As the line between live-action and animation blurs, there are more and more controversies about what qualifies as animation. Is A Scanner Darkly animation? Is Beowulf animation? It’s all up for debate. Here’s an easy one though. Is Year of the Fish animation? Most definitely not.

Year of the Fish is an indie film that opens next week in New York and San Francisco. I’m perplexed why the filmmakers are billing the film as an “animated feature film” when there is nothing remotely resembling animation in the trailer (watch it here). Movement that is created in real-time and then digitally-enhanced does not fit the definition of animation, which is generally acknowledged to be movement created frame-by-frame through the manipulation of static images. The confusion with films like A Scanner Darkly and Beowulf stems from the fact that there is possibly enough frame-by-frame enhancement and distortion of the recorded live-action footage to constitute animation.

Year of the Fish, on the other hand, appears to have had minimal work done on it by animation artists. Here’s the description of the “animation process” from the film’s website:

Using Synthetik Studio Artist….Kaplan and his small group of part-time assistants were able to work quickly and efficiently, doing with 3 people what would normally employ 40 full-time animators. A single miniDV live-action frame was upconverted to a high-definition painted frame, and that one frame was interpolated into a technique for converting an entire shot. After rendering these shots, Kaplan and his team were able to go back and refine the images frame by frame, add particle effects, and hand-paint details. This entire animation process was achieved on four Macintosh G5 computers and two Wacom tablets, and took only 6 months.

The process described—which is setting a stylistic filter on one frame per scene and rendering out the rest of the scene with that filter setting—is not animation. The filmmaker does say he went back for frame-by-frame manipulation, but it’s evident from the trailer that they were enhancing the filter effects frame-by-frame, not creating or enhancing movement frame-by-frame. The number of digital crew (3) and amount of time it took to do the “animation” (6 months) also makes clear that this is more a case of digital processing than animation.

In recent years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has qualified films like Waking Life and Beowulf for Oscar consideration in the animated feature category. It’s a slippery slope that has now opened the doors wide open for experimental live-action films like Year of the Fish to claim that they are animated.

I saw an unexpectedly great live-action film last night—Tarsem’s The Fall (view the trailer here). The film’s production design is insanely gorgeous, with nearly every shot a lush and breathtaking tableau of color and composition. The landscapes in the movie are so exotic and magical that I automatically assumed they were all computer-generated like every other Hollywood film. Amazingly, though, it was all shot on-location.

Tarsem’s background—directing commercials like the classic Levi’s “Swimmer” and music videos like R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”—means that he knows how to create stylish and imaginative imagery, but in The Fall he backs it up with a sweet and engaging story about a 5-year-old immigrant girl and a Hollywood stuntman who befriend one another while recovering from injuries in a 1910s LA hospital.

The film premiered at festivals in 2006 but didn’t receive a theatrical release in the US until May of this year. The distribution difficulties of the film are reflected in the film’s production history: Tarsem financed the film almost entirely out of his own pocket using the millions of dollars he made as a commercial director. Its production was as unconventional as the final film. For example, Tarsem scouted locations for the fantasy sequences for seventeen years, he shot the film in over twenty countries, and a good deal of the film’s story structure was ad-libbed by the little girl protagonist.

The reason I’m mentioning this film on the Brew is that it also features a brief yet highly effective stop-motion sequence conceived by Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein, the brothers who won an Oscar for their 1989 animated short Balance. I haven’t seen a new piece of work by them in a long time and was pleased to see their names pop up in the credits. Their website Lauenstein.TV indicates that they’re busy and still producing plenty of work.

Tarsem’s The Fall is currently playing in only a handful of theaters. I highly recommend checking it out on the bigscreen if you can. It’s final New York screening is tonight at the Cinema Village 3. There’s also an interview with the director at the A.V. Club in which he discusses this film’s production at length.

Is this bus stop ad from Norway part of the official DreamWorks marketing campaign or did they receive some assistance from the public? Either way, it’s a terrific idea, and somewhat reminiscent of this recent WonderBra ad.

(via Comunicadores)

Hurtling 3-D objects at viewers is not a substitute for quality filmmaking as last week’s weak opening of the 3-D animated pic Fly Me to the Moon proved. Roger Ebert takes the issue one step further and posits on his blog that 3-D technology not only doesn’t add anything to the viewing experience but that it actually detracts from the filmgoer’s enjoyment of movies. He writes:

Ask yourself this question: Have you ever watched a 2-D movie and wished it were in 3-D? Remember that boulder rolling behind Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark?” Better in 3-D? No, it would have been worse. Would have been a tragedy. The 3-D process is like a zombie, a vampire, or a 17-year cicada: seemingly dead, but crawling out alive after a lapse of years. We need a wooden stake.

[Previously on Cartoon Brew: 3-D Animation: Fad or Future?]

(via Kottke)

Try as he might, illustrator Jake Parker couldn’t make sense of the world that Pixar created for Cars. He writes:

And that leads me to the one thing that didn’t sit well with me: the strange machine/flesh hybrids Pixar came up with to populate this world. It’s as if a mad scientist enamored with automobiles terraformed Mars and furnished it with cyborg vehicles with engines of steel and minds of flesh. You have these cars, but with actual fleshy eyes, with irises, and mouths of teeth and tongues. Where does the machine end and the flesh begin? So, to make everything piece together a little better in my head I drew up what I think the internal structures of Lightning McQueen might look like.

This amusing illo is what he came up with (link to larger image).

Over at OMGlists.com is an article on Seven Films That Killed Studios. Two on the list are animated features.

There is no denying that the box office reception to Titan A.E. and Final Fantasy ended further production at their respective studios. Whatever the individual artistic merits of a project are, the truth is that hit films keep our medium going, box office bombs can have a devastating effect.

What other animated features sunk the prospects of their Hollywood producers? Treasure Planet? The Secret of Nimh?

For those (like me) who keep score, it’s interesting to note that as of this week Pixar’s Wall•E and Dreamwork’s Kung Fu Panda are virtually tied at the U.S. box office with approximately $211 million gross apiece. The Pixar film will probably top out at about $215 domestically by Labor Day weekend. Both are strong contenders for the Academy’s Best Picture Best Animated Feature nomination.

On the flip side, Space Chimps is probably doing better than it should with $26 million already collected. Fly Me To The Moon and The Clone Wars are opening this Friday. We’ve got Igor (MGM), Bolt (Disney), Madagascar 2 (Dreamworks), A Tale of Desperaux (Universal) and Waltz With Bashir (Sony Classics) waiting in the wings for this fall.

Everything I see from Henry Selick’s new film Coraline looks terrific. Rotten Tomatoes is posting a new, different behind-the-scenes video each day this week. It looks to be shaping up to be something very special. Coraline is scheduled for release next February. I can’t wait.