‘Beowulf’ raises question: What is animation?

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‘We all just played our parts’
Just don’t try telling Winstone, who plays the title character, that somebody changed his acting. “To me, I can’t see where performances were changed,” he said. “We all played our parts.”

Winstone is credited on IMDB as the “voice” of Beowulf.

“No, I beg to differ. No way. That’s a performance,” he said. “It wasn’t just voice, believe me. I broke two ribs doing this film. Probably the most physical job I’ve ever done in my life on a film.”

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Starkey predicts the familiarity of working primarily with actors will continue to draw high-profile filmmakers to performance-capture animation.

James Cameron is using the technique — with advanced camera technology — for his “Avatar” movie, coming in 2009. Spielberg and Jackson announced in May that they’d direct and produce three 3-D animated movies based on Belgian comic artist Georges Remi’s adventuresome Tintin character.

“Both Steven and Bob (Zemeckis) love to be able to do things that in their mind’s eye they could see but physically they couldn’t accomplish,” Starkey said. “It’s spreading.”

That’s all well and good with traditional animators. They just wish there were more room for recognition of their work among Hollywood’s elite. The Oscars animation category was created in 2001 and no animated film has ever won overall Best Picture.

“The problem is animation isn’t considered in enough categories,” Hayward said. “With the amount of box office that CG animation represents, it’s really ridiculous that we’re all relegated to one category. ... It’s about 15 years out of date, really.”

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