Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1378252
MAKING CONTACT From a creative standpoint, the challenges of bringing live action and animation into the same frame are still significant, especially if you want the audience's unconditional buy-in. We all know about actors working alone on a green screen opposite "characters" they never actually see. But how about the character designers, art directors, and visual effects crew whose work must convince the viewer that, yes indeed, a zany cartoon rabbit (Roger, not Bugs) is handcuffed to a balding gumshoe? "Richard Williams was a stickler for technique. It had to be perfect," recalls Andreas Deja, Roger Rabbit's supervising animator, speaking about the late Oscar-winning animation director. "In terms of the contact between the animated characters and the live action, if you're off by two to three frames, the illusion is blown." When looking at hybrids, Deja says he examines the tangible, physical ways in which these realms converge, such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks' Emelius Browne helping the lion king of Naboombu into his cape or the numerous dust-ups between Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit which, back in 1988, were a beast to create. "I always look for the connection between the human actors and the animated characters," says Deja. "You have to make sure that their hands are touching in a convincing way when they shake hands. When a live-action character is picking up an animated character, are they making sure it feels like the animated character has weight? If Roger Rabbit is holding a live-action glass of water, you have to make sure the fingers are always solid on that glass and not sliding up and down, which is something that could happen very easily." "There are some movies that know this could be a problem so they avoid the physical contact between the live and the animated characters," he continues. "On Roger Rabbit, we were having as much contact as possible to set up the idea that these characters live side by side in the same world." The cheek-by-jowl nature of Roger Rabbit, the complexity of the characters, and director Robert Zemeckis' insistence that the camera be allowed to move freely is part of what made the film a game changer in the live-action/animation genre. Ralph Bakshi's adult take on it, Cool World (1992), followed a similar path, mixing present-day Hollywood with a comic book realm created by the movie's main character, Jack Deebs—but the effect was notably different than what Roger Rabbit pulled off, according to the film's color modelist Clayton Stang. "Roger Rabbit was trying to make 2D animated characters look like 3D. They had tone mattes and highlighting to make the characters look round so they fit in with live action," says Stang. If a live-action character wound up in Cool World, we wanted those characters looking flat and 2D. We wanted this to be an animated film that live-action characters happened to drop into." this page: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (top) and Cool World (available on Digital) ushered in a new generation of PG-and-up live-action/animation hybrid movies. opposite page: A mix of animation and CG techniques creates a variety of looks in Space Jam: A New Legacy. "In terms of the contact between the animated characters and the live action, if you're off by two to three frames, the illusion is blown." – Andreas Deja, Supervising Animator, Who Framed Roger Rabbit F E AT U R E 34 KEYFRAME Cool World images courtesy of Paramount Pictures. Image courtesy of Disney.