Worst. MoCap. Ever.

By
on

I’m sorry. This is the worst thing we’ve ever posted on the Brew. I’m horrified—and yet can’t stop laughing. Thanks to Jeremy Bernstein at DreamWorks for directing me toward these.

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  • http://zeppomarxist.blogspot.com Anthony Strand

    That’s gotta be an intentional joke, right? I mean, it’s a dancing mo-cap Donald Duck with a six-pack and a deformed beak.

    No one on Earth could possibly think that’s a good idea. Right? I mean, for the love of all that’s pure, tell me I’m right!

  • red pill junkie

    MECAGÃœENLOSTIA!!!

  • Roberto

    Long-time reader, first-time commenter. Yikes! All of those look ugly (yet so hilarious), especially Bugs Bunny. All this with the combination of the mo-cap, ought to scare Bugs Bunny himself. Seriously, good one, Jerry.

  • http://www.agent44.com Jake

    Woah…*blink*…*blink*…This is how I imagine some alien race might try to communicate to us in response to all of the radio and television waves they’ve received from us over the past 50 years. There has to be some sort of hidden message buried in it or something. Has SETI seen these?

  • http://krisboban.blogspot.com Kris

    That was the greatest 5 min of my life

  • Daniel

    Someone owes me a new pair of eyeballs….

  • Bob

    That’s pretty nasty. I couldn’t even laugh because it looked like 3D had an inbred, hideous mutant spawn. Sure feel sorry for the intended audience of this stuff.

  • http://machin-x.blogspot.com Andrew

    Just FYI for anybody who didn’t already know, these are done with iClone, which is sort of an animation program for people who don’t know how to animate. It’s an interesting thing to play around with, but the modeling tools are extremely limited and it’s damn near impossible to actually create half-decent animation with it.

  • http://www.milkmoneycartoons.com Ohjeepers

    The “design” decisions made on Donalds legs are brilliant… INSPIRED even!

    I just broke all of my pencils!

  • Mike Russo

    Jerry, what the hell? How am I gonna sleep tonight now?

  • http://captainwrong.net Captain Wrong

    Well, I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.

  • Matt Sullivan

    Oh God. Oh…oh God. A bladder infection couldn’t hurt worse than this stuff.

  • http://hoorayforcartoons.blogspot.com/ Brien Barrios

    Good lord, what the hell was that?! That Donald looked like something from John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. I liked how they looped that creepy movement of “Bugs” over and over.. I guess they were trying to save time?.. even though it was Mo-Capped?

  • chuckfiala

    I love these. I’ve never precisely understood how Mickey’s jaw works. Now I’ve seen it in 3-D! Why would anyone paint on cels again? “The Pointer” is no longer Mickey’s finest role. This is. Thank you Jerry for posting these.

    Wow.

  • http://carolita.org carolita

    Maybe it was something you ate.

  • http://myspace.com/internetshow David McHank

    Why are they like… musclebound… drunks?

  • http://intracerswetrust.blogspot.com Dav-Odd

    Lovably post-apocalyptic. I watched them from top to bottom and got halfway through the Mickey one. Can I have a prize?

  • Rafa

    This is how Robert Zemeckis will end up his days…

    Dont miss the rest of the guy´s videos, btw!!
    They´re priceless!!

  • http://www.bishopanimation.com Floyd Bishop

    What’s the back story on these?

  • Gil

    MY EYES!

    The horror. The horror…

  • http://coveringthemouse.blogspot.com Kurtis

    What is this? Is it a demo reel that was sent to Dreamworks? It is terrible!

  • colawarmonger

    Mickey looks very determined with that balloon.

  • matt

    I take back everything I ever said in those other threads defending mocap as a tool. If this is how it can be used, it must be stopped. Mickey creeps me out.

    Why God, whyyyyyyyyy?!

  • http://ryuuseipro.deviantart.com John Paul Cassidy

    Oh, man, this is horrifying and creepy.

    HAPPY FEET and MONSTER HOUSE have absolutely nothing to worry about. This is what happens when you rely completely on Mo-Cap, and the results are terrible, especially with the pitiful models.

  • http://trevour.blogspot.com Trevour Meyer

    How come “mo-cap” seems to be synonymous with crappy dancing?

  • http://vincemusacchia.blogspot.com Vince Musacchia

    More like: MoCrap! It’s amazing that people take the time to produce this garbage.

  • http://www.saturdaymorningcentral.com Tommy

    The Donald Duck one almost looks like the dance from Napoleon Dynamite.

    Ps – I think I’m going to have nightmares tonight, thanks Jerry.

  • http://inklingstudio.typepad.com David Nethery

    I looked. I’m sorry I looked.

    Seriously ugly . Sick. The stuff that nightmares are made of…

    But, yeah, I can’t stop laughing either , Jerry.
    (what’s wrong with us?)

  • Dan

    Can edit the Wikipedia entry for “failure” and include these as an example. Schadenfreuderiffic!

  • http://www.starfieldcreations.com awd!

    Good ol’ fasion nightmare fuel.
    Thanks a lot.

  • David

    The scariest part about it is that whoever made these will probably be my boss some day.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWKVmCX6SKY Hasdrubal

    Some will unjustly say this is awful without knowing how he made it. These vids prove that mo-cap by its self doesn’t look natural with semi-toon shaped characters, but his methods are interesting.

    He’s invented unusual ways of adapting pre-rigged Poser 4 male figures, capable of taking mo-cap files, to look a little like the classic toon characters. He didn’t choose the best figures for the job, but it shows he’s imaginative. The use of stock human figures as toons is interesting as an experiment. It’s puzzling he has the budget for mo-cap, but not for a modelling program to make his own toon figure meshes.

    The fact that he probably accomplished these as a self-taught modeler and animator shouldn’t be overlooked. He probably also had to overcome the problems of learning the software with English as a second language.

  • Galacticadude

    I think I’m gonna be sick.

  • http://zekeyspaceylizard.blogspot.com Zekey

    THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER
    oh my ribs!

  • http://classicanimation.blogspot.com Thad Komorowski

    Why is Bugs ripped???

  • Brian

    Oh,Jerry, ick. Please show these at the next Cartoon Dump, they’re hideous. It’s especially blasphemous that they would use the old Mickey title card.

  • http://www.stephenneary.blogspot.com stephen

    woah.

  • joe s

    is donald wearing pampers? which would be appropriate considering this is crap.

  • http://www.wetgenes.com Kriss Daniels

    I’ve seen worse demo reels

    From people that really do expect to be employed…

    images that cause shock and awe and are still burned into my unwilling mind

  • http://www.fpsmagazine.com Tamu

    I need some mental floss.

  • http://www.christianziebarth.com Christian

    I tried watching these and now I just feel icky. Couldn’t get through ten seconds of any of them.

  • Graham

    I’m gonna go have a cyanide tablet now.

  • Gerard de Souza

    Nightmarish. Never tried acid. Don’t need to now.

    Listen up anyone attempting motion capture for character animation;
    a theme park costume is cheaper.

    What is the back story on these?

  • matt

    I looked at it again (I know I know). Is it really just mocap though? Why would that give you the funny floaty sliding marionette thing with the feet? Oh well. All I know is Mickey freaked me out. Actually I don’t know what to think anymore…

  • http://classicanimation.blogspot.com Thad Komorowski

    You should’ve posted this one too:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nObD2I9chY

  • Kris

    With all the weird cuts and the grating sound effects (plus the TERRIFYING model), the Mickey one looks like it was made by the little girl from The Ring.

  • greg manwaring

    Never seen the Freddy Moore Mickey looking so good!

    Actually I can’t scream “My Eyes, My Eyes”… …as I gouged mine out while viewing these!

    I cannot imagine how someone at their company, modeller included, could not tell these were no where near being ‘on model’.

    10 to 1 these guys got some jobs out of this.

  • http://elblogderg.blogspot.com Roberto González

    Sigh…and they were done by a spanish guy…I apologize in the name of my country for those abonimations.

    Mickey’s one is so long I have to fight to watch it all, but the different scenarios he used Mickey in were also kind of crazy. Donald’s one was so bad that it made me laugh a little. And he uses the classic title card in Mickey’s one, someone would think he has never watched the actual cartoons. At least that would be an excuse.

  • http://www.autodaddy.blogspot.com tom

    Those are hilarious! I made some friends watch them last night and all of us love them! Wow!

    I mean, obviously they suck, and obviously they’re ugly, but as in-jokes for cartoon fans, I don’t think I’ve seen anything this funny in years.

    Thanks SO much for posting these, Jerry!

  • http://www.moonjam.com AJ

    I stumbled across these quite a while ago. I don’t think I’ve been so terrified & simultaneously laughed so much since I was tickled by a clown, in my bed.

    I’m not sure I can prove it, but I’m *fairly* certain he killed Pavarotti…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPu8gO2erjg

  • http://thezoo.comicgenesis.com Nathan Birch

    That Donald Duck one will haunt my dreams…FOREVER.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWKVmCX6SKY Hasdrubal

    To matt:

    The reason the feet are floating is because he pasted an imported photo to the scene without using a 3-D ground prop under the figure’s feet. The shadows under the feet don’t render correctly unless there’s a 3-D mesh object to properly catch the shadows below the feet. The problem with imported background photos is that they don’t occupy any physical space within the 3-D work scene.

    It’s isn’t all the fault of mo-cap. The motion files actually work halfway descent with the smaller monkey figure and the winged statue in the Micky vid. The mo-cap looks so unnatureal because he started with stock rigged human figures and distorted their body parts until they’re almost toonish. Using the same rendering program, similar mo-cap files would look OK with a stock human figure.

  • Adam

    The Mickey one takes the cake-especially when he is dancing with the gorillas with photorealistic heads.I laughed so hard all the way through.

  • Charlie

    Dude, don’t. Just don’t.

  • Shmorky

    I love these, but in the way one loves having cancer.

  • http://www.robindavey.blogspot.com/ Robin

    These look fine to me. Move with the times people.

  • http://frankeinstein.blogia.com Frank Einstein

    As with a lot of folks commenting here: long time reader, first comment.
    Being a spaniard, I apologize for these three animations. We can do quite nice things…
    I guess this is what happens when an engineer without talent or ability gets a 3D animation program.
    Leave animation to animators. Thanks.

  • http://musingsofachick.blogspot.com sudiegirl

    Ick. As Bart Simpson says (or a reasonable facimile thereof): “I didn’t think it was possible but this both sucks and blows.

    I think Donald Duck wearing underpants and having a deformed beak was the worst one.

  • http://www.carbonalley.com Jeff Koval

    Ha! I love the cat-headed horseman and his horrific, gutteral meow. And who knew Mickey has so many monkey friends. Close monkey friends, no less, standing in his wedding and all.

  • Robert Igoe

    So after years of eluding Elmer Fudd, the Tazmanian Devil and Yosemite Sam, Bugs Bunny finally gets done in by the Joker.

  • http://www.commanderkitty.com Scotty A

    Gaah… it’s like a fever dream you can’t escape from. This is what madness feels like!

  • George

    “Donalds” gaping maw is the thing of nightmares…

  • John A

    I never noticed that Mickey has jowels like Richard M. Nixon. There is so much that 3-D modeling can teach us…

  • http://animote.wordpress.com aniMOte

    That stuff is awesome. Thanks for posting. The Mickey one was my favorite.

  • http://kitschensyngk.deviantart.com/ Kitschensyngk

    I didn’t know Donald Duck wore a diaper.

    Bugs Bunny looks horrifying.

    And that has to be the ugliest Minnie Mouse I’ve ever seen.

  • Arlyn Rankin

    Mo-Cap Stinks……….Long live Artistic Talent

  • http://persistenceofvision.blogspot.com/ ethan

    Looks like job security to me.

  • Jules

    Are these the new Beowulf teasers? Nice work, Zemeckis; significant improvement.

  • Al G

    Uhhh…wow. Donald’s mouth kind of looks like the Predator’s. The mickey on creeped me out the most. Why the hell do their mouths keep moving?

  • Steve

    MBAs get creative, with labor-saving for their God.

  • http://www.schlafman.com dave schlafman

    This isn’t funny. It’s creepy. Donald is downright frightening and who knew Mickey had such well-defined legs.

  • Bugsmer

    I hadn’t seen the Donald Duck one before. Thanks for the Woody one, Thad. Brian, in order for Jerry to play it on Cartoon Dump, some poor fellow is going to have to retrieve the copyright papers from the dumpster.

  • Charles V

    Wow! That Bugs Bunny is brilliant I wish I had that when I did the Bah Humduck Christmas special…. now excuse me I have to go vomit some more!!

  • http://www.dvdenlinea.com Arturo

    Farfur’s shots look better than these abominations… at least less nightmare-ish

  • Ryan W. Mead

    That’s obviously Bill Clinton wearing a Mickey Mouse costume. This has got to be one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. As Bugs Bunny himself once said, “Keep drawing me like this, buster, and we’ll BOTH be out of a job!”

    I almost forgot- I love that shortened interpretation of the “Mickey Mouse Club� theme. I guess his name is just Mic now?

  • slashjpl

    Finally! Something has beaten out “Daffy Duck and Porky Pig Meet the Groovie Ghoulies” as the nadir of animation of a classic animated character.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find some sulfuric acid to wash my eyes out with after watching this.

  • Chris Sobieniak

    And thanks to the efforts of our pioneering Mo-Cap geniuses, the legacy of Rickey Rouse, Muddle Muck and Rugs Runny will continue to entertain viewers for the next century! :-)

  • Kelly Tindall

    Sweet zombie Jesus.

  • http://www.jessica-plummer.com Jessica Plummer

    that last one is incredible…

  • http://childoftv.blogspot.com Brent McKee

    If Disney and Warners sued over this, we’d all be cheering for the heartless corporations to beat the little guy.

  • Some Fairy Princess

    I watched the “Monald Muck” one.
    I half expect to hear “ssssseven dayyyyyssss” whispering out of my speakers.
    Oh yes, this will be starring in tonight’s nightmares.

  • http://www.autodaddy.blogspot.com tom

    I can’t stop watching these! I gotta get to work, for Pete’s sake!

  • Pippilina

    I bet this is what children watch on Saturday mornings in the world from Eraserhead

  • JOHN F

    It looks like Donald has a cleft lip.

  • Lucy

    -cries- Mommy, make the bad things stop!!!!

  • victoria

    Oh look more Disney goodness coming to DVD!

  • Richard

    Oddly enough, I was thinking about motion capture earlier this morning. And I had thought The Polar Express looked kind of ugly…

  • Anne

    That image of nuclear holocaust Donald is going to be burned in my eyeballs for a while. O_O

  • El

    You know… bad animation is just bad animation. But I feel like the real problem here is this person’s unfailing standard of using extremely creepy models with really weird and random backgrounds, and incredibly obnoxious music. If any one of the three were really good, I don’t think the overall effect would be so… forceful.

    Observe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IH6n6nnKb8

  • joneses

    putaquipariu!!

    where’s the animation police when we need it?
    these guys should be thrown in jail for life.

  • http://www.electricminstrel.com Brett McCoy

    It’s like the Disney version of the Necronomicon!

  • Rusty door

    It’s pretty depressing to watch Mickey go from an appealing and skilled drawing by Ub Iwerks to being possessed by a mo-cap demon.

  • Steve Gattuso

    If you showed these to prisoners in Guantanamo, it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I just have to go sand my eyeballs…

  • RAB SMITH

    The average judgement, from the ‘casual’[i.e.: non-comitted] movie/cartoon viewer,—–even NOW——–is that ‘ALL animation is done by computer nowadays’.——These——-er, ‘items’ prove, once and for all, that good ole traditional characters, in order to appear DEFINITIVE, STILL must be drawn using human skill only……..

  • http://www.ka-chingcartoons.com Joost

    was it just me ?
    or did everybody just see that…….
    I need to lie down.

  • Pippilina

    So I saw these clips yesterday and had a good laugh. But when I went to bed last night, I saw these creepy characters and their ungodly undulation and freakish humanoid body details, writhing around where I normally visualize sheep jumping over fences.

  • http://www.digitalartsturku.net/valtteri/ Fossa

    These are either made by some really mentally retarded people, or seriously evil.

  • Dan

    This is a joke, everything is perfectly wrong. That can only happen if someone was trying to make it bad. Check out the eyes they point in different directions.

  • http://www.patrickdeancomics.com/ Patrick Dean

    I thought Fantasia III would look a little sharper….

  • Michael J. Hayde

    This reminds me of some stand-up comic’s bit:

    “I’m on trial, and the judge says, ‘You either gotta serve ninety days in jail, or you gotta watch the Mickey mo-cap!’

    “So, I’m sittin’ in jail, and….”

  • Oscar Grillo

    Robert Crumb reputedly said that as a kid he had the “hots” for Bugs Bunny. Maybe this shapely creature could be an approximation to the object of his desire. As we say in spanish “Sobre gustos no hay nada escrito”

  • http://www.negative13.com Geordie Martinez

    I haven’t laughed that hard in years.

  • Pippilina

    >This is a joke, everything is perfectly wrong

    I don’t think so. They obviously used Poser and ham-fistedly tried to paint on the cartoon textures on top of the realistic human bodies (hence the creepy muscles and toes), and then just applied bvh mocap files which are a dime a dozen for Poser. This kind of bad animation is de facto Poser!

  • Cydian

    The beginning of the Bugs Bunny one looks like he’s threatening me.

  • RODAN

    In my best Simon Cowell…
    “ABSOLUTLY IDIOTIC!”
    Thank you….thank you so much…

    By the way… These comments far supersede the hilarity of the video clips…
    (((raspberries)))
    Right in der fuhrers vace!!!
    I wonder what Ward would say?

  • http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~s3073901/blog2/ Giuseppe Pantaleo

    This is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen, and I have the Looney Tunes Baby boxset.

  • matt

    To Hasdrubal,

    I should really have known that. I think my mind’s messed up. Gotta stop watching this. I’m starting to feel bad for this guy though, it’s a bit like Star Wars Kid or something. Hope he doesn’t find out and sue for mental distress – because we’d launch a class action for same!

  • Adam

    did anyone notice how Mickey actually has a human nose-it just has a black ball stuck on the end of it to try to make it look like a snout

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWKVmCX6SKY Hasdrubal

    It would be funny if it all turned out to be the work of a 12 year old kid. I’ve seen similar animation made by kids. Whoever he is, he should be proud to be able to piss off this many people at the same time.

    I can’t recall a topic that has generated this much attention on this site before.

  • http://gavinscartoons.blogspot.com Gavin Freitas

    Just Fantastic! Hey Jerry, save these for your “Worst cartoons ever panel” at next years Comic-Con. That will get the crowd going….

  • http://aardvarksplumbline.blogspot.com/ The Aardvark

    The horror….THE HORROR!

  • Russell

    Worst 3D models ever, too.

    It scares me… really! I think this may give me nightmares.
    What’s with the human toes on the duck?

  • http://cartoongeeks.blogspot.com/ S. Michelle Klein-Hass

    Eew. Gross. Sick. Disgusting. Must. Soak. Head. Cold. Water. With. Bleach.

  • doug holverson

    I love how the limbs sometimes go through each other or the body.

    OTOH, it reminds me of what I dislike about furvert art: too animal-like heads and paws on an attempted-realistic human bodies. Found this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIFTNsI0HOc , which is enough to put me off cat-girls and I even have a hardcore nekomimi fetish.

  • http://www.richardjgaines.blogspot.com Richard Gaines

    Come on, dudes! This is our (ph)uture here! It’s called “Brave New World”!!!!!

  • in-ah

    wow.
    it’s hard to find the right words after this-
    am scared to go back working on my shot,
    it seriously traumatised me and I have a feeling
    it sucked my animationskills out of my eyeballs!
    argh!

  • Blake Landry

    Holy Crap thats scary! Mo Cap is a disgrace to the animation world!

  • 3ddude

    It’s pure evil…………

  • http://www.billdrastal.deviantart.com Bill Drastal

    I expect to see these come next Cartoon Dump thank you very much.

  • http://www.hollywoodsquared.com swanny

    Here are two video shorts about motion capture. They are hilarious, enjoy.
    http://hollywoodsquared.com/category/men-with-balls/

  • Juz

    This is wrong and you cant rightly call it animation!! I dont see the point in MOCAP other than to move technology ‘foreward’. Its really ugly and pecs on Donald duck and Bugs is the icing on the shit-cake that is MOCAP.

  • Alwowpal

    I am a furry, I thought that was hideous.

  • rachel

    Oh. Wow.

    I scrolled down through some of the comments before watching these things and thought to myself that surely the myriad number of people calling the videos “terrifying” HAD to be exaggerating . . . or, you know, using “terrifying” in the sense of terrifyingly bad animation.

    Now I realize, however, that they meant terrifying in the sense that I’m pretty sure one or all of these characters is going to crawl right out of my computer and try to suck my soul out while I sleep.

    Something far worse than just bad mo-cap has happened here. It’s like bad mo-cap produced by a race of demonic elves in hopes of luring human children to their untimely demise.

  • silviu

    donald has a hard-on….omg those cartoons are terrific but they also have a zest to them …

  • Julian Carter

    Well, I guess these clips’ creator is now kinda famous within the animation community. Wonder what Walt would have thought of them.

    lol

  • http://youtube.com/user/LDragon Little_Dragon

    I’m not certain whether I should be disappointed or relieved that my own animations didn’t make the cut ….

  • Wendy

    YEESH!! And I thought Syncro-vox was the most frightening cartoon technique!! Listening to The Chipmunks sining “Hound Dog” was funny, tho’. Is it me, or des Bugs have monkey feet, and it’s Jay Leno in the Mickey suit, right?