NEW BOOKS

Panorama of hybrid animation techniques

(Marcel Jean, 2007, kad animacija susreće žive, Zagreb: Udruga 25 FPS, ISBN 9789539518835)

When Peter Földes's film Hunger (La Faim, 1974) was nominated for an Oscar in the short animated film category in 1975, there was a lot of talk about a new, revolutionary procedure in animation, but few people negated that the film was really animated, although most motion capturing was done automatically by means of new computer software. There was a lot more discussion around the last year's Oscar winner in the category of the animated feature-length film Happy Feet (George Miller, with Warren Coleman and Judy Morris, 2006), which used a more recent technology of eliminating traditional motion capturing. What has changed in the perception of almost equally revolutionary technologies from 1975 till today? In his short book on filmmaking techniques which are somewhere between animation and filming, Marcel Jean does not answer these questions directly but tries to provide sufficient material for individual assessment. Most part of the book is dedicated to conversations with authors whose films were always detached from current tendencies and to overviews of the development of the animated film from the beginnings, around hundred years ago, till today. Apart from the topicality of the book (the issue of motion capturing or digital puppetry, as some animation theoreticians prefer to call this technique, especially the more conservative ones, was again very present this year because Beowulf /Robert Zemeckis, 2007/ was not nominated for an Oscar in the category of animated films), the book is also interesting because of author's lack of interest for definitions, semantics and separation of film types. If the author in his entire book holds a firm attitude about anything at all, then it's that it is irrelevant whether we call a film an animated, experimental, documentary or a feature film.

Jurica Starešinčić