Friday, March 30, 2012

Weird?!

Now that Tintin is out on the little silver disks, it gets more reviews. And this kind of nails it:

... Clearly motion-capture technology has its place. It worked in the semi-realistic world of Avatar (it helps if most of your characters have cat eyes). It worked to allow Andy Serkis to deliver brilliant performances in both Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and The Lord Of The Rings (an ape and a Gollum mixed in with live actors and all sorts of other special effects). But when the film is fully animated as in The Polar Express and The Adventures Of Tintin, the weird look of it -- not quite live action, not quite animated -- and the dead eyes of the characters is genuinely ugly. It's like stop-motion animation with none of the charm, animation with none of the freedom and beauty, computer animation with none of the sharpness. It's neither fish nor fowl and it's hard to understand why Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson couldn't see that. ...

As I've said: If Glen Keane had been supervising the Tangled crew and animated this film -- beat for beat -- it would have been better and far more successful stateside.

Rotoscope from Hell works okay in some live-action/mocap features. Not so much in total mocap, which makes audiences ... uneasy.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bingo.

Anonymous said...

Yes, agreed. It just doesn't look right to me at all.

Anonymous said...

But ya' know, it's really hard to tell since no well told story to date has been all mo-cap. All of the totally mo-cap'd films have been anywhere from really, really bad (Polar Express) to meh (TinTin). So it's still kind of hard to tell if it's the mo-cap or the bad filmmaking.

Liam said...

please shut the hell up please!!! your constantly shitting on a style a film that you see what, once maybe twice a year then judge it by your bias opinion towards it.

Anonymous said...

It's an OK process; I kinda like that weird look.

What is getting is that while Zemeckis' films are dissed (he INVENTED the process of performance capture!) Jackson/Spielberg's identical visual effort is praised by most critics.

Anonymous said...

"he INVENTED the process of performance capture"

That is simply not true.

Anonymous said...

That review is spot on.

Chris Sobieniak said...

Perhaps they should mo-cap "Ender's Game", I'd love to see that!

avid reader said...

I second the "Enders Game" idea. What an awesome book!....and while they're at it, why not make "Forever War" as well....which won both Hugo and Nebula awards among others...."Hunger war", eat your heart out!

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