Richard Linklater pissed at the Academy after it deems Apollo 10 1/2 ineligible for Best Animated Feature

Director Richard Linklater is getting vocal about his frustrations with The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences this week, after the Oscar-granting body decided that his recent film Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood doesn’t qualify for its Best Animated Feature Film category, on account of not being animated enough.

Like Linklater’s previous animated films, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Apollo achieves its look through the age-old process of rotoscoping, an animation technique in which artists draw over live-action footage, creating a distinctive sense of motion that looks like very little else in the medium. More than 200 animators worked on the film, which does not appear to have been sufficient for the Academy, which issued a decree back in July that it “does not feel that the techniques meet the definition of animation in the category rules” for Best Animated Feature Film.

In conversations with IndieWire this week, Linklater and his animation director, Tommy Pallotta, both expressed their anger at the Academy’s verdict. “I feel like if I’ve been caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare where someone is saying something isn’t real and I know it’s real,” Pallotta said, noting that Apollo is a blend of rotoscoped outlines for figures and lush animation surrounding (and on top of) them. Linklater, meanwhile, was blunt about what he sees as the commercial motivations for the exclusion: “The [animation] industry is clustered around kids’ entertainment. I get this feeling that they’re basically like, ‘Indie weirdos, go home.’”

Linklater also shared a letter he sent to the Academy about the verdict. “This naturalistic style is not a technical choice but rather an artistic choice in the crucial area of how I want the film to look and feel,” the director wrote.

It is accomplished by the hard work of animators drawing character motion and performances frame by frame, not a side effect of some hidden software or automatic process…We entirely reject the outdated and discriminatory notion that, in an industry dominated by the technical advancements in big budget CGI 3D films, some traditional animation techniques are less pure or authentic even after they meet the technical requirements for consideration.