The Oscars are unbeliveably biased and rigid and yet I still love the drama.
Personally, i’d like Tintin to get recognition for Visual Effects, Score, and heck, maybe Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture, and have a film like Rango or Winnie The Pooh win Animated Feature. I think Rango deserves an Original Screenplay nod too. We shall see.
2011 didn’t personally give me any definite best animated features—you know, something that really wows me overall—but I would probably go with Rango as my favorite AND the best. KFP 2 was actually not bad in my opinion, either. I honestly rank it close to the first, and even in terms of story, art direction, action scenes, and humor.
A very average-weak year in animation, sadly. And my favourite animated film of the year isn’t even a “proper” animated film. I await 2012 with anticipation.
Interesting, q_o_p…not sure exactly how specific CG-animation software packages work, but maybe the animator starts with a blank screen upon which lines are introduced, rather like an artist taking brush to canvas. With motion capture, it seems digitized points are introduced to the screen via pre-existing file, rather like a photograph used for decoupage or PhotoShopped onscreen. Agreed that there is room for artistic expression/work in any of the above examples, including motion capture.
Isn’t it ironic that that with motion capture there is an awkward unnaturalness of characters when the digitized source is so (technically) true to life?
Tintin actually looks interesting based on the trailer, and maybe just to see how it turns out. It could be that Spielberg and Jackson make fine use of the motion-capture tool, regardless of how the film is categorized. So maybe the personal Top 5 ranking/voting on this particular topic will have to wait a bit longer.
I think it’s fair to choose how to define motion-capture on your own terms, as long as it’s more for personal opinion. For instance, I don’t categorize films with heavy amounts of animation (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, etc.) or that are primarily rotoscoped with other animation. This is a tricky topic, indeed. Personally, I don’t think rotoscope or motion-capture animation are nearly as expressive as hand-drawn or computer animation in terms of movement (even subtle facial movement), but they’re still technically animation in my eyes.
I do feel like a lot of motion-capture films might as well be live-action, though, such as The Polar Express. If that movie was live-action, should the story allow for that to even be possible, it would hardly change my opinion of the film. On the other hand, I think Monster House would have been cooler as a stop-motion film than anything else, which it seems heavily influenced by to begin with. As for rotoscope, I’ve always found that the whimsicalness of the medium, especially when some surreal animation is incorporated, is far more interesting than the actual stories in rotoscoped movies—style over substance. But maybe that’s just because only a couple well-known films have been done in that fashion.
Also, this may be the first time I’m hearing that Happy Feet uses motion-capture technology, but it doesn’t surprise me one bit. Again with the “uncanny valley” stuff, it’s easy to sense that something’s eerily close to reality but nonetheless fake.
It’s a tricky topic indeed to define what is animation and what isn’t. Having said that, animators used to object to CG for the same reason a lot of them object to mocap now; it’s seen as cheating. When in actual fact, using CG isn’t cheating, because someone still has to animate the characters. And with mocap, someone still has to render the character, even if the expressions are human ones.
But I agree with q_o_p, in that the vast majority of mocap films could’ve been either live action or key frame animated and it wouldn’t have made a lot of difference.
I have a tendency to dislike motion capture(except the Polar Express and Avatar), but hopefully eventually therr will be more great mo-cap movies.
Yeah, i’ll think the medium will improve.
I certainly hope so.
I don’t want Mocap to be the predecessor to CG and traditional animation techniques, but I hope it was improve enough to be accepted and successfully incorporated into key frame animation for stylistic purposes.