An animated film has never been nominated for an Art Direction Oscar!
Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Up (2009) are the only animated films ever to be nominated for Best Picture, while Waltz with Bashir (2008) is the only animated picture ever nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
However an animated film has never been up for Best Art Direction.
Now saying that, Avatar did win last year but many would not regard this as a solely animated piece as the lines are very blurred with this film. I must say though it thoroughly deserved the win for an absolutely remarkable achievement, and perhaps it will be the turning point for the animated films to be recognised.
But back to traditional animated films, be it 2D or 3D, the thought of an animated film to have never been nominated is absolutely absurd.
Think of some of the amazing art direction work done on films like Aladdin, Road to Eldorado, The Nightmare Before Christmas, A Bug’s Life, The Incredibles and Cars to name but a few.
So much work goes into the art direction of an animated feature. You have to remember that everything that you see up on the screen has to be designed. I mean everything!
No live-action film has to do this.
You have prop designers, sure - but they won’t design everything because you have already existing items you can use. The prop buyers have a list of things to get and anything else they create.
In live-action art director call some location pointers. This means they just locate an area and say “oh that a nice building let shoot there” rather then designing it themselves. The set designers will create interiors and some exteriors but a lot of the time, mostly for time and budgetary constraints existing locations are used.
None of these short cuts can be done in animation, every little detail has to be designed.
If a great animation art director knows they need to build a set they will ask themselves, why is the set in the movie, what has it got to do with the characters, what is it about this particular building that forwards the story of this film? The same goes for a great live-action art director but as I said they can just go to a location they have found a just shoot there if the location fits whats required.
There’s a book called The Filmmaker’s Guide to Production Design by Vincent LoBrutto:
You only have to read the chapter by Richard Sylbert to find out all you need to know about art direction and production design.
Richard Sylbert has worked as art director on many films but one of his most famous would be the work he did on Chinatown.
In this book he talks about the film and how he used the characters and themes of the story to get the style of the film and visual emphasise these elements wherever possible.
Jack Nicholson’s character is a detective called Jake Gittes.
Everywhere he walks he has to go uphill. Every door, every piece of glass is frosted because he can’t see to the next level. Being a detective it’s always a struggle.
The story is about water or the lack of it, so there are no clouds in the sky in any of the shots in the movie.
Danger is symmetry. Every building in the film is white. Green means money, which means people who can water their lawns have money.
All of these elements he had already planned out a year before Roman Polanski joined the film.
Funnily enough though even with all of this great art direction it didn’t win him the Oscar that year, The Godfather: Part II took the gong. In fairness though not the worst film to loose out too really!
Obviously I’m not saying every animated film deserves to be nominated, but when you look at the amount of effort that has to go into creating anything in animation you wonder how the Academy don’t recognise this.
I find it funny when Tim Burton’s films get nominated for an Oscar for art direction like Batman (1989), Sleep Hollow (1999) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). This is not because I believe them not worthy, but how they have a unique look to other films because they look like an animated set ‘brought to life’.
I believe this is the case because of Tim Burton’s animation background and how, with the great people he works with, he expects a lot of the items in his films to be designed specifically from his drawings rather then just using stock props and locations.
So if the Academy can appreciate these films, why don’t they recognise the amazing work regularly done in animation?
Maybe the issue is that animation is not tangible so therefore they cannot physically see the work that has gone into it. But at the end of the day it all looks the same way on a cinema screen.
Look at the following two websites to judge for yourself if an animated picture deserved a nomination against the live-action counterparts…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Art_Direction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Animated_Feature
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences setup the Oscars to recognise excellence in the film industry. So please don’t let the excellent work done in animation continue to go unrecognised at the Oscars.
So until next time Stay Animated!
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Glossary:
The Academy Award® for Art Direction goes to both the Art Director and the Set Designer of the film.
Production Designer – This is the person responsible for the visual look of a film
Art Director – This is the person who runs the art department and directly supervises the design team and answers to the production designer. If there is no production designer on the production, the art director is responsible for both the look of the film and the supervision of the art department team. Art director is the original title of this position prior to William Cameron Menzies’ work on Gone with the Wind (1939). Nowadays the Art Director and Production Designer are pretty much regarded as the same thing.
Set Designer – This is the person who conceives and draws up plans for a set.
5 comments so far
I thought the production design on Burton’s Batman was incredible. I was designing some art deco planes one time and was borrowing from some of Anton Furst’s sensibilities, I was saddened to hear of his suicide when I went looking for references. Nice article Richie.
11 June 2010
2:51 pm
I agree Richard. The artwork on some animated films is unparalleled in live-action with the exception of those that rely very heavily on CGI (like Avatar). Personally, I thought Pixar did a fantastic job on The Incredibles. Tim Burton is in a different class altogether though, no live-action director can touch him.
It’s just a shame that animation suffers from a stigma in Hollywood that is unlikely to change anytime soon.
11 June 2010
4:26 pm
Some great points here Richie…. Now, I’m not one to be defedning live action but maybe one of the reasons why Art Direction is that bit more difficult in a live action movie is for the very fact that you CANT control everything?
They still have a set budget and have to stick to a budget and yet they still maanged to shoot all of Chinatown without a cloud in the sky ( and there was no digital cloud removal then…?) So there is an element of having to work with what you can get.
15 June 2010
2:16 pm
Yes, it doesn’t seem fair does it, more animated films should be given consideration for best art direction by the academy but this has more to do with voting politics and historical bias than anything else. To suggest that animation production design deserves any more consideration for awards because ‘everything’is designed from scratch or that one is more difficult to execute than the other is a misunderstanding of the working methods of both crafts(and this bias exists in both disciplines of each other) It’s the end result that matters and there are many examples in live-action going back to the early days of cinema where all the elements that you see are designed with the exception of the cast (look at the German Expressionist films of the twenties, which heavily influenced the makers of thirties horror movies. Directors like James Whale, which were a significant influence on Anton Furst and Tim Burton!)and before I hear the character design argument,character design in animation is called casting in live action
.So in essence, there are live-action examples where ‘everything’ in the frame is designed (Laurence G Paul’s work in Blade Runner comes to mind.)
In terms of the actual reasons why animated production designers don’t get more recognition from the academy,well I submit these ideas.
1. The “best art direction” category is voted on by the voting members of the art directors guild, the majority of which is made up of all live-action production designers,set designers and illustrators voting for their peers. There are no animation production designers in this guild, they have no autonomous representation, just as animation directors or rather directors of animated films have no representation in the DGA.
2- There is nothing in the Academy rules that says you can’t submit an animated film’s production design in for consideration but the studios don’t push the category in animation because there are two few animated films in the running and for reason 1 (see above)
3-The studios who make these animated films along with the animation members of the academy instead concentrated their efforts on lobbying for the creation of a ‘best animated feature film’ category which essentially further isolated us from our live-action bretheren and any consideration for individual achievement in the craft categories and lumped all animation people into one category! This just made that historical bias I talked about earlier more concrete( starting with the ’special honorary academy award’ for ‘Snow White’in 1938, I think.
As a member of the live action Art Directors Guild at the run-up to last year’s awards I saw ‘The Fantastic Mr Fox’ in for best art direction but this was a rare exception and I suspect it only got submitted because Wes Anderson was the director.
In general animation crafts people are in the minority. We only have ONE guild to represent all of our individual craft categories and directors are not even represented!
And in my opinion, it’s partly our own fault that we are not recognised the same way our live-action counterparts are. We do not stand up for ourselves and we do not lobby for what we want. As the line becomes more blurred between both disciplines these issues are going to become more of an issue in the future. A lot of crossover is happening, just look at Zemekis’ Imagemovers or the upcoming film from Speilberg(Tintin),Andrew Stanton(Princess of Mars) etc. Tell me, are those films live-action or animated?
Oh well…. there’s always the Annies!
15 June 2010
8:50 pm
Thank you all for your great feed back on this discussion.
Doc, I totally agree it was definitely more difficult before the digital era for art directors. They did though still have plenty of tricks at their disposal pre-digital.
Fergal I understand your point about the old style of cinema. Richard Sylbert said when he visited the Pixar studios it reminded him of the old studio system and thought it was amazing that they would design something and you make it from scratch. He lamented for those days rather then just using the ‘pointers’ that I mention in my article.
Like in everything you can only get what your budget and time allows but one thing that live action does give you are the happy accidents that can occur on sets and that don’t occur in animation.
I was reading an article with Hugh Jackman about how Christopher Nolan works and he told a story when he was shooting on “The Prestige”.
‘I remember doing a scene with David Bowie on a mountain in Los Angeles. It was described in the script as this beautiful vista, gorgeous. But fog came in and you could not see three feet in front of your face. I came to set and thought, “Oh well, I think we’ll be coming back here tomorrow,” but then I heard a knock at the door, “Alright, we’re ready to go.” I could barely see the guy knocking! I asked Chris why he was shooting, when he couldn’t get what he originally planned. He said, “I wanted to have that, but my belief is: always shoot.” He said he had learned that on Batman Begins, where a similar fog came in on the day of a big action scene and you could barely see people coming out of the fog. “People asked, ‘How did you create that? It’s so frightening and visceral.’ So always shoot. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you’ll end up using it. Never wait for the weather.”
Anyway, this argument can continue from both sides but the most interesting and valid point I think though is that of the Academy.
The big issue as you mentioned Fergal is the lack of understanding between both crafts.
3D films are still in their infancy stage and the understanding of the technology is one thing but also how it works in real life.
Like traditional animation, it’s still all an illusion of life.
With every new 3D feature you hear stories of the animation crew getting the top art directors and cinematographers in to show them how it’s done in reality.
When Richard Sylbert and cinematographer Roger Deakins went to Pixar to help teach them how they work in live action they always go away saying how jealous they are that they can do anything. However great art need limitations to succeed. The reply from the Pixar crew was always that they wanted the limitations that the live-action guys have so their films look like the films they love. The computer wants to make everything look perfect and they feel it’s the art department and cinematographers job to but the imperfections back in.
This though is 3D and not even mentioning the work done in 2D.
I suppose at the end of the day the big breakthrough that has only recently occurred is that animated films are getting the recognition from the industry that they aren’t “just for kids!”
A similar argument can be made on why comedy films and actors don’t get any recognition by the Academy.
Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.
With Avatar winning best Art Direction it looks like perhaps the Academy are starting to understand what is being done.
I can understand that the voting process is not by the public but by the people ‘in the know’ and as you mentioned, it all depends on how much a studio decides to back a project can get it it’s nomination.
The Matrix wasn’t even in the final nominations in 1999!
I suppose it’s also like the argument of mo-cap and traditional key frame animation….hmm…lets leave that for another day
16 June 2010
1:27 pm