Yeah, although if there's one thing motion capture would have a real use for is a Roger Rabit sequel that's been rumoured. That would be a good use for it.
God, no. That would be totally wrong.
Roger Rabbit toons should not be rendered in any kind of 3D computer animation. I happened across some test footage of that for the abortive RR sequel just the other day, and it looked so wrong. It would have to be hand-drawn 2D animation or it just wouldn't work. You can't replace hand-drawn 2D animation with 3D any more than you can replace oil painting with sculpture. They're distinct art forms with distinct aesthetics.
And if you mean using mo-cap to create the live-action characters, that would be wrong too. The contrast between live and animated is essential to the look and feel of the
Roger Rabbit world.
The unfortunate fact is that movie audiences are, with the partial exception of Avatar, which was still also a live-action film, consistently rejecting CG animated films that are anything even remotely approaching realistic in style.
No, that's not true. It depends on the technique that's used. We have the technology to create a realistic-looking 3D computer model, but there are two different ways of animating that model, imbuing it with motion and expression. One is key-frame animation, a human animator shaping the poses and expressions from scratch; the other is motion-capture, letting a computer record a live actor's movements and expressions and making the computer model mimic them. And regardless of how realistic the character is in design and appearance, to date, key-frame animation is still a more successful way of creating believable, humanlike movement and expression with the nuance and life of a real person, while strict motion-capture gives results that are too mechanical and lifeless. The most successful motion-capture characters, such as Gollum and the Na'vi, have actually relied on a blend of mo-cap and key-frame animation, with human animators tweaking and refining the mo-cap data to add more lifelike nuance to it.
The problem with Zemeckis's films is that he relies too much on strict mo-cap, and so the results are characters that look lifelike but lack the subtle liveliness of a real person. And so they just don't look good.
And really, what a waste to have a technology that lets you create any imaginable image and only use it to try to replicate real human beings. If you want to show lifelike human beings onscreen, by far the best way to do it is to
get real human beings and point a camera at them. Creating cartoon characters (which is what CG images are) almost as realistic as human beings gives you something that isn't quite real enough to pass as reality but not cartoony enough to work as a cartoon, so it isn't aesthetically satisfying as either. Zemeckis's aesthetic is ugly because it's too literal in its realism. The power of cartoons is in their heightened reality, the distillation and exaggeration that can make them feel more real than the real thing. For instance, the character designs in
The Incredibles are highly caricatured, but their character animation, the subtle expressions and body language of the characters, are so brilliantly subtle and detailed that they feel far more realistic to me than Zemeckis's accurately-proportioned but dead-eyed CG characters.
So it's not realism that audiences are rejecting. It's a preoccupation with the wrong
kind of realism. Accuracy of surface detail isn't important. The human mind registers human faces in a way that exaggerates distinctive traits and underplays the trivial details; studies have shown that we actually recognize caricatures of people more readily than photographs of the same people. And what we really see as human and alive in other people is their expressions, their nuances of motion, the constant saccade of their eyes, etc. If you capture those details of movement and expression, then you will make your audience perceive the characters as real, regardless of their physical proportions.
I'm not really a fan of Zemeckis' motion capture technique, but I think it's a shame that his string of box office failures mean we're going to be saddled with Shrek clones starring sarcastic talking animals for years to come.
Don't confuse visual style with story content. It's possible to tell serious stories with a cartoony design style; see
Batman: The Animated Series. And there are plenty of ways to make comedies that are very different in tone from the likes of
Shrek and far more sophisticated -- such as most any Pixar film or
The Triplets of Belleville.
It's simply a suspicion on my part that a more cartoonish, less mature Rango would have had a better time at the box office. My hunch is that audiences have seen Gnomeo and Juliet almost as much as the much higher profile Rango in part because of this distinction. Certainly the studios continue to find gold in mining the trend of ironic pop-culture referencing CG animated films.
