“The Smurfs” passed the $500 million mark worldwide, a surprising take for the CGI-live action hybrid based on the classic cartoon. While movies of this sort seem to always bring comparisons to “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and “Yogi Bear,” filmmakers have used the technique for much longer than that and with much better results. Shorter attention spans will always seem to bring up these recent mainstream efforts as measuring sticks, but there are some great movies out there that use this hybrid animation technique.
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit”
Robert Zemeckis is one of the most innovative filmmakers in the industry, helping raise awareness of CGI innovations in movies like “Back to the Future,” “Forrest Gump,” and “Beowulf.” In 1988, he created one of the most advanced CGI-live action hybrid films of all time with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”
In the movie, Bob Hoskins plays a private detective who begins an investigation of a murder in Toontown involving animated movie star Roger Rabbit. The area of Toontown is composed of animated characters in an animated world while existing next to the real Hollywood, which is live-action and contains real locations. However, real characters like Hoskins’ detective go into Toontown as live action characters and Toons head into Hollywood as animated characters in the real world situations.
At the time it was revolutionary, but soon other directors began to experiment with it and Zemeckis moved on to other groundbreaking techniques, such as motion capture animation.
“Lord of the Rings”
While having cartoon characters intermingle with real actors is what recent hybrid films seem intent on, the motion capture technology Zemeckis helped develop allows many other uses for the CGI/live action scenes. Forget about the old CGI methods of creating dinosaurs on the computer and then implementing them into the movie with green screen technology.
Peter Jackson worked with the motion capture technology that Zemeckis helped make popular in his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and created one of the most spectacular CGI characters of all time in Gollum. The difference here is that actor Andy Serkis portrayed Gollum acting out the scenes, and then Jackson transformed him into the creature seen in the movie. This is not an effect created on a computer but a real actor interacting with other actors in the movie.
“Avatar”
Leave it up to James Cameron to finally perfect the CGI-live action movie. With “Avatar,” Cameron seamlessly integrated CGI characters into his film, using real actors to portray the alien characters. Zemeckis worked with Cameron on this project, and while “The Chipmunks,” “Yogi Bear,” and “The Smurfs” seem to dominate the box office, Cameron proved it can work with adult subject matter as well, creating the highest grossing movie of all time.
It is clear that adding cartoon characters into the real world with kid’s movies is no different than adding dinosaurs or robots but, if you want the true CGI-live action hybrid experience, motion capture is where the true art resides.
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