Generation C

Watch your back, Screen Actors Guild. Stubborn studio chiefs are the least of your worries. A more insidious threat is headed your way this summer with the arrival of a new generation of animated talent hell-bent on giving flesh-and-blood thespians a run for their money.

Computer animation, which has so far stuck mostly to toys, bugs, dinosaurs and anything else that happens to be shiny or hard-shelled, reaches a milestone this summer by taking on a much softer, subtler subject: Homo sapiens. And the results, on display in the fairy-tale satire “Shrek” and the science-fiction epic “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” are spectacular, if also a bit creepy.

Leading the charge is Aki Ross, the heroine of “Final Fantasy.” Shapely, youthful and entirely compliant to the whims of studio executives, Aki looks and moves for all the world like a smoldering young starlet in her prime (and one not above stripping down to a bikini for a promotional spread in Maxim). Meanwhile, animators at DreamWorks unveil their own photo-realistic heroine in the form of Princess Fiona, the sassy Cameron Diaz-voiced co-star of “Shrek.”

“Creating people has been the Holy Grail for computer animators,” says “Final Fantasy” producer Chris Lee. “Now they’ve pretty much got it, and it’s a thing of beauty.”

But not all animators have joined the rush to create the perfect virtual human. This summer’s other animated releases include talking dogs, storybook fairylands, slapstick punch-ups and many more farfetched fantasies. Gone, however, are the days when these popcorn movie scenarios were realized with traditional cell animation alone; the same digital technology some animators are using to build believable humans is helping others create even zanier creatures and more intricate fantasy worlds.

“Animators are having a real love affair with computers right now,” says Don Hahn, producer of Disney’s summer release “Atlantis.” ’And the bar gets raised a little higher every year. The trick is choosing the best tool for the job; sometimes it’s a mouse and sometimes it’s still a paintbrush.”

Indeed, computer-generated imaging, called CGI, is just one tool at work in the summer’s other animated films. The Farrelly brothers add digital flourishes to Looney Tunes hilarity in their August comedy “Osmosis Jones,” a live action-animation hybrid about a white blood cell (the voice of Chris Rock) fighting a virus (voice of Laurence Fishburne) in the body of a bumbling zookeeper (a live-action Bill Murray).

Disney combines traditional animation with CGI in its June 8 release “Atlantis,” an adventure that follows a plucky cartographer (voice of Michael J. Fox) on an undersea voyage in search of the lost continent. And animators drop computer animated cars and clouds amid the lush, painterly surroundings of “The Trumpet of the Swan,” TriStar’s adaptation of E.B. White’s children’s book opening May 11.

And then there are the talking animals, which seem to constitute an entire genre of digital animation. First up this summer is the June 22 release “Dr. Dolittle 2,” in which a whole forest full of animals chats up Eddy Murphy’s kindly vet. Meanwhile, digital effects artists team up with Henson Creature Shop puppeteers to make “Cats & Dogs,” a sort of spy thriller waged among household pets, set for release July 4.

The first glimpse of the new breed of photo-realistic humans comes May 18 with the release of “Shrek,” a candy-colored comedy about a green-skinned ogre (voiced by Mike Myers). Though animators took liberties with some of the more fantastic characters--the power-hungry Lord Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow) is as squat as a fire hydrant, and a talking donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy) is as goofy as anything Hanna-Barbera ever created--the treatment of Princess Fiona is disconcertingly lifelike.

To make her convincing, animators modified software to simulate everything from musculature to skin tone, which turns out to be one of the trickiest human attributes to animate. Co-director Andrew Adamson says that animators at Pacific Data Images finally got close to the soft, iridescent surface of skin by borrowing mathematical models developed for laser surgery that track how light travels through the epidermis.

People are so tough to animate, says “Shrek” visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg, because we humans are such experts in our own form. “You can get away with a lot more doing insects,” says Bielenberg, who previously worked as effects supervisor on “Antz.” ’But when you’re doing people, if they don’t move quite right or the skin doesn’t look quite right, the audience will notice it immediately, consciously or not.”

Though “Shrek” goes relatively easy on the photo-realism, “Final Fantasy” attempts to very nearly simulate live action.

Based on the video game series of the same name, the futuristic adventure is the first release (through Sony’s Columbia Pictures) from Square Pictures, an animation studio built in Honolulu four years ago and staffed by a mix of Asian game designers and American animators. The team of 200 spent two years developing a motion-capture system and refining a style for humans they call “hyperReal,” which captures such minute details as sweat glands and hair follicles. (Hair, it happens, is another common stumbling block for computer animators. Technicians ended up creating 60,000 individual strands in Aki’s wispy shoulder-length ‘do.)

Although Aki is sure to wow her target audience of joystick-savvy teen boys, older viewers may need time to warm to this new breed of computer-generated star. Lee reports that in the first few minutes, some viewers experience a strange tug of discomfort.

“I think one of the reasons it seems so jarring at first,” Lee says, “is that if you haven’t played a video game recently, you have no idea how far the technology has advanced.”

Director Hironobu Sakaguchi also employs some clever camera tricks to create the illusion of reality, limiting the movement of the “camera” to those that could be achieved with an actual crane or dolly, deliberately blurring parts of the frame and mimicking the herky-jerky movement of a hand-held shot. That’s been one of the filmmaker’s more intriguing discoveries, says Lee: Realism without flaws looks fake.

“One of the ironies of computer animation is that we can get anything we want; we can, for instance, have the foreground and background in perfect focus,” says Lee. “But we’re not used to seeing that in cinema, so it looks wrong somehow. So we end up going back in and making a lot of stuff blurry.” For some artists, the hyper-realism of “Final Fantasy” takes computer-generated imaging too far.

“Some animators want things to look as realistic as they can, and to me, that’s a dead-end street,” says Piet Kroon, co-director of “Osmosis Jones.” ’You get to the point where you might as well pick up a camera. To me, the fun of animation has always been exploring the other end of things, the fantasy and the satire and the exaggeration.”

As in, for example, “Osmosis Jones,” which is set in a cartoon world where characters squish through keyholes and bop one another on the head with mallets. But even in this anarchic world, computer technology is hard at work. Instead of painting flat backdrops of the interior of Bill Murray’s body, where the cop show parody plays out, animators created digital texture maps to create organic, spongy surfaces that constantly shift, heave and contract.

“We’re using some digital techniques, but we were deliberately going for an older, simpler cartoon style,” says co-director Tom Sito. “It’s a lot more fun for the animators.”

Disney artists take a similar tack in “Atlantis,” an attempt to mine the boy-centric action-adventure genre the studio helped define in the 1950s with “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Swiss Family Robinson” (meaning: no singing sea monsters). Set in 1914, the story follows an amateur map maker and a team of explorers aboard a 1,000-foot submarine. The film attempts to blend traditional animation with an edgier comic style and digital effects. So though the film’s hero, Milo Thatch (voiced by Fox), and other main players were designed by the Disney team working with alternative comic artist Mike Mignola, the world they inhabit brims with computer-generated texture and geometry.

‘We wanted to create a hybrid of traditional and computer animation,” says Hahn. “There’s a nuance of emotion you can only get from traditional animation. We worked very hard, shot by shot, blending the two techniques.”

Once something of a novelty, digital animation is standard in even the most traditional animated feature. Terry Noss, co-director of “The Trumpet and the Swan,” says computer-generated imaging helped add touches of depth and substance to a feature that stands apart from its fast-paced, high-volume competitors.

“This is a pretty traditional film, and our only real mission was to make it look as beautiful as possible,” says Noss. Meanwhile, computer-generated imaging is mixed with animal wrangling and puppetry in “Cats & Dogs,” a Warner Bros. release about warring pets that director Larry Guterman describes as “a straightforward thriller that just happens to star animals.” Guterman says he was not exactly raring to take on another effects film when he first read the script, in which an innocent beagle named Lou (voiced by Tobey Maguire) fights off a nefarious plot for world domination hatched by a fluffy, Mussolini-like house cat called Mr. Tinkles (voiced by Sean Hayes). “I thought, ‘Oh no, not another CGI,’ ” he says from a back lot editing suite, where he’s putting finishing touches on the film. “But it had such a great hook and this sort of wry Gary Larson tone. I couldn’t believe no one thought of this before.”

The animation in “Cats & Dogs” is designed to be both spectacular and subtle, with the script calling for wild kung fu kicks one moment and heart-to-heart exchanges the next. Guterman says digital animators at Rhythm + Hues in Los Angeles, Tippett Studios in Berkeley and the Mill in London worked hard to make the animal actors come to life. “The goal was to push the expressiveness as far as we could take it,” he says.

Though making animals talk may seem simple compared to creating convincing ogres or speeding spaceships, the process can be quite tricky. Doug Smith, visual effects supervisor of “Dr. Dolittle 2,” says there’s not much new ground to break after films like “Babe’; now the most animators hope to do is not to draw attention to their work. In this sequel to the $144-million-grossing comedy, the challenge was to make the audience never doubt that creatures great and small, from a bear to a goldfish, are fully capable of delivering a wry aside or a big punch line.

“It sounds simple,” says Smith, but “I’ve worked in visual effects for over 20 years, and talking animals are one of the most intensely complicated things you can attempt.”

From house pets suddenly capable of Stanislavsky-esque performances to humans created entirely out of digital code, a new era of animation is indeed at hand. Although this might cause some concern among living and breathing performers, there are certain advantages. During voice-over recordings of “Final Fantasy,” actor James Woods was reportedly delighted to watch his voice emerge from such a fit, youthful alter ego.

“He couldn’t stop giggling,” says producer Lee. “He kept saying he’d never have to exercise again.”