The difficulties of making the original The Incredible Mr. Limpet and getting a remake off the ground point up the special problems involved in melding live action and animation. Historians often cite "The Enchanted Drawing" - a 1900 short from J. Stuart Blackton, the father of American animation - as the first film to mix the two media, though it seems rather simplistic in comparison to Mr. Limpet's interactions with the U.S. Navy. In the pioneering film, Blackton draws a face on a large canvas. He then adds objects like a wine bottle, a hat and a cigar to the drawing, pulling them off for his own use and returning them to the canvas for use by the newly drawn figure. As he gives his figure a drink and a smoke, its expressions change. Blackton did this by stopping the camera and changing drawings, though he does so with surprising precision for such an early film.

In the '20s, Walt Disney and Max Fleischer had popular series of animated shorts mixing the two techniques. Disney's Alice cartoons featured a live girl wandering through a dangerous animated world, while Fleischer's Koko the Clown, created by tracing over footage of his brother in a clown costume, interacted with the animator's hand and various real animals and objects. Disney refined the technique of mixing live action and animation in feature films like Fantasia (1940), in which Mickey Mouse shakes hands with conductor Leopold Stokowski, and The Three Caballeros (1944), in which Donald Duck interacts with various characters and performers from Latin America. He then had James Baskett, as Uncle Remus, interact with animated characters from the Uncle Remus stories in Song of the South (1946). At MGM, Gene Kelly danced with Jerry the Mouse in Anchors Aweigh (1945), and Esther Williams swam with Tom and Jerry in Dangerous When Wet (1953). One of the most popular mixes of animation and live action would occur in Disney's Mary Poppins (1964), which captured an Oscar® for special effects.

The earliest combinations of animation and live action used double-printing, combining the negative of the animation with a negative of live action to create a release print. Later, optical printers photographed the two different versions as they screened simultaneously, allowing for more sophisticated synchronization of the images. The biggest breakthrough in mixing the two formats came with the use of digital special effects, with Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) making the combination of live actors and animated figures more popular than ever. That and new motion-capture techniques have helped make the combination as seamless as possible, with films like Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) making the animated figures seem to interact freely with human actors. Those are the techniques that should help The Incredible Mr. Limpet reach new generations of viewers should a remake ever be completed.

By Frank Miller