Yesterday I saw James Cameron’s latest movie, Avatar. It was Christmas evening and the theatre was packed with people who had just spent the day unwrapping presents and and eating turkey. While part of me was excited and curious to see this movie, another part of me was dreading it to my core.

Somewhere, deep down inside of me, I knew as an animation fan what this movie would truly mean to the industry. It wouldn’t matter whether it made a gazillion dollars as Titanic had or whether it simply made back its gargantuan budget, even from the trailers I knew this was a movie that could represent the next evolution of computer graphics for Hollywood.

Because James Cameron has done it before, spurred the advancement of visual effects in ways that few directors of our day have done.

Let’s not forget, this was the director that brought us The Abyss and Terminator 2 both of which were landmark films for their time. It’s hard to believe that in 1989 a face on the end of a tentacle represented cutting edge technology. It was one of the early uses of computer graphics in films and, at its time, still somewhat of an oddity. But then 1991 rolled around with this silvery metal man who walked, melted and killed people throughout Terminator 2 and suddenly the whole ballgame changes. It was the year that suddenly the whole industry sat up and took notice of what computer graphics could do.

It was as if these two movies started a chain reaction and from it spun out all the other special effects blockbusters that Hollywood has become known for. Everything from the rebirth of the Star Wars franchise to movies like Spiderman and Jurassic Park. It’s hard to believe now that Steven Spielberg had actually planned on doing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park using stop-motion animated puppets until he saw what computer animation could do for his film.

You might also say that in the last two decades animation has taken a much more prominent role in the movie making business than it had previously. Prior to 1989, the only studio to have any significant success with animated films was Disney and the only heavy use of animation in live-action films was stop-motion puppets that could bring to life incredible creatures or double for actors in tiny miniatures. Now animation had jumped front and center with studios crying out for skilled animators to bring their computer generated visions to life.

Let’s face it, it’s been a good time to be an animator or to be a fan of the the work that really good animators can do.

But animation is a time consuming, disjointed process. So long as there is an animator inserted in between the actor providing the vocal performance and the finished character appearing on the screen, there was always going to be a call to take out the ‘middle man’ and speed up this labour-intensive process.

The solution was motion capture (aka ‘mocap’).

Anyone who knows me, knows that I automatically cringe at the mention of motion capture. Even its 2D animation equivalent known as rotoscoping tends to generate a kind of mental gag reflex. Whenever I hear people describe heavily mocap’d movies such as Polar Express or Beowulf as animated movies, I can feel this passionate tirade build up inside me.

Up until now, some mocap looked okay if you didn’t look at it too closely,  but so much of it looked downright awful.

In some instances, you’d have a highly stylized character doing freakishly “normal” movements that seemed out of sync with their cartoonish bodies. Animation is deliberate by its very nature, but mocap tends to pick up every jitter and all the unintended, fidgety sorts of things that we do as human beings. This can lead to a much more diluted performances that have little of the grace or strong character silhouettes that a good animator will put into their poses. It also didn’t help that in the early days the mocap performers simply weren’t of the same caliber of actor that was providing the voice.  This isn’t the case these days, although you can end up with some weird mocap combos. One of the more infamous was how supposedly Tom Hanks performed all the roles in Polar Express including that of the little boy.

What I found more disconcerting about entirely mocap’d performances however was the complete disconnect between the physical performance and the emotional one. I remember seeing the posters for Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within and being blown away by the near microscopic realism of the models. Unfortunately, the illusion is completely broken when they attempted anything like acting. In one scene where the leading lady is supposed to be sobbing at some indescribable loss, she merely looked like she’d stubbed her toe.

And yet, despite all these obvious failings, more and more “animation” was being done with mocap and that just set my teeth on edge. The thought of talented animators losing out to a clearly inferior process was aggravating in the extreme.

Thus, when I went into the theatre last night to watch James Cameron’s almost entirely CG generated, mocap movie, I figure I’d either want to throw things at the screen by the end of it… or I’d be blown away… and, as Mr. Cameron has proven capable of doing before, I was in fact blown away.

Cameron refers to the process used for his movie as “performance capture” and I find that a much better descriptor than simply mocap. Avatar is the first CG movie I’ve ever seen that truly connects the emotional character performance with the physical one. There were numerous occasions where you forget you are looking at a completely CG character sitting in a completely CG world because that character’s performance is simply so strong. When Neytiri sobs or screams in anguish, everything is in sync from the rigidness of her posture to the heartbreaking agony stitched across her cat-like alien face. It occurred to me afterward that someday, in the not too distant future, the Academy is going to have to decide whether performance capture acting (perfcap?) can be up for an Oscar because, after seeing this movie, I am certain the day will come that a performance of that caliber is telegraphed into a CG body.

There is a weird sort of irony that the premise of the story is that of human beings who genetically engineer alien bodies that they “drive” remotely since in many ways that is exactly what the performance capture process is. The actors are suited up with sensors all over their bodies and faces so that they can “drive” their CG counterparts. Cameron makes a point of saying that this is not an animated film. Instead, it is more like huge leap forward in prosthetics. I admit this distinction helped soothe the wounded animator in me, although I can now see makeup artists the world over cringing.

So yes, I do believe this movie will be another of those pivot point for the industry. Twenty years from now, there will probably be some blogger who will write, “Yes, it was Avatar that started the next revolution.”  As an animation fan, I can only hope that the next line in that blog doesn’t read, “And that was the movie that sent the CG animator the way of the dodo, much as Harryhausen’s stop motion animators had gone before them.”