Members in the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts
& Sciences’s animation branch conferred on Tuesday night for a meeting which lasted 4 hours. Among the topics said to come up was the issue of motion capture (aka performance capture), and they “apparently” have decided to send a letter to the filmmakers of Mars Needs Moms, Happy Feet 2 and Tintin asking them what their “intent” was in the use of the Mo Cap process before deciding whether those films qualify. In its formal rules, the Academy states that “motion capture by itself is not an animation technique” and that the films must be done in frame-by-frame animation.

This year, 3 potential nominees use the Mo Cap process: Robert Zemeckis’ box office bomb Mars Needs Moms, George Miller’s sequel to his Oscar-winning Happy Feet, and most notably Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited entry into the animation world The Adventures of Tintin (which he also produced with Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy).