Summer blockbuster Shrek, which has already earned $250 million in the US alone, picked up 12 Annie nominations this week and looks set to sweep the prestigious awards, which celebrate the best in animation. The top-grossing film, starring Mike Myers as the titular ogre and Cameron Diaz as his beloved princess, has significantly upped the ante for future works with many calling its photo-realistic images a quantum leap in animation.
While each second of action took a crew of 25 animators a full day to create, the pay off was enormous. However, after seeing a rough cut of the film, star Mike Myers loved everything but his own performance. “I realised Shrek needed to sound… vulnerable, hurt, angry and dismissive,” he said. “A Scottish accent somehow captures all that.” At a cost of $4 million, the Austin Powers star re-recorded all of his dialogue in a Scottish brogue, much to the chagrin of the crew.
“They had to throw out all the animation, too, because you’re filmed when reading, and each scene of your character is matched to how you pronounce the words,” says Mike. “DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told me that this had never been done before in the history of animation.”
Yet Shrek wasn’t the only character sent back to the drawing board. It seems that Princess Fiona, voiced by the Charlie’s Angels beauty, was originally too real looking, so much so she was distracting. Animators toned down her looks and shifted the focus back to the fairytale.
“She was by far the most difficult character,” says the films’s co-director Andrew Adamson. “You can get away with a lot with a talking donkey. But everyone’s used to watching people talking and expressing themselves on a daily basis… Particularly watch when Fiona is listening to someone and her lips compress and her eyes squint. These are extremely hard things to achieve in animation, but they give the character a richness you’ve never seen before.” Don’t tell that to Jessica Rabbit.
“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” said the sultry Jessica Rabbit in 1988’s ground-breaking Who Framed Roger Rabbit. She may be right. While traditional animation like Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire fail to repeat the success of blockbusters like Aladdin and The Lion King, computer generated films are seen as the future of animation. Steven Spielberg produced Roger Rabbit – the forerunner of the live action/animation genre that spawned 2001’s Osmosis Jones – and his DreamWorks team pose the greatest threat to Disney’s empire.
“Animation is just exploding now and rightfully so,” says June Foray, Annie founder and the voice of Rocky of Rocky And Bullwinkle fame. “It is such a wonderful art form. It has no limitations.” Yet for years, Disney was the only big player. However, much has changed since Mickey Mouse made his first appearance in 1928’s Steamboat Willie.
Since Fox scored with the Meg Ryan-voiced Anastasia in 1997, animated films have flooded the multiplex. When four major films including Dreamworks’s Antz and the Disney/Pixar comedy A Bug’s Life were released in late 1998, some worried if they’d exceeded demand. “Everybody was wondering what would happen, whether they would hurt each other’s business, and it turned out they all did very well,” says Fox’s Christopher Meledandri. “Everything always comes back to good storytelling,” says former Warner Brothers animation chief Jean MacCurdy. “If we deliver that, we’ll find an audience.”
While there have been pitfalls along the way – Fox later closed its Phoenix animation studio after the costly Titan AE bombed – Toy Story 2,South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Chicken Run have all been major hits and established animation as much more than kids' fare. So much so, the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences can no longer ignore the genre.
For the first time since 1981 the Academy has added a new category: Best Animated Film. Though the Annies are often dubbed the Oscars of animation, that comparison is now obsolete.
“People in the animation community are very excited that the academy has chosen to recognise our achievements,” says Tom Sito, president of the Hollywood Animator’s Union. “Animated features consistently occupy a sizable portion of the lists of the greatest films and the most successful videos of all time, yet they’ve never received regular recognition by the academy. We’re looking forward to the challenge and excitement of the competition.”
Disney’s classic Beauty And The Beast is the only animated film ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. And while some say Shrek has a shot at competing with the big boys, insiders are all but certain it will snag the inaugural animation award in March.
The Annies, awarded by the International Animated Film Society, will be handed out on November 10 in Hollywood at a star-studded black tie affair.
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
