Making the transition from cartoon to live-action can leave an unsavory smell: Josie and the Pussycats. © and TM 2002 Cartoon Network and Hanna-Barbera Productions.

An oft-quoted phrase from George Santayana warns that: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." That venerable philosopher might have gone a step further and generated a memorable bromide about what happens when one -- willfully and with full cognizance of past disasters -- chooses to spit in the face of the past while simultaneously extending both middle digits. While such a quote might have taxed Santayana's inherent grace and sagacity, it would have applied perfectly to the motion picture executives who continue to stain the nation's screens with live-action versions of animated properties. It matters little that virtually all of these films have been resounding bombs, and even less that most animation fans despise these misguided mutations and decry them in droves. The perverse and self-destructive urge to waste time, talent and treasure on these abominations seems to be as endemic to Hollywood as personal trainers and tiny silver spoons.

Enough is Enough!
This is not my first rant against LAAFs (my acronym for Live-Action Animated Features); I explored the phenomenon in November of 1997 on the now-defunct Animation Nerd's Paradise Website. My unfortunate conclusion was that LAAFs would continue to be made, as they were an inevitable result of the tendency to market a successful property in all of its possible permutations. This is quite a different matter than having LAAFs produced because they are entertaining experiences or novel interpretations of their animated forebearers. LAAFs have proved to be encumbrances, rather than tributes, to the memories of the original animated properties; the only legacies they leave behind are their own videos and DVDs (as well as the consensus among moviegoers that they reeked). This has done nothing to stop the corporate machines from inflicting two more of these egregious indignities upon us; live-action desecrations of Scooby Doo and Fat Albert are up next. This, with the stench of Josie and the Pussycats still lingering in theaters.

The live-action trio. Photo by Shane Harvey. © 2001 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.

It Just Doesn't Work
I am going to attempt to explain why these things don't work and why they are such economic calamities for the studios that produce them (God knows nobody will listen anyway). Let's begin with a tenet held dear by Tex Avery: If it can be filmed in live-action, why bother to make a cartoon? Avery's observation went deeper than simply depicting funny-looking characters doing impossible things. The immortal director was referring to the fact that live-action and animated films operate by different conventions. Timing, pacing, action and flow of narrative are vastly different in animation; this is what gives cartoons their unique appeal. Cartoon characters do not walk, speak, act or even occupy physical space in the same way that flesh-and-blood actors do; this is one of the first concepts animators discovered when they attempted to animate entirely by rotoscoping.

Then there is the fact that animation can be effective at even sixteen frames per second. Great animators such as Art Babbit would take advantage of this fact in order to turn Goofy's feet 360 degrees for a frame or two, subliminally reinforcing the character's ungainly gait. Rod Scribner could portray a character as a loose tangle of gangly lines so fast that the eye could not catch it, then snap back into the original physiognomy. At Terrytoons, a madcap animator named Jim Tyer would (intentionally or otherwise) distort his characters from one pose to the next, model sheets be damned. The aforementioned Mr. Avery experimented with cutting individual frames in order to create action that defied the boundaries of "real time." Doing the same things to actors and timing in a live-action film would certainly produce jarring distortions. No amount of special effects can compensate; when metamorphosis takes place in a cartoon, for example, it simply follows the conventions of animated surrealism. When the same thing is done in live-action, the special effects are what command our attention. Thus, simply by the fact that live-action is being used, the experience of animated characters "coming to life" through human actors is unexciting and slow in comparison.

Human actors: That is my next point. Why do cartoon characters have funny and amusing appearances, even when they are animated in human form? Why are they proportioned the way they are? Why should any animator care about how many "heads high" any character ought to be, and why are some characters modified in design after their original appearances? This is done, of course, to create effective and endearing actors and comedians. Friz Freleng, for example, constructed Sylvester Cat with a low-slung crotch in order to give him the physical appearance of a baggy-pants clown; ditto the big red nose. Sylvester doesn't actually look like a human clown, but neither does he resemble a real cat. Sylvester does, however, strongly suggest both. That's the whole point of his singular design.