I don’t know what is the worse idea, an all-CGI 3-D Smurfsmovie, as Paramount had planned, or a CGI/live-action mix, as Sony Animation is now planning for our beloved blue communists friends. I guess if we only think back to Alvin and the Chipmunks and Underdog, it’s easy to think Sony’s new plan for The Smurfs is a terrible idea. But I think the second Scooby-Doo movie worked pretty well as far as cartoon adaptations go, and there’s a chance Hollywood could do a good job again, despite the majority (including Garfield: The Movie, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the first Scooby-Doo) being on the bad side.
That said, I’m still no fan of the trend. However, if it must continue, I think it would be interesting to see any of the following 15 animated series, all of which feature the necessary mix of talking animals (or inanimate objects) and humans, turned into live-action movies with CGI characters:
While I should have been a good cineaste and watched some Oscar-worthy documentaries or some Sundance-originating indies, I saw two mainstream movies this week. One was this past weekend’s box office winner, Beowulf; the other was Enchanted, which will surely be the Thanksgiving weekend champion. I found neither of them to be very remarkable in terms of storytelling, but each does have some significance to cinema, and each is noteworthy for its respective blurring of animation and live-action.
Obviously, Beowulf is animated. It is so far considered eligible for the Animated Feature Oscar, and aside from its few bits of photorealism, it looks like a cartoon (or a video game). But because the movie was made with real-life actors, who were “performance-captured”, there is still that link to live-action filmmaking. And there was hardly much reason, in my opinion, why it necessarily had to be made as an animated film. Meanwhile, Enchanted is primarily live-action, but it does have some bookending animated sequences, which figure into the gimmicky plot of a 2-D Disney Princess who magically finds herself in the 3-dimensional world of New York City. But it probably could have been fine as a completely animated film — maybe it could have been the Wizard of Oz of computer animation (as in 2-D to 3-D animation rather than black and white to color film). As it is, the “real-life” parts of Enchanted seem too artificial anyway.
According to Scott Kirsner, today is the 25th anniversary of the release of Tron, the groundbreaking Disney film that served, as Kirsner puts it “as the “shot heard ’round the world” for computer-generated visual effects.” Kirsner recently interviewedTron director Steven Lisberger, who notes that in spite of the innovation Tron represented, at the time Disney compared his film unfavorably to another 1982 release:
Tron was nominated for two Academy Awards, in sound and costume design. But it wasn’t nominated for Best Visual Effects.
“We found out that the statement that was made was that we had cheated when we used computers,” [Lisberger] said.
[...] Lisberger said that when ET came out a few weeks before Tron, Disney executives told him they wished ‘Tron’ had turned out more warm and fuzzy… like ET. (ET won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for 1982.)
In honor of Tron, feast your eyes on this infamous deleted scene from the film, in which Yori takes Tron back to her “very illegal” private quarters, where they can “talk.”
I don’t know what is the worse idea, an all-CGI 3-D 
While I should have been a good cineaste and watched some Oscar-worthy documentaries or some Sundance-originating indies, I saw two mainstream movies this week. One was this past weekend’s box office winner, Beowulf; the other was Enchanted, which will surely be the Thanksgiving weekend champion. I found neither of them to be very remarkable in terms of storytelling, but each does have some significance to cinema, and each is noteworthy for its respective blurring of animation and live-action.
