The line blurs between animated and live-action films
The rise of motion-capture technology creates problems when categorizing award entries.
For decades, it was easy to tell the two media apart: There were real people in live-action movies; animated films had drawn characters or stop-motion figures. But as filmmaking technology has grown more complex, it's not clear if a single term can encompass movies as different as the five Oscar nominees for best animated feature, the additional 15 films that qualified for the category and the visual effects in movies such as "Avatar." An often heated debate over what is -- and isn't -- animation rages among animators, filmmakers, critics and fans.
For decades, it was easy to tell the two media apart: There were real people in live-action movies; animated films had drawn characters or stop-motion figures. But as filmmaking technology has grown more complex, it's not clear if a single term can encompass movies as different as the five Oscar nominees for best animated feature, the additional 15 films that qualified for the category and the visual effects in movies such as "Avatar." An often heated debate over what is -- and isn't -- animation rages among animators, filmmakers, critics and fans.