CG features have hybrid fever

Pics blur the line between animation and live action

By IAIN BLAIR

'Avatar'

An "animated feature film" is defined by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences as "a motion picture (where) a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75% of the picture’s running time" — a definition just vague enough to confuse an industry whose own sense of the medium is very much in flux .

Does that cover "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," in which six CG characters star in an otherwise live-action feature? What about James Cameron's "Avatar," which mixes "traditional" footage with performance-capture characters rendered in virtual environments?

"The truth is, so many of the big films today have some kind of animation, from 'Harry Potter' to comic­book films like 'Iron Man,' even if you wouldn't call them 'animated' films," says director Terry Gilliam, whose "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" alternates between practical sets and a CG world reminiscent of Gilliam's early work with the Monty Python troupe.

The filmmakers themselves may still think of their projects as "live action," the way James Cameron does "Avatar," but for those working below the line, there's no denying how dependent these films are on the discipline of animation. Speaking about "Avatar," co-production designer Rick Carter insists: "It's an absolute hybrid. It's got animation, and it's got live-action performances that are being recorded both with a camera and in a digital volume space (using) performance capture. Those two realms have come together to the sense where there's no real sense of pre-production, production, post-production."

"G-Force" helmer Hoyt Yeatman, who won an Oscar for his vfx work on Cameron's "The Abyss," mixed disciplines again for his directorial debut. "I always saw 'G-Force' as a hybrid mix of live action and animation, and my background in visual effects was a big help," he says. After Disney bought his Dream Quest f/x shop in 1996, Yeatman transitioned to feature animation, where he worked on such films as "Mighty Joe Young." "They were called visual effects," he recalls, "but they really revolved around a main character that was digitally created. I really felt that animation could be much bigger and broader than how it was defined by the major animation studios."

The resulting film is "definitely a hybrid," he adds, "and in many ways, it could be classified as a digital feature, a completely computer-animated film."