ANIMATION EXEC DECRIES POSSIBLE ENTRY OF TINTIN IN OSCAR RACE

Animation producer Stephen Paul Leiva has spoken out against Steven Spielberg’s reported efforts to persuade the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to allow his film The Adventures of Tintin, which uses performance-capture technology to compete for an Oscar in the best animated picture category next year. In a commentary published in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Leiva, a former president of Chuck Jones productions and a producer of Space Jam, argues, “Performance capture is not animation.” Defining animation as creating the illusion of life through frame-by-frame filmmaking, Leiva argues that performance capture by definition captures a performance in real life by a live actor. In fact, he suggests, performance capture is the opposite of animation, which, he observes, is “not drawings that move and act, but rather, movement and acting that is drawn.” With performance capture, it is not the animator that is creating the movement and acting, he notes, the live actors do. “You then overlay an illustrative look … [that] is nothing but a special effect.”