Animation Oscar. (view point).(Column)

Before the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences would consider offering a Best Animated Feature category, eight submitted films had to qualify. In 2001, nine did. Next month, the Academy will award the first competitive Oscar to an animated feature.

If Shrek and Monsters, Inc. are nominated as expected, that competition should produce no end of fireworks as DreamWorks and Disney battle for the honor. Lost in that spectacle might be the news that of the nine qualified entries, four were created with 3D computer graphics: Shrek, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Monsters, Inc., and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, (see April, July, October 2001, January 2002).

Indeed, it would have been impossible to create Shrek, Monsters, Inc., or Jimmy Neutron without 3D computer graphics. Final Fantasy could theoretically have been filmed with real actors rather than animated digital actors, but a live action film would not have represented director Hironobu Sakaguchi's vision or preferred method of working (and of course, wouldn't qualify as an animation). Thus, one could easily argue that without 3D computer graphics there would not be an Animation Oscar this March.

One could further argue that the advent of 3D computer graphics, combined with the critical and box office success of Disney/ Pixar's pioneering feature film Toy Story, has revitalized animation. 2001 saw Dreamworks/PDI's Shrek become a box office behemoth as did Monsters Inc., the fourth straight uberhit from Disney/Pixar. Yet, happily, rather than imitating Pixar or PDI's style, DNA and Square stretched the new genre in opposite directions: DNA's Jimmy Neutron blasted off with a new, cartoony 3D style and Square's Final Fantasy emerged with a "hyper realistic" style--which we can hope foretells a wide variety of 3D graphics styles to come.

In fact, only two of the nine films, Marco Polo: Return to Xanadu and The Trumpet of the Swan, are traditional cel animations. The Prince of Light combines Japanese anime with classical Indian painting. Osmosis Jones used Cambridge Systems' Animo to combine cel animation ...