Live action mixing has been a staple of animation pretty much since the beginning. In 1900, a man named J. Stuart Blackton filmed himself drawing a face on some paper and interacting with it. Pulling things off the paper and putting them back. Like wise, some of the earliest shorts were forms of live action mixing as well, with Disney's earliest short films being the Alice Comedies (As pictured above) and the first warner bros short technically being another live action mix, Bosco: The Talk Ink-Boy. Live action mixing is a part of the industry, and it would be dumb for me to ignore it completely. That being said, most mixes are mostly animated characters in live action worlds, so I do hesitate to talk about them on this blog. That being said, I really wanted to talk about my favourite of these movies.
Released by Disney in the 1980s, it features a man trying to solve a mystery and having to be sucked into an animated world. It was groundbreaking for its effects, has a loving fanbase and may just be the greatest movie Disney ever released, that's right!
Yep, my favourite Live-Action/Animation hybrid is not Who Framed Roger Rabbit, although that is also one of my favourite movies ever, but for my money, my favourite is 1982's TRON.
TRON is just an incredible movie, being one of the first movies to really create a new world in CGI. Even though by today's standards the effects are really bad, they still add a level of charm to this movie. People forget that if there was going to be a world inside of a computer in the 1980s, it would definitely look like this would, with that sort of plasticy, gummy looking CG. Even taking that out of the picture, the movie looks amazing, there are plenty of shots that look like album covers for prog rock bands, maybe something like Yes or Rush, maybe even Tool.
Really I'm a big sucker for historically significant pieces of media, I love looking at media history. Movies, Animation, Video Games, Music, I love it all.
TRON was a very ambitious movie for its time, as CG was not really used for such big projects. There were computer generated shorts, but a lot of them were more experiments to see what was possible with this kind of technology. Not to knock the importance of shorts like 1968's "Kitten" or 1971's "Metadata", but they weren't mainstream cinematic movies. There really wasn't any movie that really surrounded itself with CG at the time.
Keep in mind, this predated a lot of the movies that Disney would put CG effects in, predating The Great Mouse Detective, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. Really, this might have been the catalyst for other CG effects for Disney. Then again, I could just be talking up this movie too much. It isn't like this movie was really appreciated at the time. It was a bit of a box-office flop and wasn't even recognized for best visual effects in the Academy Awards, with the 1982 award going to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Then again, it isn't like the Academy is really known for either foresight or being right about anything.
I think most people view the movie as an effects over story or characters kind of movie. Personally, I can't really agree with that. Yeah, the story is a bit weak, but that is kind of the thing with a lot of adventure films, the story does tend to take a backseat to the locations. TRON doesn't really do this, it does not forget that these guys have a mission and need to get to the destination. One of my friends did mention that the movie felt a bit confused as to who the protagonist really was, but I never really felt that way. While we do focus on one character a lot, I don't think the movie ever forgets that this is still the other characters story.
So, now the question really comes in; Does this movie technically count as a Live-Action/Animation hybrid? To which I have to answer... it depends on how you see it? It is still live action people interacting in an animated world, but unlike Blue's Clues, there are really only two characters that are fully animated, a minority in the movie. Still, a majority of the movie is set in this animated world, and the most memorable scenes are in there too. So, while some may not consider it to be a true mix, personally I think that just enough is set in an animated world to count.
This really wasn't a review, it was just kind of me talking about one of my all time favourite movies. I've been watching a lot of movies lately and I was just kind of in the mood. I dunno, maybe I'll talk about my all time favourite movies in a separate blog someday. Until then, go see TRON if you haven't already, and if you want to know my thoughts on the sequel... I haven't seen it in years, but I remember not liking it all that much. Maybe someday I'll give it another go.
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