These are wonderful times for animation bloggers, what with all the controversy raging about whether or not motion capture/performance capture is or is not animation. I have long said that it is, but would like to amplify my feelings a bit on the matter. The cause for this is a recent posting from the ever thoughtful Mark Mayerson, who criticizes Cartoon Brew’s Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi’s acceptance of the technique as animation; Mayerson argues that it is a postproduction technique, and thus should not and cannot be considered animation (which, he says, is a production technique).  He concludes by saying:

I’ve written extensively on how fragmented the process of making an animated film is and how so many of the acting decisions are made before the animator starts work. The character designs, the storyboard and the voice performance all make acting decisions that constrain the animator’s interpretation. There is no question that motion capture is yet another constraint, probably larger than all the others. To insist that Avatar is an animated film is to marginalize animators even more than they are in what are generally considered animated films. Is this the direction we want things to go? Better to agree with James Cameron [that it’s not animation] and focus our attention on films where animators create, not enhance, performances.

His argument is not a new one and I’m sure that any number of animators feel that motion capture work demeans them because it reduces the animation to a postproduction process. And similar arguments have long been lodged against rotoscoping. But if we take an historical approach, which I think can be useful, then the evidence is strongly in favor of both rotoscoping and motion capture being animation.

Remember, Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope in 1915 as a way to create more fluid animation; and though I have not done much research in this area, I would be surprised if anyone could find comments by any other animation pioneer that derided the process as being something other than animation. It is said that early animators struggled to have their characters move in a realistic manner, which arguably created an opening for Fleischer’s invention.

One of the earliest examples of motion capture used in lieu of animation in a mainstream production was the Brilliance commercial Robert Abel and Associates did in 1984 for the Canned Food Information Council. In the film describing its production posted above, it is clearly labeled as an animation process. And it should be noted that the company used the technique at a time when computer animation seemed incapable of easily producing realistic human movement.

Bill Kroyer, recalled in an interview with me that,

When we did Tron, all you could do is move one object, like a light cycle, and it had one thing on top, like a moving turret as in a tank. Having multiple movements was a big deal, because nobody had really written software which structures movement in a hierarchy; so when you move the shoulder, it moves the elbow, the wrist and the fingers; then you can move the elbow and it moves the wrist.

At Digital Productions, [in 1984] they wrote a program that created a hierarchy. They set up this hierarchy of a human body, but the objects were mere blocks — the head was a square and the torso was a kind of a little pyramid — but at least it had all the joints; it had a neck, back, hip, knee and everything. Then they gave me this block woman as we called her and said, “Just see if you can make it move.” And I just started creating key frames and animating; I started with the center of gravity and the hips, then I kept adding on and adding on and created this dance scene.

In other words, Robert Abel, one of the pioneers of computer animation, not having the technology available to Digital Productions (or perhaps feeling it was inadequate) turned to motion capture in much the same way that Max Fleischer turned to rotoscoping.

Thanks to Amanda Kieffer.

I just became aware of the British Film Institute’s YouTube Channel which is featuring the first screen version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which was directed  by  Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow. The BFI, which is touting its restoration in conjunction with the release of the new Tim Burton film, notes that, at around 12 minutes (of which only 8 survive), it “was the longest film yet produced in Britain.” It also features “an early appearance by the [Hepworth] family dog, Blair, who would become famous as the star of Rescued by Rover(1905),” one of the most famous of early British films.

All this and the attempted fidelity to John Tenniel’s original illustrations, is all well and good; but what interested me most was the film’s use of Georges Méliès-style special effects, which I found quite delightful.

In a follow-up to a front page story in the Los Angeles Times entitled “’Avatar’ stirs an animated actors debate in Hollywood,” the paper’s Rachel Abramowitz posted this interview with Steven Spielberg on his use of motion capture in his The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, which utilizes the same technology James Cameron did in Avatar. The comments of Spielberg, who has played an important role in nurturing the current animation renaissance, are indicative of why mocap has proven so attractive to live-action directors:

For the director … the new experience was transporting.

“I just adored it,“ he says. “It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don’t often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an Xbox game controller.”

With that small monitor, Spielberg could look down and watch what the actors were doing — in real time — on a screen that showed them in the film universe. Working on the motion-capture stage — which is called the volume  — Spielberg was routinely dazzled by the liberating artistic value of the new science.

The Los Angeles-based iotaCenter, an organization “devoted to Abstract Cinema and Visual Music,” now has a YouTube channel where a number of otherwise unavailable films can be seen. These include Len Lye’s pioneering experiment in cameraless animation: A Colour Box; this was his first film in which he painted directly onto film, a technique process which today is more closely identified with Norman McLaren. The film was made in 1935, but John Grierson later arranged for the GPO Film Unit to reissue it in 1937 with a blurb for the General Post Office appended, which is the version posted above.

Below is Permutations (1966), John Whitney’s lovely computer/optical printer film done at UCLA under a grant from IBM. Whitney is one of the true pioneers of computer animation, whose work is probably most familiar from the digital graphics created for Saul Bass’ title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958); among Whitney’s disciples was Bob Abel, whose Robert Abel and Associates famously worked on Tron (1982).

This is by way of an overdue update on Tinga Tinga Tales, the Kenyan animated TV series I reported here on June 30th. The series (see trailer above) has begun broadcasting on the CBeebies,(Children’s BBC) (those living in the UK can see past episodes here). In the meantime, check out this BBC story on the studio here.

Thanks to Cartoon Brew.

The Savannah International Animation Festival (SIAF) is making its debut February 5-6, 2010 at the Coastal Georgia Center, 305 Fahm Street, Savannah GA 31401. The event will consist of “7 blocks of animation shorts, consisting of over 60 juried films from 15 different countries [including Joan Gratz’s latest excursion into clay painting, Puffer Gir (see above), as well as] 8 workshops and panels.” The workshops and panels include “Collecting the History of Animation and Film Piece by Piece,” “Reconciling Motion Capture & Animation” and “Getting My Work Out There/Working in the Business.”

The event is the brainchild of my SCAD colleague Hal Miles and is being put on by his Hal Miles Imagimation Studios and is certainly worth a visit. For more details, check out the festival’s website here.

The Plaza which opened in 1939 is finally celebrating its 70th birthday in style with screenings of classic films from 1939, including 35mm prints of the Fleischers’ Gulliver’s Travels and Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, plus Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Planet Outlaws (the 1953 feature version of the 1939 Buck Rogers serial). The event kicks off on Friday evening, January 15th, at 7:00 p.m., with a gala party featuring Turner Classic Movie host Robert Osbourne followed by a screening of the Capra film at 8:45; the next two feature screenings of Gulliver and Mr.Smith; other screenings and events will be held the following two weekends. Check here for further details and to buy advance tickets.

‘

Well, the wait is over and, whether one likes it or not, Avatar looks like the game changer that James Cameron, Jeffrey Katzenberg and other promoters of 3D movies said it would be, quieting critics who said the technology would never really work in live action. It also looks like it will be the film which legitimatizes motion/performance capture, especially as a way for live-action directors to enter the wonderful world animation (though sometimes without necessarily admitting it’s animation). It also helps that, despite its occasionally comical mixture of Star Wars and FernGully, it’s a pretty good movie.

As I wrote a year ago, “I suspect 3D will not go away anytime soon; the question , I believe, is whether or not it will go beyond being a niche market.” Avatar’s success certainly solidifies 3D’s place in the cinematic mainstream, though calling it a live action is problematic. (In this regard, do read Brad Brevet’s “Should ‘Avatar’ Be Considered for Best Animated Oscar?” on RopeofSilicon.com here and Steve Hulett’s follow-up comments on The Animation Guild blog here.) Thus, Kristin Thompson’s comments on Beowulf that “It’s still fiendishly difficult and expensive to shoot live action material in digital 3-D, so most projects are animated,” perhaps still seems to hold.

In regards to his use of motion capture, Cameron has been especially boastful about how he has overcome the last obstacle to the technology’s acceptance, that of being able to reproduce not only the reference actor’s bodily actions, but their exact facial expressions as well. As a result we are left with the spectacle of critics gushing over how, for example, Sigorney Weaver’s avatar face looks just like Sigorney Weaver’s actual face (see comparison below). This, as Brevet points out, is something that animators have been doing since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (actually since Otto Messmer’s pre-Felix the Cat work on Charlie Chaplin cartoons).

Also, the film really does not fully address the problem of the uncanny valley, as the mocap characters are not meant to be realistic humans, but highly stylized humanoids; a better test would be to see how Cameron would do on a follow-up to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Cameron also boasts that his work on performance capture technology will eventually lead it to becoming more commonplace and cheaper. I suppose so, but less expensive approaches already exists. For instance, director Neill Blomkamp in an interview about his District 9 with Todd Gilchrist notes:

Pretty much in any shot with an alien interacting with a human, which 99 percent is Christopher interacting with Wikus, there was Jason Cope, who was the actor who plays Christopher and who also plays all of the other aliens in the film. He was always on set in a lycra, light-reflective suit, and he would be interacting with Sharlto. It was not performance capture from a data-recording standpoint; like, there were no motion-capture cameras around. But once our live-action camera was tracked, the animators at Image Engine would sort of trace-animate the motion of Jason, almost literally like tracing him. That rotomation would become the essence of the performance of this digital creature, and then they would paint Jason out and put the digital one in, and you would have both performances and they would both be real and they would both be interacting with one another. It’s just very difficult and very expensive to paint someone out of a moving-camera [image] and then replace them with something, but we factored that in.

And despite District 9’s $30 million budget, it doesn’t suffer much in comparison with Avatar and, I would argue, is the better film.

The comparison between the two films is also interesting in that Blomkamp’s training and experience was an animator and special effects artist, while Cameron’s was not. (True, Cameron can draw, a skill which is often considered the holy grail of qualifications to becoming an animation artist or special effects artist, he never had any particular training in either craft.)

The 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for the 2009 National Film Registry were announced today and include the usual mix of classic Hollywood, independent , documentary, amateur and student films. (The Library’s press release announcing the list can be found here.) Also as usual, I found the selection a mixed bag, but among the selections I have no quibble with are Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) (a particular favorite of mine) and Winsor McCay’s first film, Little Nemo (1911) (a pick that was way overdue; pictured above is one of the film’s most magical moments).

Animated films have almost always made the cut since the Registry was first established in 1989, but they do seem more prevalent this year and include: Sidney Peterson’s The Lead Shoes (1949), (a live-action/animation combo that is more of a trick film), Sally Cruikshank’s Quasi at the Quackadero (1975), Janie Geiser’s The Red Book (1994), and Helen Hill’s Scratch and Crow (1995) (a student film made at CalArts; the other student effort this year is Martin Brest’s Hot Dogs for Gauguin [NYU, 1972], “with a cast including Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman in her film debut.”)

Mohamed Ghazala reports that Noshi Iskandar, who has been a key figure in Egyptian animation since the 1960s passed away last week at the age of 71. He started his career as a caricaturist and starting in 1961, he helped set up the Animation Department for Egyptian Television; his works were screened at a number of international festivals; in addition, he was also an important teacher for several generations of Egyptian artists at Minia University, in Minia.

I just received an interesting report from Mohamed Ghazala. Director of ASIFA Egypt, on celebrations of International Animation Day across Africa  on October 28 (Tunisia, Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa) and November (Cairo and Alexandria). (IAD commemorates the opening  of Émile Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique at the Musée Grévin in Paris on October 28, 1892.) The basic approach to these events were screenings of films submitted by ASIFA chapters from around the world, but also included a wide range of presentations, screenings  and workshops, which I thought I would sample with the following images:

ASIFA Egypt Alexandria Team Maha Sherwin and Ahmed El Ashwah speaking at 2009 International Animation Day in Alexandria, Egypt.

ASIFA Egypt member, Alemu Damena organized the festivities in Addis Ababa, which took place in the Ethiopian National Theatre and the Candle Theatre in collaboration with the Ethiopian Animators Group. Pictured above is Ethiopian poet Ayaleh Mulat speaking in Addis Ababa. The event featured an hour long screening of films by 10 Ethiopian animators.

Animation Africa’s Samuel Quartey is seen here introducing a panel discussion in Kumasi, Ghana.

A children’s workshop was also featured in Ghana, in which animators Salamatu Yakubu and George Opare instructed 20 students from Kumasi’s Ridge School in “basic digital photography exercises and Pixilation.”

Wassim Ben Rhouma of ASIFA Egypt Tunis is here seen introducing an IAD panel in Tunisia. The Facebook page in French promoting the event can be found here.

The IAD celebration in Cape Town, South Africa featured a screening of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a selection of African animation put together by ASIFA Egypt, and Animation SA indents by students from Learn2. The two students above were the winners of Toon Boom software prizes.

The Algerian event, which took place December 13-15 with the theme “Africa Comes to Life, in which Moustapha Alassane, the “dean of African filmmakers” happened after the report was written, but a story on the event, in French, can be found here.

For more on African and especially Egyptian animation, check out Mohamed Ghazala’s Animation from Egypt & Africa blog.

Being that it is Christmas time, I thought I would post Hugh Harman’s Peace on Earth, especially as this is the 70th anniversary of its release (7 December 1939); the film’s pacifist theme resonated with the American public in the wake of the outbreak of the World War II in Europe and Harman said it was his favorite film “because it has some meaning and a serious theme.” Peace on Earth, which has some echoes of William Cameron Menzies’ version of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come (1936), earned an Oscar nomination and, according to Harman, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. The film’s success was not entirely welcomed by the powers that be at MGM, as producer Fred Quimby subsequently scotched Harman’s plans to do a version of his favorite poem, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

(Incidentally, this week also marks the 70th anniversary of Dave Fleischer’s Gulliver’s Travels (22 December 1939), which like Peace on Earth also had a pacifist theme — though it was not so blunt in its message.)

Being Christmas, I thought I should also post Paul Driessen’s An Old Box (1975), which the great Dutch-Canadian filmmaker made for the National Film Board of Canada, with music by Normand Roger.

Yesterday, tired of Atlanta’s continuing lack of Imax theaters showing Hollywood fare, my wife and I drove to the AMC Southlake 24, in Morrow (about a 30 minutes away) to see Avatar. The theater complex is a rather comfortable oasis in the midst of a rather desolate shopping complex and largely enjoyed the movie; but right now I don’t want to focus on the movie itself, but on the fact that about two hours into the film I began to get a headache on both sides of my head. Reports of headaches while watching 3D films are certainly nothing new or strange, but, for someone who has been seeing stereoscopic films without incident since 1952 (yes, I’m old enough to have seen Bwana Devil when it first came out), this really caught me by surprise.

I suppose there are several valid explanations for my what happened, including the fact I never before sat through a 3D movie over two hours long, or saw a feature-length 3D Imax film, or age was finally catching up with me, or some combination of these or other factors. And attempts to use the techniques to avoid 3D headaches discussed on Shadowlocked did not seem to help left me fearing my 3D moviegoing days might be numbered.

However, in talking this over with my wife, she suggested that my headache came from the glasses applying too much pressure on my head muscles. She herself felt uncomfortable during the show and was able to relieve her discomfort by moving her glasses into a more comfortable position. I’m not sure if this explanation is valid or not, but the RealD 3D glasses the Southlake used were noticeably different from any I used before; and though I was not conscious of any added pressure to my head, it’s not something I can rule out.  And even if it is valid, I doubt it explains all reports of headaches while viewing 3D movies.

This snapshot, which I took at The Animation Guild’s annual Christmas party on December 12, 2003, was the closest I ever got to meeting Roy E. Disney, who died yesterday, December 16th, at the age of 79. He appeared there in the midst of an epic struggle for control of the Disney Empire with Michael Eisner, in which he eventually prevailed three years later.  (See my report on his surprise appearance at the party here.)

Most frequently identified as Walt Disney’s nephew, it would be more appropriate to note that he was the son of Roy O. Disney, Walt’s older brother who was the Disney Studio’s co-founder and long-time CEO; after all, Roy E. Disney, like his father, made his mark not so much as a creative producer, but as a creative executive who helped steer the Walt Disney Company to become one of the world’s major entertainment companies. In the process, he helped rescue a foundering company more than once, making Disney a real player in Hollywood in both live action and animation.

The animation community has long recognized his efforts to pull the studio’s animation operations from the brink of extinction in 1984, after he managed to oust president and CEO Ron Miller, Walt Disney’s son-in-law, in favor of the team of Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Frank Wells; it turns out the three were essentially ready to ditch animation to concentrate on energizing its  moribund live-action slate, but Roy Disney persuaded them to do otherwise. Luckily, Katzenberg took up animation with a vengeance and soon made the studio into an animation powerhouse which came to dominate theatrical animation in ways it had never done before. (I suspect these efforts were made possible by Katzenberg’s equally impressive work in the live-action arena.)

In addition to his role as an executive, Roy E. Disney had a strong sense of history which led him to try to extend his father’s and uncle’s legacy. When Fantasia 2000 was in production, I was told by several artists on the project that Michael Eisner was personally supervising it, I immediately realized that Eisner was acting as an agent on behalf of Disney. He also pushed the studio to resurrect and finish Salvador Dali’s Destino in 2003, 58 years after the project was started. Incidentally, a non-legacy project he also championed, without success, was trying to get the Disney Studio to allow Richard Williams to finally complete The Thief and the Cobbler the way he  wanted to.

For a quick overview of the various boardroom battles Disney waged with his long-time business partner Stanley Gold, check out this Financial Times story;  for his role in animation, see Charles Solomon’s appreciation in The Los Angeles Times. But if you’re really interested in his life and career, then by all means take a look at the six-part Archive of American Television oral history interview, the first part of which is embedded below.

 Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas, Fred Ladd’s personal history of his involvement with producing the American versions of such early Japanese animated TV series as Astro Boy and Gigantor, has now been made available as an Amazon’s Kindle Book for only $9.99, which you can order here. (The original print edition is, of course, still available in its original softcover edition from MacFarland for $35.00.) Unfortunately, as far as I know, neither Fred Ladd or myself will be able to personally autograph your Kindle Edition, but I suppose there are other compensating virtues to getting it via Kindle.