

#Apes strong together movie#
Maybe Andy Serkis’ own Jungle Book-inspired movie Mowgli, out Oct. And let’s face it: War for the Planet of the Apes is a lot better-looking movie than A Christmas Carol and that Tintin movie Spielberg made. Serkis isn’t the only booster of performance capture either as Oscar winners Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis have used it extensively in their movies, only to receive a similar laissez-faire attitude about the technological achievements of their films. It’s kind of what I said in my article about Oscar spoilers yesterday where Cinematography and Visual Effects go hand-in-hand since they’re all about what a movie looks like, and Blade Runner 2049 is a very pretty movie.īut if nothing else, War for the Planet of the Apes is a movie that really blows the viewer away with what can be done with CG and visual effects, yet it’s not considered good enough for the Academy, so who knows if performance capture will ever really catch on? It’s kind of perplexing, and without talking to actual Oscar voters, it’s hard to imagine what they’re thinking while filling out their ballots other than the fact that they liked the way Blade Runner 2049 looked overall.Īnd if that’s the case, then surely Roger Deakins will finally win his well-deserved Oscar for the cinematography for that same film, right? It’s odd to think that other CG animal movies like Jungle Book and Life of Pi offer CG animals that meet up to Oscar members’ standards, while the work by WETA FX has now been ignored three times. One might think that the Academy members have something against performance capture being used as the basis for CG visual effects, but last year, Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book won in the same category, although it didn’t use performance capture quite to the same extent. Serkis gives amazing performance in all of those movies, but the Academy clearly isn’t quite ready to honor an actor whose performance is translated by visual effects artists, so why aren’t those visual effects people getting the credit they deserve with an Oscar? Last July, many critics and others who saw the film were clamoring for Andy Serkis to receive an Oscar nomination for his performance as Caesar, and it wasn’t the first time, as Serkis’ performance as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies received a similar reaction. But it also is a credit to WETA that they can enhance those performances in their computers. Much of that has to do with Andy Serkis, and his persistence at pushing performance capture and training other actors to bring the most to their sensor suit performances. I think anyone who saw War for the Planet of the Apes over the summer was blown away by the way that WETA FX and the performance capture actors were able to bring the apes to photo-realistic life, instilling them with emotions rarely seen in movie animals. For the third time, one of 20th Century Fox’s Planet of the Apes movies was nominated for an Oscar in the Visual Effects category, and for the third time, it was snubbed in favor of another movie, in this case Blade Runner 2049. What gives?
