ANDY SERKIS TALKS ANIMATION

• ANDY SERKIS ON THE FUTURE OF ANIMATION

Andy Serkis Deserves That Oscar!!!

Actor and pioneering motion-capture champion Andy Serkis, who plays Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg's mo-cap Tintin movie, says it's time for people to rethink what animation means.

In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter, Serkis -- who is the subject of an Oscar campaign to get him nominated as Best Supporting Actor for his motion-capture performance as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes -- declared: "The category of animation should be under review because Tintin is entirely derived from actors' performances created in a conventional live-action way and manifested onscreen in a painterly, animated fashion. There has to be a review of all these storytelling methods. It's not necessary to exclude one from a category. A lot of people are being quite defensive about it. I think people should not be so Luddite. Don't say, 'No, traditional animation is this.' They've got to think out of the box and start to embrace all these different methods and mediums. This year will be a very interesting watershed point in our understanding."

Serkis doesn't think there should be a separate Oscar category created for motion-capture performances: "It should be in the [regular] acting category because the acting part of the process is entirely the same. I've been bombarded by hate mail from animators saying, 'How dare you talk about 'your' character when all these people work on it after the fact? We're actors as well.' They are actors in the sense that they create key frames and the computer will join up the dots, carefully choreograph a moment or an expression and accent it with an emotion. But that's not what an actor does. An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer."