Look at the 2025 nominees for Best Visual Effects and you’ll notice something: There are a lot of digital apes. An animation expert says there’s a technical, and psychological, reason for that.
Hollywood’s biggest night, the Academy Awards, arrives this weekend, but this year there’s some monkey business going on.
It’s easy to focus on the race for best picture, best actor and best actress, but look a little closer at the 2025 nominees and you might notice something: The Oscars have gone bananas for computer-generated apes.
Three of the five nominees for best visual effects place digital primates in the center of the frame. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” and “Better Man,” a biopic that depicts its subject, British pop star Robbie Williams, as a chimpanzee, star CGI apes, while “Wicked” brings digital life to the famous flying monkeys from “The Wizard of Oz.”
It might seem like a random piece of Oscars trivia, but there are legitimate reasons behind the Academy’s trio of primate-centric picks, says Jason Donati, a teaching professor of art and design at Northeastern University and award-winning animator.
Part of it has to do with Hollywood’s — and humanity’s — long-standing obsession with these animals, he says.
“There’s a fascination with an animal or a creature that has so much in common with humans but is still very much othered, different enough to be interesting, curious, creepy,” Donati says.
The recent pack of digital primates is an extension and evolution of that psychological fascination. As visual effects and digital filmmaking techniques like motion capture have become increasingly sophisticated, artists and animators can now conjure the kind of digital creatures that erase the suspension of disbelief we had to ignore or accept previously.
The industry has come a long way from the costumes used to conjure flying monkeys and hyper intelligent apes in 1939’s “Wizard of Oz” and 1968’s “Planet of the Apes,” respectively. It’s even shifted away from the use of real primates, as studios have recognized the ethical issues that come with it.
“It’s so easy to want to put human characteristics on these animals,” Donati says. “Now, as the technology ramps up, it’s believable.”
We might be obsessed with our distant cousins, but Donati says there is also a technical reason why there are so many digital apes on our screens: They are, relatively speaking, easier for animators to work with.
One of the most common methods used to create digital characters in films like “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is what’s called motion capture. It involves tracking the facial and body movements of actors on set to help animators later translate and map the performance onto digital characters. That means each part of the actor’s performance — and body — has to be mapped onto an often non-human digital character.
“The closer the structure is to the human actor, the easier it is to map it on,” Donati says. “When you have apes and monkeys and primates, it becomes very easy because the bone structure, the muscular structure are so similar.”
The animation and VFX process for films like these, two of which come from the wizards at Wētā Workshop, can take years. It involves even digitally building the skeleton, musculature and skin, and all the physics involved with their interactions, to make things as realistic as possible, Donati says.
Those similarities already mean it’s easy for audiences to project human emotions onto real chimps and monkeys. Taken one step further by animators and VFX artists, it’s the perfect storm for creating emotionally engaging digital characters.
“When you think about animation and VFX, it’s the easiest animal to anthropomorphize, to make that bridge and put humanish characteristics and emotions on and not have this really strange disconnect,” Donati says. “Now, we can apply, through motion capture, really human, nuanced facial expressions and emotions upon these characters and it doesn’t look animatronic or like a mask or like a person in a suit.”
However, creating CGI primates is also a “double-edged sword from the creator’s perspective,” Donati adds. Humans are very familiar with how apes and monkeys move and behave, and the similarities to our own bodies mean there’s room for “this uncanny valley situation where it doesn’t feel right and kind of close but not close enough.”
The trio of films nominated for Oscars this year largely push beyond the uncanny valley, showing how VFX artists are using our favorite primates to blur the boundary between belief and disbelief for audiences.
“[In ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’] there’s a shot of a river and an orangutan holding onto this bridge … and it’s interacting with water, a real bridge and a real human actress seamlessly,” Donati says. “That’s a lot going on from a VFX shot composition and technical perspective. I watched it knowing I’m going to be super critical, and I don’t know where you go from that. That’s as real as it gets.”