Cartoons films at war

Hollywood is locked in a war of the 'toons, as two revolutionary animated films battle to rival the success of the giant green ogre Shrek.

Hollywood is locked in a war of the 'toons, as two revolutionary animated films,

HT Image

The Polar Express

and

The Incredibles

, battle to rival the success of the giant green ogre

Shrek

.

The new releases hit the screens this week as part of an end-of-year rush of movies aiming to capture Tinseltown and audience attention in the run-up to cinema's top awards, the Oscars.

Both films use new human animation technology that produces two very different cinematic styles but which pundits say could revolutionise the increasingly competitive animation industry.

Polar Express, based on the award-winning children's book by Chris Van Allsburg, opened in North America on Wednesday, starring Tom Hanks in five different roles and is tipped as a strong contender for the fourth best animated feature Oscar.

The lush 165-million-dollar film has the appearance of a painted storybook thanks to its unique "performance capture" animation that seamlessly blends real actors into animated sets and stories.

"Performance capture is key to trying to do something that has always been very difficult for animators to do, which is animate correctly proportioned characters," said the film's Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis.

"(Y)ou have that wonderful ability to have those subtle things that actors intuitively do that it would take an animator way too many hours to try to draw," said the maker of Forrest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

All the film's performances, including Hanks', are created by filming the actors as they wear high-tech body suits and strategically-placed reflective beads that allow their movements, including facial expressions, to be precisely tracked.

The movements are then digitized and captured in real time and transferred to animated backdrops and scenes, creating a unique storybook effect.

The films tells the story of a young boy who is doubting the existence of Father Christmas until on Christmas Eve, a magical locomotive pulls up outside his house and whisks him off to the North Pole.

But while Zemeckis' breaking of new technological ground has been hailed, the Warner Bros. film has won only mixed reviews.

"Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks come as close to commercial infallibility as seems possible in Hollywood, but appear to have taken an ambitious misstep with The Polar Express," Daily Variety said.

Disney-Pixar's penultimate collaboration, The Incredibles, which opened last Friday to a stunning box office take of 70.4 million dollars, is a spoof story about a superhero who has suffered a setback after being sued by an unwilling rescue victim but is recalled into service.

The animation team behind the 92.5-million-dollar picture, which featuring the voices of Holly Hunter and Samuel L Jackson, went beneath the surface of the characters to make them more engaging and human.

"Our goal was to do something patently unreal that feels very believable," said writer and director Brad Bird, explaining that he even gave his characters muscles under their skin to make them move more naturally.

"Something where you're going to get involved with these guys and be convinced that they have lives and hopes and dreams and are thinking beings," he said.

The movie follows another huge computer-animated success: Shark Tale, Dreamworks' story of a fishy family of undersea mobsters, starring the voices of Robert DeNiro, Angelina Jolie, Renee Zellweger and Will Smith.

But the huge challenge that both The Incredibles and Polar Express face is beating the stellar performance of Dreamworks' Shrek 2 which has taken more than 440 million dollars in North America since it opened in May.

Also entering the fray in the closing months of the year and ahead of the January 25 Oscar nominations is the animated The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, adapted from the television cartoon series.

The simple-animation feature is a far cry from the high-tech wizardry of Polar Express and The Incredibles, but could draw in just as many fans - and Oscars -- if its script and story are up to the task.

"Animated films have all the strengths and weaknesses of live-action films," Bird said. "Some of them just have a little more going for them than others."