ROTTEN TOMATOES: Total Recall: Beowulf and Ye Olde Tradition of Animation

Total Recall: Beowulf and Ye Olde Tradition of Animation

Humans and animation mix and match in this week's Total Recall.

by Tim Ryan and Alex Vo | November 14, 2007

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These are heady times for live-action/animation hybrids. This week, Robert Zemeckis updates the Old English poem Beowulf with some help from Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie, and a whole mess of technology. Next week, Enchanted, starring Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey, also adds a heavy dose of animation to its fantasy world. With these flicks in mind, it's a good time to take a look at some other flicks that combine live-action and animation in unconventional ways.

The blending of live-action and animation is nothing new, as evinced by silent cartoons like Gertie the Dinosaur and Max Fleischer's rotoscoped shorts featuring Koko the Clown. Now technology has advanced to the point where some films, like the Lord of the Rings movies, blend technology and live-action so seamlessly it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. What was once a novelty is now relatively commonplace. But before then, rotoscoped animation hit its turning point in the 1970s when director Ralph Bakshi established it as an artistic technique (and not just a trifle or cost-cutting measure) through a series of racially charged, frequently explicit animated movies.

By the mid-1970s, Bakshi was the American king of urbanely ribald animation with features like Fritz the Cat (53 percent), Heavy Traffic (91 percent), and Coonskin. With 1977's Wizards (53 percent), he attempted something a little different. Conceptually, Wizards is a movie Walt Disney could get behind: soulful, beautiful animation (as Bakshi described it) with bright colors, fairies, and even a princess or two. In execution, he delivered post-apocalyptic psychedelia, a bizarre fable about two brothers set millions of years in the future. One brother is healthy and is nice to his mother, the other a mutant who reconstructs 21^st century weapon technology and breeds an army with Nazi propaganda. A.H. Weiler of the New York Times calls it "a melange of animation and live footage that [features] mystical, slightly scary and, occasionally, comic tones." Contrasted with its Disney-esque color palette and voice acting, this movie is like the UNICEF Smurfs ad gone feature-length.

Bakshi used rotoscoping for a majority of the large-scale battle sequences, a technique that requires an animator to paint and color live footage. (Beowulf is a sophisticated variation on rotoscopes.) Elegant creatures such as Snow White or Gollum can spring out of rotoscoping, but Bakshi had a unique approach in films like Wizards and 1978's The Lord of the Rings (50 percent): applying just the right amount of detail and fluid motion, he turned objects into grotesque apparitions. Perfect when you feel like animating the monstrosity of war.

The Wizards trailer.

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(1-16 of 16 posts) | Reply

BleedsNoMore666 writes:
on Nov 14 2007 08:52 PM

...i dont have anything to say about tihs...i just wanted to be one of the firsts posts to feel cool

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undead646 writes:
on Nov 14 2007 10:06 PM

I love Ralph Bakshi and Tron

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moviemonkey2 writes:
on Nov 15 2007 01:15 AM

No mention of the new Star Wars films? They were animated movies with live actors tossed in here and there.

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Lord_Kingsley writes:
on Nov 15 2007 06:37 AM

*sigh* One more time: Rotoscoping is *not* true animation. It is to animation what McDonald's is to hamburgers.

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mouse_clicker writes:
on Nov 15 2007 07:05 AM

So Sleeping Beauty isn't a true animated movie? Because, you know, most of that was rotoscoped. I don't see why rotoscoping is somehow "fake" animation, just because they're tracing live-action footage. The true essence of animation is what you do with the medium, not the technical process itself. And what you can do with the medium is pretty much limitless. But all of animation shouldn't hinge on whether or not the artists drew the characters themselves. By that definition, none of Pixar's movies are "true animated" movies other. I'm an animation snob, too, buddy, but hating on rotoscoping is just ridiculous.

And, to please the animation snob side of me, Beowulf pisses. me. off. Yes, it's animated. But it is a *complete* misuse of the medium. Animation allows your look like anyone and have them do anything! And yet they make their characters look as much like their actors as possible, and limit them to real-world actions? What's the point? Why not just shoot live action? It'd look better, you wouldn't have characters that look like puppets. And you wouldn't have scenery that looked like plastic. I wouldn't even be mad if Robert Zemeckis weren't so gung ho about it, as if he was actually innovating some sort of new genre. I hope this movie crashes and burns to send a message to everyone else that ultra-realistic motion-capture CG is NOT how you make movies.

-Moses

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DIABLUSX writes:
on Nov 15 2007 07:10 AM

I just hope both movies will be good. I see this as either going the way of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" aka good or "Cool World" aka bad.

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Hamboner writes:
on Nov 15 2007 08:53 AM

Wizards looks awesome... I'm gonna spark up and rent it.

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moviemonkey2 writes:
on Nov 15 2007 10:14 AM

Sorry Mouse, but Kingsley is right. Rotoscoping is never as good as Key to Key animation. Granted it can be done well, such as Gollum in LotR, the above mentioned Waking Life, and Sleeping Beauty. However those are instances where the animation teams have taken the rotoscoping and used it for the basis of their animation. They capture the movement, then take it a step farther to make it work for each character.

I think where Kingsley and I coming from is the craptastic pure rotoscoping. Watch Bakshi's Lord of the Rings and tell me it's not painful. The movement doesn't match the characters. You have stylized characters, moving like normal people. It just doesn't translate the same. The same goes for Polar Express and it's creepy looking characters. Even films like American Pop that are pretty cool, look blatantly rotoscoped. It doesn't look like solid animation, it looks like someone did their best to draw exactly what the actor was doing.

Essentially it's like putting tracing paper over a master artists' work and trying to replicate it. It'll look close, but you'll never get it quite right, because you're trying to copy it, rather than recreate it. There's a world of difference.

Though I agree with you on Beowulf. If you're going to try and realistically model characters to look exactly like the actors, what's the point of even making it animated? How is a 3D model of Angelina Jolie going to perform better than the real Angelina? Motion capture can't capture everything, and what's getting lost is what makes it believable. There's even a concept that describes the problem that Beowulf, Polar Express, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within have (though I forget what the concept is called) Basically our minds are trained to recognize real people, but we've also trained ourselves to accept highly exaggerated people as being real enough to suspend our disbelief. However these kinds of hyper-realistic animated films are so close to looking real, but not quite, that our minds have a harder time accepting it. The aesthetics are there, but the subtleties aren't, which makes the characters stand out as being something other than what they're intended to be: realistic.

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Jen Yamato writes:
on Nov 15 2007 10:47 AM

Slight correction, Mouse Clicker -- though I agree with the kind of ridiculousness of making actors perform just to animate over their likeness to make them kind of look like themselves, they're not exactly beholden to "real world actions" in Beowulf. Unless Ray Winstone can really do backflips off walls, jump ten feet into the air, wrangle ginormous sea monsters and dragons, etc. There's some pretty cool action in the flick.

And although animated John Malkovich looks just as creepy as real life John Malkovich, and Grendel really does resemble Crispin Glover, Ray Winstone as Beowulf is a 7 foot tall, rippsed abs-having blond god of a man. Thank you, CG!

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mouse_clicker writes:
on Nov 15 2007 10:48 AM

Yes, yes, but my point is that you can't downplay what is essentially just a special effect, more or less, because it's been missused in the past. To say it's not animation is just blatantly false and ignores all the great things that CAN be done with rotoscoping. Of course I agree with you that rotoscoping as it is popularly used is little more than lazy animating, but I just want to make it clear that rotoscoping as a whole should not be discounted because of Zemeckis or Bakshi, because it is a very useful and helpful tool in animation when used properly.

-Moses

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mouse_clicker writes:
on Nov 15 2007 10:54 AM

Yamato: Those are hardly stunts that can't be done with actual people. Movies have had no trouble with them in the past. At the very least they could use a CG model to handle some of the more outright ridiculous stunts, like in Lord of the Rings or Spider-Man. But even in those movies it was used sparingly, and it was still a bit jarring to the viewer (or at least me) when I could tell it wasn't the actor but a CG model, albeit a very detailed CG model.

Monkey's final point is the real thing to keep in mind here. Humans are so good at recognizing other humans (think about it, we do it pretty much constantly throughout our lives) that we can pick out an impostor, no matter how good that impostor is. We may not be able to pinpoint the exact faults, but we know *something* is wrong, and I personally don't want to sit through a movie feeling like I'm watching puppets the director thinks I'm stupid enough to mistake for real people just so the main character can be seven feet tall and do some back flips.

-Moses

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Jen Yamato writes:
on Nov 15 2007 11:11 AM

I shared that same trepidation going into Beowulf. I certainly didn't want to see soulless looking animated versions of recognizable actors, especially in the creepy polar express way. And while I'd say it's not totally dismissable, you can often forget about the animation -- that is, not totally forget, but not actively think about it.

There's definitely an epic, mythic feel to the film lent by the animation-over-acting visuals, so I think it only enhances the experience. Live action would not have looked "better." Angelina yes, but the movie as a whole, no.

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High School With Money writes:
on Nov 15 2007 11:34 AM

monkey, I've seen Bakshi's [i]Lord of the Rings[/i], and its rotoscoping IS NOT PAINFUL. Unlike [i]Polar Express[/i], its movements are purposeful and fitting to the characters, giving each a sense of weight and identity. I'll take Frodo's dancing over that ridiculously stiff musical sequence of flipping waiters in [/i]Express[/i] anyday.

And what's with the criticism of "all" the Beowulf characters looking like their actors... have any of you ever seen Ray Winstone? He's not the 300 type, he's pudgy. Last time I looked, Crispin Glover didn't look that gnarly. Now all they have to do is move their eyelids for once, even to blink.

The point of having these characters look this way is part of the experiment of whether audiences (not film geeks) will accept this new style of filmmaking. Death to the Uncanny Valley, antiquated fallacy that it is.

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mouse_clicker writes:
on Nov 15 2007 11:35 AM

Live-action would have looked better than animation trying to imitate live action. That's my point. I think animation could be a great medium to tell the story of Beowulf. But I think it's a medium that needs to be used to its fullest potential, and not merely try to emulate a *different* medium. Animation can never be live-action, so if you want a live-action, realistic feel to your movie, then shoot it live-action, because that will achieve the intended effect much, much better. But if you want to do something more fantastic, then animation is definitely the way to go.

I'm espousing responsible use of animation. Slapping motion-capture dots on your actors and converting that into ultra-detailed CG is NOT responsible use of animation. It produces an inferior artistic product and demeans the position of the medium of animation in the public eye (as if the droves of crappy CG movies hadn't done that already). In my opinion, live-action is *clearly* a better choice of medium for this movie.

-Moses

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sfsilver writes:
on Nov 15 2007 03:51 PM

I saw Beowulf on Tuesday night at a preview and it's much better than it has any business being. I'm dubious of the necessity for animating most of the characters, though there are sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic transformations of the actors actual bodies and appearance that might be as unconvincing using make-up or body suits as the slightly inhuman animated faces are. In general though these characters work much better than in Polar Express. ALso there are some acrobatics that would have been very difficult to get an actor to do without serious risk of injury. Perhaps the insurance saving s alone justify the CGI expense. I expect at the end of the day though it's ultimately about the gimmick.

The parts of this film that couldn't have come from real life are astounding. The monsters and the fight scenes were incredible on IMAX 3D.

I had gone into the film ready to not like it and was very pleasantly surprised.

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mouse_clicker writes:
on Nov 15 2007 03:56 PM

I'm sure the movie itself is quite good. I love Robert Zemeckis and Neil Gaiman. I'm just way too much of an animation snob, like I said, to ever actually admit that fact, hehe.

-Moses

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