ANDY SERKIS TALKS ANIMATION

• ANDY SERKIS ON THEFUTURE 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'stime for people to rethink what animation means.

In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter, Serkis -- who is thesubject of an Oscar campaign to get him nominated as Best Supporting Actor forhis motion-capture performance as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes --declared: "The category of animation should be under review because Tintinis entirely derived from actors' performances created in a conventionallive-action way and manifested onscreen in a painterly, animated fashion. Therehas to be a review of all these storytelling methods. It's not necessary toexclude one from a category. A lot of people are being quite defensive aboutit. I think people should not be so Luddite. Don't say, 'No, traditionalanimation is this.' They've got to think out of the box and start to embraceall these different methods and mediums. This year will be a very interestingwatershed point in our understanding."

Serkis doesn't think there should be a separate Oscarcategory created for motion-capture performances: "It should be in the[regular] acting category because the acting part of the process is entirelythe same. I've been bombarded by hate mail from animators saying, 'How dare youtalk 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 framesand the computer will join up the dots, carefully choreograph a moment or anexpression and accent it with an emotion. But that's not what an actor does. Anactor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that youdon't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer."