Making a Face : Computer animator Chris Landreth has broken new ground with his Oscar-nominated short film. He created new tools to mimic human expressions.

The throng shrieking at the Academy Awards nominees as they filed into a luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel earlier this month didn’t have much to say to Chris Landreth.

“Chris . . . ?” frowned Tina Morehouse, 24, of Madison, Wis. “I’m hoping to see Mel Gibson. Omigod, there’s . . . SHARON! OVER HERE!!!”

But for Landreth, a self-described animator geek with big sideburns and a healthy sense of the absurd, having the Hollywood establishment nominate his satire “the end” for best animated short film has been enough unexpected recognition for one year.

For computer animation, an art form that grew out of the science of mathematical algorithms and computer coding--and for the computer animators themselves, who have long sought acceptance as artists in their own right--tonight’s Oscar ceremony is something of a watershed.

“We tend to be looked at as the lab coats,” says Aliza Corson, co-chair of the Los Angeles chapter of Siggraph, the computer graphics trade group. “What Chris did was a major technical achievement, but he did it using a story, and it’s just so great that that’s what he’s being recognized for.”

“Toy Story,” the first feature film created entirely with computer animation, took in more money at the box office than any other movie in 1995. It’s been nominated for best screenplay, and its director, animator John Lasseter, will receive a special Oscar tonight.

Charlie Gibson of Rhythm & Hues, the computer graphics studio that created the polar bears in the Coke commercials, has been nominated for best visual effects on best picture-nominee “Babe,” in which he used computer animation to develop the personality of the lead swine. It was also the year of “Casper,” in which a computer-animated character interacted with live actors, and “Jumanji”, in which live actors appeared in computer-animated environments.

And the ability to conjure digital illusions with computer animation also sparked a flurry of business deals in recent months, most notably “Toy Story” creator Pixar Inc.’s splashy public offering and DreamWorks SKG’s purchase of a 40% stake in Pacific Data Images.

Last year, Silicon Graphics Inc., which builds the powerful computers used by most computer animators and special-effects artists, bought the two leading 3-D graphics software companies, Alias and Wavefront--where Landreth works now. Jobs abound for those--often black-clad, artsy-looking twentysomethings--with the right blend of computer and artistic skills.

Of course, creative computer mavens have won Oscars before, mostly for the spectacular effects in movies such as “Terminator 2” and “Jurassic Park.” But today, there is a growing acceptance of computer animation as an art form rather than a bundle of high-tech tricks.

Lasseter, one of the early crossovers from traditional cel animation, broke new ground in 1987 when his short “Luxo Jr.” was nominated. He won the following year for “Tin Toy”, an engaging tale of a windup toy’s first encounter with a baby.

Still, Landreth’s nomination is a milestone of a different sort. The idea that the computer has finally become easy enough for “real” animators to use has been relatively easy for the entertainment industry to accept. But the notion that those from the computer side of the equation might have their own creative ideas on how to exploit the medium does not go down so smoothly.

Landreth’s style is much darker and more experimental than Lasseter’s. “Toy Story” garnered much media attention and was a big hit with kids. The six-minute “the end,” on the other hand, opens with what looks like two living cardiovascular systems dancing around a stage muttering about “the harbingers of the new semiotics” and ends up poking fun at computer animation itself and all its artistic pretensions.

The film had its unlikely genesis in 1994 when Landreth, then a new hire in the research and development division of the now-combined Alias/Wavefront in Toronto, was asked to create a piece that would showcase a new version of the company’s software.

Instead of whipping out the usual promotional reel, the 34-year-old mechanical engineering graduate asked for a grandiose $9,000 budget to do something that, if it were good enough, might get into the animation festival at the annual Siggraph trade show.

Drawing on his training at the University of Illinois computer animation department, Landreth spent the next six months painstakingly developing new tools that would enable him to replicate human facial expressions.

He used motion-capture technology to replicate the movements of human dancers and did whatever else it took to bring his characters to life--in a virtual sort of way.

“On the one hand, you have ‘Toy Story,’ which follows in the footsteps of the great hallowed tradition of 2-D animation,” Landreth said. “On the other hand, you have people who see this as a way to create synthetic actors, take Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and Elvis Presley, put them in a movie and have them explode.”

By last June, Landreth was mostly done. The film was shown in Los Angeles at the Siggraph show last summer and later at the Nuart Theater, which qualified it for consideration by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for the Oscar award.

Whether it will win is anyone’s guess. It is up against, among others, the formidable Mickey Mouse’s latest incarnation, which Walt Disney Co. has promoted in its inimitable fashion.

Alias/Wavefront promoted “the end” too: The company took out a one-sixteenth-page advertisement in both Variety and the Hollywood Reporter with the film’s title, category and the plea, “Screen this.”

Patrick Stockstill, a longtime awards coordinator for the academy, says he has seen many more computer-animated submissions in recent years and expects the number to keep increasing.

“I just hope they don’t get rid of cel animation entirely, though,” Stockstill says a bit wistfully. “There’s something about actually drawing on film that gives a personal feeling to it as opposed to a machine doing it. It’s an artist doing it as opposed to a computer technician.”

That, computer animators say, is what they come up against all the time.

“I find that when someone from the profession will sit down and watch cel animation, they kind of get an idea of how it’s done,” says Lasseter. “But when they look at computer animation, no one has a clue of how it’s done. It’s a big mystery, and they start thinking, ‘Well if they could do that, maybe they could do a digital version of me and replace me.’ ”

Fear of the unknown may be one reason that even as computer animation comes into its own in Hollywood, “Toy Story “ did not get nominated for best picture.

“No animated feature film has ever won best picture, and probably no animated feature film ever will win best picture because there is no constituency in the academy for animation,” Pixar Chairman Steve Jobs says with resignation. “It sure would have been nice, but ‘Toy Story’ has been so successful I don’t think we have a right to be disappointed.”

Still, the medium is clearly having its effect on Hollywood, influencing the kinds of screenplays that get written and the kinds of movies that get made. The dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” were visually spectacular, but they did not emote or project personality.

Says Gibson of Rhythm & Hues: “The work we’re looking at today is so much more interesting. It’s not all about robots and blowing things up anymore. On ‘Babe,’ the new part was that we were considered for it and we were able to do it and it was expected of us that we would be able to do it, and that kind of trust hasn’t existed ever before for computer-generated characters in a film.”

As for Landreth, he would like to push those boundaries even farther, using the medium to mesh fantasy and reality in ever-evolving ways.

But perhaps his fondest wish is for more animators to realize, as his character does at the end of his film, that “I am a work of fiction in my own animation, and as such, I can make my own ending.”

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Amy Harmon can be reached via e-mail at Amy.Harmon@latimes.com