The side-by-side view of Tom Hanks and his CG likeness gives an idea of the detail of movement that motion capture can obtain.

Landreth had seen a “making of” presentation of Polar Express, which featured Tom Hanks acting with his white spots on and a split screen showing the digital performance that came out of Hanks’ work, “Tom’s acting looks okay. He’s emoting, he’s being physical — actually showing what could be, in a two-minute sequence, kind of brilliant physical acting.”

Well, that knocked my socks off because that’s sure not what I saw on the big screen. So where did that performance go?

The mocap approach sort of works for the adult characters, where it becomes a caricature of the deadpan adult with a heart of gold. But the children come across not so much as deadpan, as just plain dead: soul deprived zombies sleepwalking through their parts. Unfortunately, rather than luminous Christmas revelers, I kept thinking about that banjo playing kid in Deliverance…

It probably didn’t help matters that the foundation performance for the hero boy was acted out by Hanks rather an actual child. But even disregarding that, the Polar Express experience only seems to prove that motion capture has the same pitfalls as its ancestor, the rotoscope.

In other words, this is another case of it doesn’t matter how much detail or control you have, what matters is knowing what to do with it. While such devices can be an aid to graphic based filmmaking, they still don’t fully replace the interpretive role of the animator.

So why did I ask all those questions and what do I think has been accomplished in these three films?

Well, first, in spite of Landreth’s enthusiasm…

And though I found The Incredibles to be a romp with lots of fun sight gags, inventive gadgets and cute family interaction…

And though I agree that the human characters are more successful than previous Pixar attempts…

Something still bugs me about this film. Part of it is that underneath their superpowers, The Incredibles are really just another sitcom family from central casting and that makes the story rather formulaic. But even more is the fact that, while Brad Bird is clearly a great director, the hard truth about The Incredibles is that the character animation would have been far better and more believable in 2D.

In spite of all expectations, the characters come off as nothing more than puppets — sophisticated puppets, yes, but puppets nonetheless. There is a mechanical quality to the movement: a feeling of marble eyeballs rolling under rubbery hoods eyelids, mouths that look like they were cut out of felt and, like creepy old Victorian dolls, REAL HUMAN HAIR! Rather than looking like real creatures that truly inhabit their own world, these characters looked manufactured and that distracts from the performance and undermines credibility.

This is not to make the bald statement that the Pixar approach is wrong — just that it is limited in what it can do.

As for The Polar Express… Well, think back to the beginning of this article and remember the part about finding interesting, animated ways to express the characters’ inner life. Perhaps, then, it becomes clear that live-action performance plus oil painting texture, no matter how luminous, does not an animated film make. You need both the fantasy concept and you need the means to truly convey it. In other words, you can’t fudge this stuff.

So in the end, I have to say that, as animators, we have some important thinking to do about how we animate in the 21st century. For the moment, mocap doesn’t look like it’s going to be putting animators out of business but that doesn’t mean we can relax. We have to choose our path. From here it looks like either we continue on what will likely be the dead-end of classical animation or we can join Chris Landreth and do some trail blazing of our own.

The current “2D rules into 3D animation” approach has its strengths but the reality is that the tools are more subtle now. For a long time all that could be achieved was broad acting. We were used to using bludgeons and now we’re being handed the finest scalpels… is it surprising that we need some redirection to get the best out of them?