Roger Rabbit Sequel Will Contain Both 2D and Mo-Cap Animation
Filed under: Animation, Comedy, Noir, RumorMonger, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand, Remakes and Sequels
As Peter reported a few days ago, Robert Zemeckis is going forward with a Roger Rabbit sequel. We all seem to be intrigued by the possibility of returning to Toontown, but Zemeckis' obsession with motion capture really casts a Judge Doom-like shadow over the project. Will he motion capture Roger Rabbit and his Toontown friends? Or will Zemeckis return to the old school of hand-drawn animation?MTV caught up with Zemeckis, who was quick to assure fans of the bumbling Roger that he will remain his cuddly 2D self. "I wouldn't use it for the cartoon characters, because I think they should stay two-dimensional because that's what - I wouldn't dimensonalize Roger," he said. "And I couldn't dimensonalize Jessica even if I wanted to because she doesn't have a nose. We wouldn't want to give her a nose." But motion capture will be a part of Roger Rabbit 2. The technology is like Zemeckis' whale, and he's determined to exploit every possibility with it. His current plan appears to involve using motion-capture for the human performances. "All the other characters that [the cartoons] would sort of have fun with would be magnificent in performance capture technology."
There's that Judge Doom shadow again. The clumsy way humans and toons interacted was the point of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It was the contrast that was interesting and fun. Having animated humans just seems to take it on a trip into the Uncanny Valley. The project is still in its early stages, so maybe Zemeckis will surprise us, and have the technology be part of the story. Everyone on the interwebs seems to be championing the idea of the toons having to deal with technological advances. We can hope for that, and not that Zemeckis will just shove in a motion-captured cast just because he can't stop himself.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-04-2009 @ 10:41PM
Booby Jones said...
A lot of, if not most, newer characters now are all computer generated. So if they decide to add lets say Woody and Buzz from Toy Story, well they are kind of going to have to use computer animation for that since they have always been 3D.
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11-04-2009 @ 11:21PM
carg0 said...
there has to be someone out there who cares about this... i'll keep looking.
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11-04-2009 @ 11:28PM
Joe said...
I really wish the Mo-cap was not apart of the Sequel to Who Famed Roger Rabbit. I only could see Mo-cap being able to work with the 3d CGI kind of characters. But would prefer to see the CGI cartoons looking like they are without the mo-cap. I hope the humans are not mo-caped because I do not want to see humans looking like cartoons. I don't get why it would be so hard to have real life people with Cartoons. It worked for the first and I see no reason it can't work for the sequel too.
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11-05-2009 @ 12:31AM
Mike said...
If Zemeckis were to digitize the human characters, he would be missing the entire point. Humans are real. Cartoon characters are not. Which is what makes the original film so fun, because it answers the question of "what if toons were real?" We get to see them interact with people. What would be the fun of seeing hand drawn characters interact with fake people?
If he insists on using mo-cap, I sure as hell hope it's only one element in the greater scheme of things. But even then (if the story would include cgi animated characters), I think you'd still lose a lot of the magic of the original film. Because the noir element was a major component, and I don't see how you contemporize Roger Rabbit without losing that feel.
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11-05-2009 @ 10:30AM
Josh said...
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is dear to me and I would hate for humans to be motioned captured just because Zemeckis is in love with that technology. I personally despise it and don't get the appeal. If he were to incorporate the concept being floated around the web about 2-d toons being replaced by motion captured/cgi toons, that would be interesting. But keep humans real, as Mike said in the previous post. Humans interacting with the toons is the fun of the whole film.
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