In filmmaking, video production, and other media, the term live action refers to cinematography, videography not produced using animation. As it is the norm, the term is usually superfluous, but it makes an important distinction in situations in which one might normally expect animation, as in a Pixar film, a video game or when the work is adapted from an animated cartoon, such as Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones or Josie and the Pussycats films, or The Tick television program. Use of puppets in films such as The Dark Crystal is also considered to be live action, provided that stop-motion is not used to animate them.
The term is also used within the animation world to refer to non-animated characters: in a live-action/animated film such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Mary Poppins, in which humans and cartoons co-exist, "live-action" characters are the "real" actors, such as Bob Hoskins and Julie Andrews, as opposed to the animated "actors", such as Roger Rabbit himself.
Live action can also mean that a film or a television show is adapted from comics. Adaptations from comics include live-action film versions of Marvel Comics' Spider-Man and X-Men, DC Comics' Superman and Batman, or manga such as Death Note, Detective Conan and Great Teacher Onizuka.
Famous quotes containing the words live and/or action:
“What is a slum?... it is something that mostly exists in the imaginations of middle-class do-gooders and bureaucrats: people who do not have to live in them in the first place and do not have to live in what they put up afterwards once they have pulled them all down. One person’s slum is another person’s community.”
—May Hobbs (b. 1938)
“His eloquence was of every kind, and he excelled in the argumentative as well as in the declamatory way. But his invectives were terrible, and uttered with such energy of diction, and stern dignity of action and countenance, that he intimidated those who were the most willing and the best able to encounter him. Their arms fell out of their hands, and they shrunk under the ascendant which his genius gained over theirs.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)