What is Animation, Zemeckis?

Outside, the writ­ers’ strike rages on. Going into its sec­ond day, it has now become clear that the bat­tle between the WGA and the AMPTP is unques­tion­ably an uphill one. And I can­not write about film with­out men­tion­ing it. But now that I’ve done that, let’s put our think­ing caps on.

As many of you may know, Robert Zemeckis has been on a mis­sion for most of his film career. A stu­dent of Spielberg’s (read P.T. Barnum’s) school of larger-than-life-cinema thought, Mr. Zemeckis has made a point of uti­liz­ing cut­ting edge tech­nol­ogy in nearly all of his films. In this sense, among oth­ers, he has left a pro­lific foot­print in the annals of film history.

His Back to the Future series pushed our imag­i­na­tions to a new limit, while his Who Framed Roger Rabbit? changed the pos­si­bil­i­ties of live actors mixed with ani­mated char­ac­ters. (Remember that last film, it’ll be impor­tant shortly.) Toning down the kid in him, he earned an Oscar for his American opus, Forrest Gump, the first film to take advan­tage of the more real­is­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. When you sit and think about it, the scope of his con­tri­bu­tions is far-reaching.

Unbeknownst to many of us, Mr. Zemeckis has been work­ing on a major film exper­i­ment. It’s unclear for how long the man has been con­sid­er­ing this, and it is even fuzzier to antic­i­pate when the project will come to its com­plete fruition. Ultimately, he envi­sions a cin­ema where you can put every­thing, in place after your actor is done giv­ing his per­for­mance. Uhh, what?

For those who missed it, his 2004 The Polar Express was an ani­mated hol­i­day fea­ture star­ring Tom Hanks in a num­ber of star­ring roles. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary bit though was the fact that, besides the fact that each car­toon­ish incar­na­tion of Mr. Hanks bore var­ied resem­blances to the man, was that the action was actu­ally cap­tured directly into a com­puter off of his face. For a fright­en­ing sight, check out some behind the scenes shots of Forrest Gump him­self with a face full of yel­low motion cap­ture balls. (In short, the tech­nol­ogy cap­tures the move­ment of brightly col­ored balls into a com­pute, which is then turned into an ani­mated character.)

It’s not that motion cap­ture, or mo cap for those who speak biztalk, is such a new and ground­break­ing idea. The tech­nol­ogy itself goes back a good 20 to 30 years, depend­ing on who’s count­ing. The incred­i­ble Andy Serkis took the con­cept to a new level with his por­trayal of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings tril­ogy, a feat he dupli­cated with wild finesse play­ing the title role of the same director’s King Kong. In 2003, direc­tor Ang Lee offered his own expres­sions to Bruce Banner’s dig­i­tal alter ego in his own Hulk. But in each of those instances, and the more recent appear­ance of Savion Glover’s phe­nom­e­nal dance moves in Happy Feet, the actor was wholly altered to cre­ate some­thing new. The actor has been but one tool in the animator’s kit, which is then cov­ered in paint, fur, and defor­mity (com­pared to the human actor).

Not so for Zemeckis.

The same year as The Polar Express, one-hit-innovator Kerry Conran released his Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a film cre­ated nearly entirely in a com­puter. There are real actors in it, but that’s about as far as the real­ity goes. Everything else (sets, props, extras) was gen­er­ated within a com­puter. The idea was sim­ple, to give the film­maker lim­it­less imag­i­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties, and limit the dif­fi­culty of secur­ing elab­o­rate loca­tions by film­ing every­thing in the com­fort of your own green screen. Zemeckis is look­ing to one-up the Conran con­cept, which was at once ahead of it’s time and behind it. While a whole film had never been done in that man­ner, the green/blue screen tech­nol­ogy has become a tra­di­tion in cin­ema over the past 40 years, 80 if you con­sider that rear-projection is essen­tially the same idea.

Try for a minute to get into Mr. Zemeckis’s state of mind. You could show up to your set, and go through the whole script with a sin­gle actor over the course of just a few days. There are no cos­tumes, no makeup, no boom poles fly­ing about; none of the tra­di­tional inter­rup­tions that get in the way of a direc­tor and his actor. Essentially, you are going to a rehearsal, except this time, every­thing is being “shot” and will be used in the final film. Everything else, right down to the cam­era place­ment and light­ing, is done later in a com­puter. There is lim­it­less auton­omy. Wish it were rain­ing? Want it to take place at a dif­fer­ent set­ting? Think your main char­ac­ter would look bet­ter with a beard? No prob­lem! Fix it in post will take on a new meaning.

This is where Beowulf will come into play. The film is entirely com­puter gen­er­ated from mo cap work of rec­og­niz­able stars, who look just like them­selves in com­puter form. The AMPAS is in a tizzy over what to con­sider the film, as mo cap work blurs the lines of ani­ma­tion, as well it should. Our per­cep­tion of what is real and what is not will once again be rocked, even if this par­tic­u­lar film is not the one to do it. With a healthy amount of decades left for Mr. Zemeckis, I imag­ine he will one day achieve a look that appeases his need for con­trol and meets the audience’s watch­able standards.

Ultimately, Robert Zemeckis is find­ing ways to limit the col­lab­o­ra­tive process and increase the power of the auteur. With that in mind, I’ll invoke my favorite anec­dote on the subject:

Sidney Lumet claims to have once asked Arthur Miller why he chose to stick with a career in the­ater, given that his early novel “Focus” pos­sessed every bit as much of his scribe tal­ent as his plays. Why give up the auton­omy of the novel for the process of the the­ater? Miller valiantly responded that he loves see­ing what oth­ers could bring to his work that he may not have seen.

So it bears the ques­tion, left to his own devices, would a Robert Zemeckis film be worth watching?

Only time will tell.