Animation’s world of wonder

There will be only three animated films nominated this year. Why so few? According to the academy rules, there has to be a field of at least 16 entries to get a full slate of five nominees. This year there are just 14 contenders, which drops the academy’s nominating options to three. Among the submitted films are the Japanese entries “The Sky Crawlers” and “Sword of the Stranger”; the fantasy “Dragon Hunters”; the crowd-pleasing “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!”; the still-to-be-released “Delgo”; “Igor,” MGM’s comic take on mad scientists; “Fly Me to the Moon,” about Apollo 11 stowaways; “$9.99,” a stop-motion animated look at the meaning of life; and Ari Folman’s documentary, “Waltz With Bashir,” about his time as an Israeli soldier fighting in the first Lebanon War in the early ‘80s. Here’s a look at the other contenders: “Wall-E” and “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” and turn the page for “The Tale of Despereaux,” “Kung-Fu Panda” and “Bolt.”

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Ben Burtt may not be a household name but his work certainly is. As George Lucas’ longtime sound designer, Burtt was responsible for nothing less than R2D2’s enthusiastic chirp, Darth Vader’s ominous breath rattle, the crack of Indiana Jones’ whip and, for director Steven Spielberg, the excitable E.T.’s curious burbling sounds. This year, Burtt gave voice to a whole new collection of creatures in the Pixar animated hit “Wall-E.”

After six “Star Wars” films, four “Indiana Jones” adventures, a handful of other Spielberg epics and the occasional forgotten gem, like “The Dark Crystal,” one would expect Burtt’s trophy shelf to be overrun with Oscars. But that’s not so. He’s won two for best sound effects editing and a couple of special achievement awards -- he is slated to receive a career achievement award in February at the Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel Awards -- but compared to his Lucasfilm contemporaries, he’s been lightly honored. (“Star Wars” visual effects guru Dennis Muren has six Oscars, composer John Williams five). What gives?

“I’m in a difficult spot,” Burtt says, because sound designers do the work of sound mixers and sound effects editors. “And there’s no recognition of the term ‘sound designer’ in the academy.”

Indeed, Oscars are given for best sound -- for the creation of the final sound mix on a film -- and best sound effects editing, for the people who create the sounds heard in the film. But because Burtt’s work isn’t defined solely by these two distinctions, he’s shut out of the awards race more often than not.

“It’s an unresolved issue between what really goes on in how soundtracks are put together these days and how they’re looked upon in the official view of the academy.”

This year, Burtt just may break through. After decades of working almost exclusively with Lucas, he recently traveled across San Francisco Bay to the Emeryville headquarters of Pixar Animation, where he gave voice to a very different robot in “Wall-E.”

While the voice of “Star Wars’ ” R2D2 was just an unintelligible series of bleeps and bloops, that’s all that was required for a secondary character who brought some comic relief to the space saga. But the endearing “Wall-E,” who had to express loneliness and devotion, needed to connect more deeply with audiences. So Burtt set about creating a more understandable synthesized voice, not unlike that of physicist Stephen Hawking.

“There wasn’t the technology available back in the ‘Star Wars’ days to synthesize a voice,” he says. “But I always tried to fake it using human voices.”

Though modern voice synthesis programs, like MacTalk, were used for some of the other robots in the film, the voice of Wall-E needed something extra. “There are limitations on those programs in terms of the kind of character voice you can get. We wanted to add intonations to [Wall-E’s] speech. Something that indicates how he’s feeling with no words involved.”

To inject that layer of performance, Burtt recorded his voice and digitally manipulated it. “It’s a human performance wrapped in this envelope of electronic sound that, hopefully, sustains this illusion that it’s a synthesized voice.” And who knows? Maybe that illusion will pay off in gold.

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