Gene Deitch On Motion/Performance Capture

Serving as an appropriate complement to this earlier piece on Cartoon Brew, animation legend Gene Deitch has written a piece for Animation World Magazine entitled “Yes, But is It Animation?” in which he uses Beowulf as a jumping point for his thoughts on motion and performance capture. Deitch’s primary complaint is that while the type of work on display in Beowulf is technically qualifiable as animation, it is not a creative use of the medium. “We animators can animate absolutely anything we can imagine,” he writes. “We are graphic artists, and graphic art can be wildly anything.” Beowulf is not even mildly anything as far as animation art goes.

In the end, Deitch concedes that the whole debate about what is and what isn’t animation may be little more than a trivial technicality because a film’s worth is not rooted in its technique: “We may simply have to give up trying to categorize films by their technical process of production, which will surely be more and more a mixed bag of tricks, and simply judge them as films. Do they tell a story worth telling, and do they tell it well? That’s really what movies are all about, isn’t it?”