If Rotoscoping Isn’t Animation, Nothing Is

Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood looks like no other animated film this year — not like the smooth CGI of Pixar’s Turning Red, or the stop-motion of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, or the angular line work of the action anime Inu-Oh. Apollo 10 ½ was made, like Linklater’s previous films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, by filming live actors and then painstakingly tracing over their movements, a process called rotoscoping.