The breakout star of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002) was a slimy, pale figure with sparse, limp hair and a ragged loincloth. This creature, a devolved former hobbit named Gollum, nevertheless charmed audiences with his vibrant and mercurial performance that oscillated between devious scheming and pathetic pleading. What made this performance unusual for a live-action film, however, was the fact that Gollum was computer-generated.
Gollum brought attention to a then little-known technique called motion capture, which tracks and transfers the movements of an actor onto a digital character. Motion capture, and the discourse surrounding it, raises the question of authorship in animation. Are the animators responsible for the artistry of computer-generated characters, or should we credit the actors behind the scenes? Much earlier in animation history, the rotoscope allowed for the tracing or recording of aspects of the real world, including human figures, suggesting that animators may in some cases take a back seat to performers. More recently, the emergence of machine learning and generative AI poses a challenge to human control—whether animator or actor—of animation. In this essay, I use the character of Gollum to explore the advent of motion capture, an earlier form of automated human performance, in order to illuminate how scholars in film and media studies have understood the relationship between animator and actor in animation. Gollum’s complex interplay of innovative acting techniques and new digital animation prompts scholars to consider issues of agency and human creativity in animation—questions that are ever more important today as artificial intelligence changes how we create and view digital images.
“Motion Capture and Embodied Virtual Performance,” essay for The Encyclopedia of Animation Studies, Vol. 4: Characters and Aesthetics, eds. Christopher Holliday and David McGowan (Bloomsbury, expected 2025).