Why Oscar Snubbed “Tintin”
“The Adventures of Tintin” wasn’t nommed in the animation category. Why? According to this report, because many traditional animators are suspicious of motion capture or, as it’s also known, performance capture, in which actors’ performances are fed into a computer. In 2010, they succeeded in adding a line to the Oscar rule book that says, “Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique.” That doesn’t rule out mo-cap movies; it just means that they must prove they include frame-by-frame animation as well. The fact that Tintin didn’t receive a nom in the animation or visual effects categories and that Andy Serkis wasn’t nominated as a supporting actor for his work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes suggest, as Visual Effects Society chair Jeffrey Okun puts it: “The industry is confused. It comes down to, ‘What is animation?’ That is something everyone has been struggling with.”
