On Technology and Comedy with Ted

Gollum, King Kong, the Avatar aliens and now Ted. All created using the same state of the art motion capture technology. Only one of them allows prostitutes to defecate on the apartment floor. Using this technology for an X rated comedy is a nice touch as it allows writer, director Seth MacFarlane to bring Ted to life and make him a character in the way Gollum was. So far the technology has only been used to generate dramatic or alien characters, with comedy maybe seeming undeserving or unlikely to need the technology. But, even when the character is almost 100% comedy, as Ted is, rendering them with more realistic human emotions and movement that motion capture brings, makes the film, in this case, much funnier. And Ted is funny, pretty much in the same way Family Guy is; it hits and misses, but mostly hits. The comedy is generated through MacFarlane’s writing mostly, but the combination of Wahlberg, who is more and more versatile, MacFarlane’s voice and the cleverly animated Ted, makes this essentially a live action version of Family Guy.