Even a monkey could tell you Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture movies — Beowulf, Polar Express, A Christmas Carol — are creepy.  It’s dumb; they don’t look like people, they don’t look like cartoons, they’re just weird, shiny sentient condoms.  And I’m serious about the monkeys, it’s science.  From Scientific American:

These too real facsimiles fall into the so-called uncanny valley, between acceptably fake-looking human representations and real, healthy humans. Psychologists have long wondered whether this aversion has an evolutionary basis, and new research on macaques suggests that it does.

Princeton University researchers presented images of real monkey faces, unrealistic animated faces and realistic animated faces to five monkey subjects and recorded how long they gazed at each. Similar to the human response to objects in the uncanny valley, the monkeys avoided looking at the most realistic animated faces. The scientists, who published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, speculate that realistic animations might resemble sickly or diseased animals because they lack subtle cues of health such as normal skin texture and hue—and that an aversion to such sights may have evolved to keep us healthy.

Crap, what happened?  I zoned out near the beginning, when I started daydreaming about a bunch of hot psychologists doing intensive research on macaque.

Whatever, dude, macaque jokes never get old.   [-Thanks to K-squared for the tip]

Cary Elwes, star of Robin Hood: Men in Control-Top Tights (because he’s put on a few pounds since ’87, you see. Haha, have some more ice cream soup, fatty.), has joined the cast of Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming 3D remake of Yellow Submarine.  The who with the what now?  From THR:

Cary Elwes, Dean Lennox Kelly, Peter Serafinowicz and Adam Campbell are in negotiations to portray the members of the band in “Yellow Submarine,” which the director is remaking for Disney.
The original 1968 animated movie was based on the music by the Beatles and featured a storyline wherein a soldier called Old Fred meets up with the Beatles and travels in a yellow submersible to Pepperland. Among the group’s encounters are the music-hating Blue Meanies [Na'avi?].
Zemeckis is making the movie using 3D performance-capture technology. [of course]
The Beatles tribute band the Fab Four will be motion-captured as the ensemble for the musical performance sequences.

And so the Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture, condom-people experiment continues (I hear his nickname for his wife’s vagina is the ‘uncanny valley’).  Anyway, a 3-D movie featuring Beatles music?  1966 is going to be so jealous.

(I CAN HAZ DINNER FOR 6? OM NOM NOM NOM…)

/You keeled my father, prepare to diet.

The original article is in Spanish, but FilmDrunkard “argentino” helpfully translated for me (even though his non-Spanish-sounding name leads me to suspect he’s descended from escaped Nazis).  The gist is that Robert Zemeckis, a once-good director who’s been torturing his audience with pointless motion-capture animation for his last three movies, thinks motion-capture should have its own Oscar category.

“I’d say that the appropriate thing would be to create a new category, like when Walt Disney made the first animated movie. He got a special award since no one had ever done that.”

In 1939 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Disney received an honorary Oscar for innovation resulting for the film. [LaTercera]

Say what you will about Zemeckis, he did sort of pioneer the technique of motion capture, which is kind of like animation, but creepier and less creative, and kind of like live-action, but not quite lifelike and everything looks like it’s wearing a condom.  (I hate this, there’s no feeling!).  And for that he deserves to be recognized. I say they give him the Smellovision Memorial Do Not Want Award.

After three movies, Robert Zemeckis is still dead set on this motion-capture stuff even though no one besides him seems to like it.  I don’t hate it, I just don’t really get it.  If you want the characters to look sort of like the actors but stylized, use makeup.  It looks better.  If you want them to look nothing like reality, just animate them altogether.  Mo-cap is a weird, off-putting hybrid, like John Travolta in drag (as opposed to an awesome hybrid, like bearsharktopus). Anyway, the jury’s still out on whether A Christmas Carol will be a success or a bomb, but Zemeckis is already doubling down on the mo-crap with an adaptation of The Nutcracker.  From Pajiba:

To be sure, this is not an adaptation of the popular Tchaikovsky ballet (fathers everywhere can breath a sigh of relief) but an adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original novel, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Zemeckis’ The Nutcracker will be a faithful adaptation, as well. It’ll be a period piece, set in 19th century Russia, which will explore how the cursed Nutcracker character came to be and the battle between the dolls and the mice.

You catch that?  The Nutcracker, it’s about rich, 19th century kids’ toys that come to life, not what your mom used to eat at frat parties.  Though if you ask me, the idea still sounds a little, shall we say, jacked off on.

Does anyone actually like motion-capture besides Robert Zemeckis?

After the jump you can watch the first full trailer for his A Christmas Carol starring digital Jim Carrey.  The 3-D, motion-capture-animated adaptation of the Dickens’ tale beautifully combines two technological innovations that I hate.  I’ve said it before, but look, if you want to animate something, just draw the damned thing. (and if you want to put a fleshlight in someone’s hand, use Photoshop).  Motion-capture still doesn’t look as good as photography, and none of the “nifty” effects are as cool as real-world special effects like costumes and pyrotechnics.  And you know how in real life you can see people’s pupils expand and contract as they focus on stuff and adjust to light?  They don’t seem to do that in motion-capture, and it makes people look… well, sorta weird.  Which we might be able to accept if there were… you know, any actual benefit to motion capture.  I don’t want to sit through this technology’s growing pains any more than I would’ve wanted to be the first guy to get a heart transplant.  “Did it work?”  “Nah, he’s dead.  Maybe next time we should try filling him with baboon blood first, I just have a hunch.”

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