The Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special Pays Tribute To The Rotoscope Ghost Of Animation's Past
"The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" is a fun, fluffy tribute to the joys of the holiday season that follows Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) as they try to give Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) the best Christmas possible. Poor Peter hasn't been able to have a real Christmas since he was a child, and his first Christmas with his (sort of) adoptive father Yondu (Michael Rooker) wasn't exactly the kind of holiday happiness he needed. In order to show Kraglin's (Sean Gunn) story about Peter's first Christmas with the Ravagers as well as Peter's own flashbacks, director James Gunn used a classic Hollywood staple: rotoscope!
Rotoscoping is an animation technique where artists trace over photographs, creating a fluid kind of realism that's a bit uncanny to watch. The technique was popular in the 1980s, the time Peter would have nostalgia for because that's when he was a kid. Just like the Awesome Mix soundtracks, flashbacks in rotoscope animation are a fun bit of nostalgia that immediately takes a chunk of the audience right back to childhood (or their parents' childhoods), and Stoopid Buddy Studios, creators of "Robot Chicken," replicated that animation style fantastically. After all, if anything's going to inspire the holiday spirit, it's some sentimentality for the beloved art forms of the past.
A slice of animation history
Believe it or not, rotoscoping has been around for over a century! The technique was invented in 1915 by Max Fleischer, who used film taken of his brother dancing on the roof in a clown costume to create cartoons of a character called "Koko the Clown." Appreciation for the technique seems to happen in waves, with a heyday in the early days of Disney with films like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." That fervor faded until the 1980s, when creators like Ralph Bakshi and Rankin and Bass ushered in a new era of rotoscoped cinema with films like "American Pop" and the 1978 "The Lord of the Rings."
Perhaps the most memorable of the rotoscoped films from this era is "Heavy Metal," a 1981 adaptation of the popular fantasy and science fiction magazine of the same name. No one is entirely positive what "Heavy Metal" is about, since it's really more a string of vignettes that are connected by a story about a glowing green orb, but it's impossible to deny that "Heavy Metal" is incredibly cool. It has an '80s sensibility and style that was tied heavily to rotoscoping, and the style in the "Guardians" holiday special is pretty similar. Gunn didn't have to tell us that it was an '80s Christmas flashback; he just showed us.
Not only is rotoscope a fun film reference from the past, but it's been making a big comeback, and a rotoscoped film even has the chance to win an Academy Award for animation this year.
Rotoscoping makes its return
Writer and director Richard Linklater has been a champion for rotoscoping for decades, bringing us surreal films like "Waking Life" and the Phillip K. Dick adaptation "A Scanner Darkly." Linklater's latest, "Apollo 10 1/2," uses that technology to tell a space race story that would be especially difficult and expensive to film in live-action. There was some debate about whether or not it would be eligible for an Academy Award, but the Academy voted in the film's favor, so we could see a rotoscoped movie take home an Oscar sooner instead of later.
There's a little bit of rotoscope magic for everyone on streaming lately. For fans looking for that "Heavy Metal" vibe, there's the ridiculously gory and fun "The Spine of Night" on Shudder, while Prime Video's "Undone" is a gorgeous and heart-wrenching examination of living with mental illness. There's even YouTube music artist Joel Haver, who creates rotoscoped shorts that range from hilarious to eerie. Rotoscope rules, and it's great that Gunn is giving it a huge stage to shine on.
A cartoony Christmas miracle
Yondu's arc in "Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2" cemented him as one of the best daddios in all of cinematic history, but at the start of the holiday special, he's still trying too hard to be a tough guy as the leader of the Ravagers. He doesn't exactly have the Christmas spirit, but it's hard to understand a human holiday when you're, you know, a big blue guy with a killer hairdo (literally). The flashbacks mostly just show young Peter, Yondu, and Kraglin as they celebrate Christmas aboard the Ravager ship for the first time, but they're a great and inventive way to depict the past and set it off from the events happening in the special.
While many creatives and executives understand that people have nostalgia for things, they often don't seem to understand why. Gunn's use of needle drops, classic animation techniques, and more prove that he understands the nostalgia because he has it himself. Gunn has a lot of love for the things he puts into his films, and that love is contagious. Check out "The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" for this sweet slice of animation history, and have a happy holiday season!