Oscars: "Motion Capture Is Not Animation"

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ruled that "motion capture," a technique that can create non-human characters based on the movements of real actors, does not qualify as "animation" for the purposes of Oscar nominations, Deadline Hollywood reports.

The ruling was made as part of an edit to the qualifying definition in the Animated Feature Film category. Under the revised definition, a significant number of the major characters in a qualifying feature must be animated using a "frame to frame technique", and such animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture's running time." The definition explicitly states that "motion capture by itself is not an animation technique" for the purposes of qualifying for the prize.

Additionally, the Academy has lowered the minimum running time necessary to qualify in the Feature category, from seventy minutes to forty minutes. This brings the Animated Feature in line with the other definitions for "feature length" product and closes a hole under which films that are between forty and seventy minutes could qualify in neither the "Features" nor "Shorts" categories.