“Hi! I’m Mr. Mo Cap! I’m the future of animation!”

I woke up this morning to the news that Disney is entering a partnership with Robert Zemeckis to create a new in-house studio to produce motion capture films.

Mo-Cap? Oh-Crap! In a parallel universe, (the one in my mind, anyway) Disney was supposed to make a deal with Aardman for clay films… not with Zemeckis and motion capture. There is a part of me that would like to think that Disney bought in with Zemeckis just to keep him and his future “performance capture” projects off the market… but I doubt it. The grosses (and Oscar prestige) of Happy Feet and Monster House are too great for Disney to ignore.

I’m guessing this is an Iger-led business decision, not a Lasseter-led creative one. Let’s not forget the studio’s mandate: Disney must dominate animated features. Number 1 - buy Pixar. Number 2 - buy any other technique or filmmaker encroaching on our dominance in the market. Teaming with Zemeckis is part of that plan.

I hated the look of Polar Express, but could see some potential for the technique in Monster House. However, neither film can be compared to the true art of hand-drawn Disney animation. John Lasseter is commited to reviving traditional hand drawn character animation at the studio and this new business deal does nothing to slow those plans. While this new arrangement doesn’t bode well for Disney’s own (non-Pixar) CG feature projects, it does keep Disney at the forefront of digital filmmaking - with a new twist on an old technology. I can’t help but think that Max Fleischer is looking down on all this and having the last laugh.

Oscar-nominated animation director Michael Sporn has a thought about all the negative reviews that the Nickelodeon feature BARNYARD is receiving:

Too bad. When you have a live-action auteur like Steve Oedekerk come in to write and direct an “animated feature,” surely you’re on the right track. Why should the director know anything about the craft?

My sentiments exactly.

Mick LaSalle is quickly becoming a household name; in the past week, his awful MONSTER HOUSE has been picked up all over the blogosphere including Boing Boing, Cinematical and SFist. Toronto-based writer Jason Anderson, apparently jealous of LaSalle’s infamy, decided to write his own article showing a profound lack of understanding about the animation art. Yesterday, he had an article published on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) website that explains to the world how MONSTER HOUSE and ANT BULLY are revolutionizing animated filmmaking. His classic line is that MONSTER HOUSE offers audiences a “taste of the future technologies that will someday make Pixar’s classics seem as quaint as Dumbo.”

Here are some of the choice cuts from Anderson’s piece:

“While Pixar set the standard, recent films like Warner Brothers’ The Ant Bully and Sony Pictures’ Monster House are pushing big-league Hollywood animation into promising new territory.”

“Though Cars has been a box-office leader this summer - second only to Disney’s live-action phenomenon Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest - Over the Hedge, The Ant Bully and Monster House strike a far better balance between form and content, tweaking the Pixar formula and moving beyond its limitations.”

“[MONSTER HOUSE] does, however, have the best-rendered cast of CGI Homo sapiens to date…”

“At the screening I attended, the children in my row frequently seemed to be on the edge of tears. Sure, they might require psychotherapy in later life, but they’re getting a taste of the future technologies that will someday make Pixar’s classics seem as quaint as Dumbo.”

(Thanks, Peter Fries)

The ARK is a new CG animated short written and directed by Polish artist Grzegorz Jonkajtys. It is scheduled for completion by the end of 2006. The trailer - watch HERE - looks pretty dark and intense. Jonkajtys, who has one other short to his credit (MANTIS), has been working at a digital fx house in the US where he has contributed to films like HELLBOY, GOTHIKA and SIN CITY. The official ARK website has more images and details about the short.

Mark Mayerson has a short but insightful commentary about the (sad) state of CG feature animation in the US and the hope that exists beyond the current slate of mind-numbingly repetitive and uninspired CG filmmaking:

We had A Bug’s Life and Antz and now The Ant Bully. We had Finding Nemo and Shark Tale. We had Madagascar and The Wild. And we’re due for a plague of rats. There’s Ratatouille, Flushed Away, Rats Amore and One Rat Short.

When you take the genre conventions and add settings or subject matter that have already been done, you’re in danger of boring the audience.

Something very interesting happened in the comics field that may relate to what’s going on in animation. From the 1960’s onwards, comics fans argued for longer, more serious works. While Marvel and DC, the two main companies, did adapt to a degree, they stuck with superheroes and continued to market to their established fan base.Cartoonists finally took matters into their own hands and started doing personal work that broke out of genre conventions. Between the importation of Manga and mainstream publisher interest in the graphic novel, Marvel and DC have been reduced to minor players in terms of sales and artistic importance.

The new trailer for Warner Bros.’s upcoming ANT BULLY is posted HERE. It looks like a pretty good CG film…especially if it was currently 1994 and nobody had ever released a computer animated feature. The studio responsible for the animation, DNA Productions, has already laid off most of the ANT BULLY crew, and if the film does as well as I think it will, it’s unlikely they’ll have to worry about restaffing anytime soon.

This is the trailer for Aardman’s first CG film FLUSHED AWAY.
Looks like the new formula is (Aardman+CG = Aardman-charm).

OLI’S CHANCE is a new German short that I discovered on character designer Harald Siepermann’s blog. The film can be viewed HERE (Windows Media Player version). Directed by Saschka Unseld and Johannes Weiland, the short was commissioned by the German rail to warns kids against playing on or near railroad tracks. The film is in German but its story should be clear to those who don’t speak German. I agree with Harald, who writes on his blog, “It succeeds not only in terms of animation but also in its unpretentious, non-patronizing storytelling.” Some of the design choices are questionable - for example, the extreme separation of the eyes and nose on such realistic designs gives the characters an awkward alien-like quality - but all in all, it’s a pretty good film worth checking out. The film was produced by Studio Soi, a young German commercial animation outfit. Be sure to watch their super-appealing “Bunnies” commercial they produced for MTV; it’s posted on their site.

ADDENDUM: Jakob Schuh, one of the directors at Studio Soi, emailed to let me know that their studio has another website at ChezSoi.de where they have job listings posted. They’re currently looking to hire designers; submission info is on the site.