I don’t know much of anything about the original Philip K. Dick book on which this movie is based, but perusing over the descriptions in the Amazon.com listing makes it seem like the funky animation technique is more than warranted.
I hesitate to call it “animation”, because that might be interpreted as a slap in the face for any hard-working animator who works on traditional hand-drawn or 3D animation and creates works of art from scratch. A Scanner Darkly is visualized using what looks like a sophisticated rotoscoping technique. Rotoscoping is a method of animation in which frames of live-action film are “traced”. It’s basically like using tracing paper to copy a drawing. Rotoscoping allows the animators to capture realistic movement, while at the same time giving them the option of augmenting that reality with their own vision. Sometimes it’s very effective, while it can often be seen as a cheat.
Ralph Bakshi has been known to employ rotoscoping in his films; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Bakshi’s animated 1978 version of Lord of the Rings was the first film to be made entirely using rotoscoping. At the time, that was probably the only way to realize such a huge film on a reasonable budget. (Interesting bit of trivia: at the time that film was made, Screen Actors Guild rules prohibited providing on-screen credits for actors who did not have speaking roles. Since the actors in the live-action footage had no speaking parts, none of them were credited. Billy Barty — one of the most famous “little people” actors in Hollywood — who played two roles in the film, was so incensed by this that he challenged those rules. Because of his efforts, thousands of people who would normally go uncredited are now recognized in films today.)
There are various methods and levels of rotoscoping, each requiring different amounts of work and allowing varying degrees of artistic freedom.
On the one hand, rotoscoping can be sparingly used to, say, capture the basic movement of a dancer. Sometimes, a simple animated stick figure is produced by rotoscoping. This gives only the minimum amount of information needed to create realistic motion. An animator can then use this reference to create a final finished work.
On the other end of the spectrum, rotoscoping can be used to create an animation from start to finish. Using the example above, an animator could trace the dancer’s body form, even the folds and colors of her clothing, to yield a fluidly dancing animated character.
Of course those are two extremes, and there are varying degrees of rotoscoping in between. But generally, the amount of rotoscoping used is inversely proportional to the artistic talent required to create the finished work.
On the digital front, rotoscoping has inspired new techniques.
Motion capture, or mo-cap, is a sort of grandchild of rotoscoping. Mo-cap animation is created by attaching reflective spheres or dots to an actor. The location of the reflectors correspond to the locations of the body’s joints. A series of cameras or infra-red detectors records the movement of these reflectors during the actors performance, creating a three dimensional skeleton. An animator can then attach a 3D model to the skeleton and quickly create an animation sequence with the model. Usually, mo-cap requires a lot of tweaking to create a polished animation, but it does allow the animator to create very realistic and convincing motion.
Computer generated films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within were created using motion capture. At times, the performances of the digital actors is almost eerily realistic.
Conversly, Pixar’s CGI films ( Toy Story , The Incredibles, etc.) were created using little or no motion capture at all.
There are films that fit somewhere in between. The digital dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park films obviously could not be animated using normal motion capture, since no real dinosaurs exist to provide a performance that could be “mo-capped”. However, motion capture was used extensively for the film’s research of how dinosaurs might have moved. Animators used motion capture to record the walking movements of elephants to approximate how a huge and lumbering brachiosaur might walk.
I have a feeling that A Scanner Darkly uses a form of automatic digital rotoscoping. Computer programs can be used to analyze live action footage and create a sort of “cell-shaded” look. The computer creates thick black outlines around moving shapes and high-contrast color boundaries (for example, outlining a character’s clothing or head), and reduces the number of colors and shades used in other areas (such as reducing the color in a character’s face and skin to only a few shades with hard boundaries). This visual “simplification” of live action footage gives the film the look of a traditional animated cartoon while at the same time preserving the realistic and subtle motion of the actor’s performance. Also, reducing the complexity of the scene allows animators to more easily manipulate the footage — important when creating a film that apparently will have a lot of trippy drug-enduced halucinations.
Like any digital art, however, one cannot rely on the computer to do all of the work and expect great results. Even this kind of rotoscoping requires a lot of adjustment and tweaking to achieve the desired look.
I’m not sure if the subject matter of A Scanner Darkly is something I can relate to, but it looks to be an interesting science fiction story with a unique visual style. I’d love to see the trailer on the big screen.