DIGITAL L.A. : VIDEO GAME NOW OSCAR CONTENDER.

Byline: David Bloom 

It's an Odd, Odd, Odd, Odd World.

Abe the Mudokon is a little different: froggy face, topknot, bad posture, greenish skin, three-fingered hands, mouth partially sewn shut. In short, a real looker.

He's also the star of Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus, the computer game and now, a short, quirky animated tale trying to cadge an Oscar nomination for best animated short film.

Abe's creators at Oddworld Inhabitants of San Luis Obispo are billing it as the first time a computer game's animations have become the basis for an Oscar competitor, something animation-industry observers say is probably correct.

``It's true as far as I can see,'' said Wendy Jackson, a Los Feliz-based animation consultant and writer. ``They don't really have a claim unless they get nominated, but in terms of nomination, it's never been done.''

Sarah Baisley, editor in chief of Animation magazine in Agoura Hills, said she can't recall any shorts based on videogame work either among all the hundreds of pieces her staff sees every year.

``I don't believe I've heard of one originating from a game,'' Baisley said. ``It hasn't been unusual to see that stemming from TV shows or features, and it may have happened for one created for the Internet. But probably not, because the quality of the Internet animation is not good enough to (compete). Now (the competition) has much higher production values.''

The production values aren't a problem for the Oddworld piece, however. Many recent games, created either for computers or consoles such as Sony's PlayStation, use eye-popping animated opening sequences and ``interstitials'' between game levels. Powered by increasing graphics capabilities, programming savvy and many of the same animation programs used in movies, the work is increasingly of movie quality in games such as LucasArts Star Wars Rogue Squadron on the Nintendo 64.

The great look of Exoddus in particular isn't a surprise, either, given the Hollywood special-effects backgrounds of Oddworld founders Sherry McKenna and Lorne Lanning.

The two worked for most of two decades with such special effects stalwarts as Douglas Trumbull and Rhythm and Hues before striking out to create what McKenna calls ``movie-quality games.''

Their first try, Abe's Oddworld, was a million-seller, leading to the Exoddus successor and to the decision to create a separate short film using some of the 25 minutes of high-quality computer-generated animation they had created for that game.

``I was just blown away'' last fall when Lanning showed her the game's animation all strung together, McKenna said. ``I said, `This is Academy Award stuff.' Then I said, `Wait a minute. Why not?' ''

To make the animation eligible for the Oscars, however, it had to be released before the game came out, under Academy Award rules designed to protect the film business. That gave Lanning two weeks to create additional animation that would tie the interstitials together in a coherent narrative.

Then the company had to arrange a short premiere run in a Burbank theater last October and show the film enough times before a paying audience to make it eligible for the Oscars, McKenna said.

``I'm sure Hollywood will (thumb) their noses at us, but so what?'' McKenna said. ``At least it's a start. Maybe people will realize not all games are the way we preconceive them.''

The piece tells the story of Abe's crusade to save his fellow Mudokons from oppression and extinction at the hands of another grotesque species, the Glukkons, who use Mudokon bones and tears to create an addictive drink at the SoulStorm Brewery.

The short film is a first step in McKenna's long-term goal of creating products that aren't violent, can appeal to a broad audience and can be easily translated to movies, television and other venues.

``We want to eventually get into movies that we, as opposed to Hollywood, control,'' McKenna said. ``We want to create a database that can transfer to movies.''

Whether they are successful this first time around will be interesting to watch, said Jackson, because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just passed rules that made ineligible animation created for television series and pilots.

TV work had in the past been a fertile source of excellent animated shorts from such cable children's channels as Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network, Jackson said. Now that part of the increasingly busy field of animation is clear, though plenty of other competitors here and abroad are still jostling for attention, Jackson said.

``There would have been some nominees in there'' from television without the rules changes, Jackson said. ``Since those got nixed, it really opened up some opportunities. I think the people at Oddworld are very clever and saw an opportunity before anybody else did.''

The biggest new area of competition will come from the companies that make and use special-effects programs as they let their employees create shorts both for corporate demo reels and to provide them a creative outlet, Baisley said.

``Oddworld's'' major competition for the nomination includes work from Walt Disney Animation, Digital Domain and Blue Sky Effects as well as a stop-motion clay animation piece called ``More,'' Baisley said. That latter piece was created by Mark Osborne with backing from the Large Format Cinema Association, a trade group for the IMAX and similar massive-screen theaters.

Jackson, a big fan of the first Oddworld game, said she believes ``Oddworld'' can compete fairly well with those contenders.

``I think if anyone could do it, they proved themselves with that first game,'' Jackson said. ``I'm really curious to see if the academy will go for it though. Some folks in the TV arena might feel a little jilted. But it's definitely an emerging area that you can't ignore anymore.''

Bambi Fights Back

One of the most unlikely success stories of recent years in the computer game business has been the runaway sales of Deer Hunter and a series of knockoffs and successors, mostly sold in stores such as Wal-Mart rather than traditional gaming outlets.

In them, would-be game hunters stalk a variety of prey with a variety of weapons and locations. The games themselves are generally startlingly low-tech, deliberate to the point of glacial and widely mocked by the twitch-happy crews running most gaming companies.

The games also are ripe for parody, and that's finally come along with Simon & Shuster Interactive's Deer Avenger for the PC.

Avenger allows Bambo, the toughest buck in town, to take up an M-16, bazooka or deer-pellet-laden slingshot against hunters. It even comes with ``special hunter stalking devices,'' such as a variety of hunter calls like ``Help, I'm naked and have a pizza.''

As jokes go, it's pretty hilarious. As games go, it's not bad. And it's sure to be the only hunting game likely to be played on the office computers of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

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Photo

Photo: The Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus video game's animation is of high enough quality that it has been turned into a short film.