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.
