Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6359
26 Post • January 2010 www.postmagazine.com The Little Mermaid's Ron Clements and John Musker at the helm, took the old-fashioned 2D route with their hand-animated revamp of the classic fairy tale, now set in New Or- leans with an African-American in the lead. And Fox's Fantastic Mr. Fox, a more adult- friendly tale based on Roald Dahl's novel, features an even more basic animation tech- nique — stop-motion. Making his animation debut, director Wes Anderson (Rushmore) endearingly combines low-tech puppets and painted backdrops with an edgy soundtrack powered by the Rolling Stones. Another stop-motion fable, Coraline, from veteran director Henr y Selick (The Night- mare Before Christmas), and based on the sin- ister Neil Gaiman book, marked the debut of Portland's stop-motion studio Laika, is more adult-friendly than kidpic with its disturbing stor y about a girl who crawls into a weird parallel world. Up, another huge Pixar hit, was obviously animated in a ver y different style from Zemeckis' motion capture-based 3D film A Christmas Carol. And Disney's hand-drawn The Princess and the Frog is very different from Coraline, or Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, animated by Sony Im- ageworks. And while no one would call Trans- formers: Revenge of the Fallen an animated film, it wouldn't exist without animation. According to the Academy, an animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of at least 70 minutes, in which movement and characters' perfor- mances 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. "I think the Academy's just confused about hybrids and the whole subject of animation," says Terr y Gilliam, whose love of animation dates back to the '60s and his Monty Python work, and whose new film, The Imagi- narium of Doctor Parnassus, makes use of extended ani- mated sequences through- out the live action. "The truth is, so many of the big films today have some kind of animation, from Harr y Potter to the big comic book films like Iron Man, even if you wouldn't call them 'animated' films." Indeed, despite its cre- ator's apparent reluctance to include "animation" in any description of the work, Cameron's Avatar promises to blur the lines even more, as Rick Car ter, co-production designer with Rober t Stromberg, makes cr ystal clear. "It's an absolute hybrid," he states. "It's got animation and it's got live-action perfor- mances that are being recorded both with a cam- era and in a digital volume space with mo- tion capture/performance capture. Those two realms have come together to the sense where there's no real sense of pre- production, production, post production." Car ter goes on to stress the impor tance of involving post departments and visual effects right from the star t, "because…it all has to be not just seamless, it has to be conceived of at the same time." While a project like Avatar is downplaying the role of animation in its creation, other films are more than happy to stress their hy- brid nature. "Using animation and visual ef- fects together is a huge trend," agrees Daniel Jeanette, the animation/visual effects supervi- sor on Where the Wild Things Are. "Tradition- ally, animation was ver y limited in visual ef- fects, but as the technology and techniques have improved and grown, it's now become a very big tool to use — and it's becoming more and more common to combine ani- mation and visual effects. Our film was very animation-centric." He's not exaggerating. Out of a total of 1,150 VFX shots (in itself a huge number), some 950 featured animation. And while Jeanette and his team had to ani- mate just seven characters, they're visible on screen for over 1,400 shots — another huge number. "We could have shot it all green- screen or used motion capture," he notes, "but Spike Jonze really wanted to do it as a hybrid film, mixing the suits and the animated faces.That way, Max could really interact with all the creatures on set." The on set creatures were done by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, who made 14 suits — "two for each character," repor ts Peter Brooke, creative supervisor. "The chal- lenges were that they were ver y large — nine-foot tall — and needed to be very mo- bile and cover a wide range of motion." The Shop spent six months on the suits, which Even with an early '09 release, director Katherine Bigelow's Hurt Locker is still garnering Oscar buzz. F I L M S Precious and newcomer Gabourey Sidibe seem likely to be acknowledged by the Academy.