Please, No Motion-Capture in Roger Rabbit Sequel!

Posted by Dominic von Riedemann Nov 5, 2009

Talk about your roller-coaster rides: as soon as Robert Zemeckis raised fanboy hopes by announcing that he was working on a script for a Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel – with original writers Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman, no less – he dashed them by talking about using motion-capture technique for the non-cartoon roles.

"All the other characters that (the cartoon characters) would sort of have fun with would be magnificent in performance capture technology," he told MTV News on Tuesday.

Magnificent? Hardly: all the mo-cap characters in his films, from The Polar Express through to the upcoming A Christmas Carol, look waxy, unappealing and have dead eyes.

The idea is understandable, especially if Zemeckis wants to bring back Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant yet keep the sequel in the original Roger Rabbit's 1947 time period. But rendering his human actors as inexpressive mo-cap mannequins will look horrendous, especially when compared to the hyper-expressive Roger and Jessica Rabbit, plus those other old-school toons. As good-looking as his films are, Zemeckis simply hasn't cracked the code of how to convey emotional nuance through motion-capture, and his movies suffer for it.

It's also a disservice to the excellent actors who appear in them. Watching the behind-the-scenes footage in The Polar Express DVD, I was struck by Tom Hanks' incredible work in the film (he played 5 roles) and how much of his performance was lost in the transition to mo-cap animation.

Granted, Zemeckis' technique has improved since then, but Beowulf and A Christmas Carol (as per Disney's request, the movie review will go up tomorrow) suffer from the same problem: his mo-cap style is simply not up to the task of rendering human characters in an appealing, expressive way.

Bringing back Roger Rabbit is a wonderful idea, but keep the human actors human, please.