Surf's Up

Chris Buck and Ash Brannon treat the mockumentary frame as a production method rather than a running gag. The handheld feel is not animators imitating shake: the crew motion captured a real camera operator and drove the virtual camera off his movement. The lens sits at the characters’ eye level, the crew is present inside the scene, and the penguins answer straight into it. The voice work broke with animation habit too. The actors were put in the room together for many sessions and pushed to improvise. Jeff Bridges has described riffing with Shia LaBeouf while cameras in the booth recorded the performers’ faces for the animators. That is why lines overlap and sentences get cut off halfway. The story is entered the same way, through archive footage and talking heads before Cody turns up, and halfway through the contest stops being the subject. The Academy nominated the film for Animated Feature Film at the 80th Academy Awards. Ratatouille won that category and Persepolis was the third nominee. A good fit if you want the contest constantly derailed by interview asides and characters breaking off to address the crew. Not for anyone who wants an animated frame that is clean, decisive and always pointed at the right thing, because this camera deliberately arrives late, drifts and loses focus.