New on the site in this new week is a review of Filmation Studios’ Journey Back To Oz, the closest the company ever got to creating anything approaching a truly classic, fully animated feature film. It turned out to be anything but, though BCI’s disc treatment packs in an assortment of extras that make the disc essential viewing for anyone interested in the Filmation story.

In just-confirmed Hollywood news, it has been announced that Walt Disney Pictures’ first collaboration out of the gate in their ImageMovers partnership with director Robert Zemeckis will be a CG performance capture version of that perennial chestnut A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey in the leads.

Why a CG interpretation? Zemeckis has Carrey, one of the most versatile and physical comic actors on the scene, to play with. Why not dress him up, smother with make-up for the many characters he will portray, and create a stunning, live-action feature? Animation was, remember, the medium to jump to when a given story couldn’t be told on real sets with real people. But, since the awkward railway journey that was The Polar Express [with Tom Hanks, right], it seems exactly that what Zemeckis seems to be doing is creating features – I can’t quite call them animated – that could and perhaps frankly should have been brought to the screen with live actors and special effects.

The “performance capture” system doesn’t really do anyone any favors. It’s not live-action and the audience can’t identify directly with the actor, thus rendering the nuances that thousands of tiny mo-cap suit balls can’t possible register redundant. Then again, it’s not animation either, as a sly poke in the closing credits of Disney/Pixar’s current Ratatouille has great fun in pointing out. As such, what we get is by turns elaborately (over)staged and stiffly stilted. And, for me, it’s such a shame that the chiefest proponent for this technology is one of my favorite directors: Robert Zemeckis.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, Back To The Future (and its two just-as-good sequels), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump, Contact and Cast Away – each one a gem, or at least with wonderful moments and innovative movie breakthroughs amongst them. When it came time for The Polar Express I was intrigued to see what Bob Z would cook up. Tom Hanks, at the time, stated that filming had taken place and work would continue for a year at which point we would see “the absolute state of the art” in animation. While The Polar Express worked visual wonders as eye candy on Imax screens, the animation was anything but state of the art (I wondered, coming almost ten years after Final Fantasy, how anything could have taken such a giant leap backwards); the phrase “uncanny valley” being coined to describe the zombie nature of the characters “performance”.

Much better was to come in Gil Kenan’s Zemeckis/Spielberg-produced Monster House [pictured right], which ditched the (non)photo-real designs and played fast and loose with its style and story. The result was a film that played up how mo-cap could be used in a more pleasing way: approaching the photo-real aspirations everyone seems to want to conquer while keeping an element of animated stylization. Though this helped Monster House enormously when it came to arguing against the limitations of motion capture, there were still criticisms to be made in some of the character acting, as one might expect from translating human performers’ naturally slower mannerisms and matching them up to what should appear to be more sprightly movable youngsters.

My admiration for Zemeckis dimmed greatly with The Polar Express, but where Monster House really scored was in its ludicrously entertaining story and I found it a hoot. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he does with Beowulf, his next performance driven mo-cap feature that comes to screens this Christmas. With a cast including Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Ray Winstone, John Malkovich and Zemeckis’ old Back To The Future chum Crispin Glover all skilled performers, here’s hoping that the epic poem will make a truly stunning argument for the process employed to bring it to the screen. Not a lot has been leaked from the “set” – one of the clear benefits of the enclosed studio shooting – and the official website shows us nothing so far save the predictably weighty logo.

And so to the just-confirmed A Christmas Carol, produced most memorably over the years in various stage and screen forms including dramatic live-action, musicals, animation (including, of course, Zemeckis’ Roger Rabbit pal Richard Williams’ version and Disney’s own Mickey-take) and even an all-around applauded Muppets movie. Now rubber face Carrey will do his best to translate those rubbery features to four characters: Scrooge himself, plus the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet To Come. Lemony Snicket means this isn’t the first time Carrey has played multiple roles in a single movie, but it’s his first encounter with the restrictive capture system. It will be interesting to see how far they can stretch things with such a physical performer in the suit, especially when the film is released as intended in Disney Digital-3D.

Several sites picked up on this news by way of Roger Rabbit‘s Bob Hoskins letting slip that Bob Z had put the idea to him of playing Scrooge’s old boss Mr. Fezziwig in the film. Though Disney has denied official negotiations have begun, Hoskins’ participation is almost a certainty and makes perfect sense for the role. In the meantime, Carrey himself is about to get immersed in animation for the first time (after previously dropping out of several high-profile projects including Over The Hedge) by providing the voice of Horton in Fox/Blue Sky’s Horton Hears A Who, bringing him back in the Grinch universe. Certainly all these projects sound extremely promising and should build on Carrey’s previous experience with heavily made-up and CG-tweaked performances.

As for Zemeckis himself…I hope that in Carrey – with whom he wrote the Christmas script in mind – he’s found someone capable of providing the unique qualities that performance motion capture so desperately needs to validate itself as a true animation process. I’m not expecting such from Beowulf [concept art pictured right], which is sure to be all about “the look” and quieter performances. Not that anyone, at this point, actually knows what to expect! Released as a collaboration between Paramount Pictures (in the US) and Warner Bros. (internationally), the rumor is that we’ll get a peek at the mysteries of Zemeckis’ latest on the front of the new Harry Potter opening this weekend. My fingers are crossed that Beowulf indicates his new teaming with Walt Disney Studios to further explore and develop his preferred movie making technology is a well chosen career path and that he hasn’t given up making truly amazing live-action films to chase something vastly time consuming and ultimately elusive.

– Ben.