbuster, you might have to eat your words. i'll be watching, with the pepper shaker at hand.
rufus
avatar does not look like anything spectacular to me either. just lots of stuff being thrown at a viewer willing to pony up double the average ticket price to shut their brain off for a couple of hours.
hope im wrong if i spend any of my hard earned cash on it.
Titanic also had mixed reviews and many nay sayers, and yet...
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000101/CRITICALDEBATE/40308080
r.
Cameron himself in promo pieces has said that these characters are NOT animated - they are performance captured. Or in other words, they are digital prosthetics. Now I'm quite sure A LOT of animators did A LOT of clean up in order to get the most out of the captured information, but I can't consider it animation.
the more i see the more it looks like a video game, may wait for the DVD
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