For the past half-century, American directors have stuffed their films with citations of other films, television shows, and pop-culture artifacts. In his 1982 essay “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond),” Noël Carroll argued that allusion “has become a major expressive device” in American cinema, with many popular films employing a “two-tiered system of communication” in which a subset of the audience appreciates the work as much for its knowing references as for its more familiar “action/drama/fantasy” pleasures. While much American film and television continues to operate on these two levels, subsequent decades have seen a kind of democratizing of allusionism, such that a large portion of the contemporary audience has come to expect and appreciate a weave of cross-references in their popular media. The intricate interconnections of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” no less than Quentin Tarantino’s bricolage testify to this.

Over the years, Tim Burton’s films have helped to tutor the mass audience in the pleasures of allusionism. His earliest works, even those with “original” premises, rely almost entirely on allusions for their meanings and effects. His stop-motion short Vincent (1982) concerns a boy’s fascination with Vincent Price, particularly the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he made for American International Pictures in the 1960s. The live-action Luau (also 1982) pastiches several genres of 1960s drive-in movies. Burton’s first features are less pure instances of allusionism, but only slightly. His breakthrough, Beetlejuice (1988), is a horror-comedy dense with references to The Wizard of Oz, The Fly, and The Exorcist. Edward Scissorhands (1990) might have been pitched as Frankenstein Meets Beauty and the Beast. Mars Attacks! (1997) is a parody of Cold War alien-invasion films.

Adaptations and remakes arguably represent one end-point of this reliance on allusion, and Burton took this short leap early in his career. His critical cachet and attraction to cultural recyclables made him an ideal director for studios’ efforts to revive valuable intellectual property. In 1986, for a rebooted Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Burton re-filmed the 1964 teleplay adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Jar.” Warner Brothers’ Batman (1989) was a landmark in corporate synergy for its integrated marketing and merchandising and for its legacy of comic-book blockbusters. Fox’s Planet of the Apes (2001) was a failed effort to reboot a franchise. Even outside of a blockbuster context, Burton has been drawn to familiar stories with prominent cinematic or televisual intertexts, from Sleepy Hollow (2009; it owes as much to the 1949 Disney animation as to Washington Irving’s story) to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005).

Burton’s association with Disney goes back 35 years, to his origins as an animator for the company in the late 1970s. Vincent was, in fact, a Walt Disney Production. His work has exhibited a scholarly devotion to Disney history, as in Corpse Bride‘s quotation of the 1929 Silly Symphony “Skeleton Dance.” The first feature Burton made for the company was Ed Wood (1994), distributed by Disney’s “adult” imprint Touchstone. Although the stuff of Ed Wood’s no-budget films would seem worlds away from Disney’s ethos, Burton’s biopic lightly sanitizes its subject, effecting a willfully ahistorical transformation of what Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Wood’s “miserable, abject failure of a career” into a postmodern “celebration” whose affected innocence is paradoxically a function of the film’s (and tacitly the audience’s) knowingness. In other words, Burton Disney-fies Ed Wood. This operation is akin to the remaking of Uncle Walt himself in 2013’s relatively edgy—for Disney—Saving Mr. Banks, which engages its audience’s knowing skepticism about Disney only to revise and revive his myth, as Mike Budd argues in a recent essay for Jump Cut.

Alice in Wonderland was thus not just a joining of two brands but a reunion, one that Dumbo will extend. It was also an especially profitable instance of the ubiquitous corporate practice of recycling intellectual property. The Walt Disney Company helped to popularize this strategy in the mid-20th century and has relied upon it more than ever in the 21st; witness their recent acquisitions of the Muppets, Marvel Entertainment, and the Star Wars franchise. Within this broad program of recycled properties is a systematic campaign, often credited to Walt Disney Pictures’ Sean Bailey, to reinvigorate interest in their “legacy” films through a new series of high-profile features. In addition to remakes of Alice, Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), Pete’s Dragon (2016), and Dumbo Disney has produced a “re-imagining” of Sleeping Beauty (Maleficent, 2014) and a fictionalized “making-of” Mary Poppins (Saving Mr. Banks). There are a host of other, slightly more ambiguous cases in the works. These films not only generate or promise huge profits. They also turn the settings and characters of discrete stories into franchise fodder. In this context, allusions allow intellectual properties to exfoliate: Sleeping Beauty spins off Maleficent, which spins off a Disney Channel series, and so on. Films like Saving Mr. Banks and Maleficent also serve as feature-length advertisements for Disney’s film library, which had historically been subject to carefully-spaced-out theatrical revivals and then limited DVD and Blu-Ray editions. This new cycle of remakes and other franchise-extenders is, among other things, Disney’s response to a stagnating home-video market.

Disney has sought to validate its remake of Dumbo by reference to Tim Burton’s body of work. The WSJ report, no doubt inspired by a Disney press release, made sure to note that “[c]ircus motifs have been a favorite of Mr. Burton . . . going back to the Red Triangle Circus Gang in his Batman Returns.” This tenuous association appears quaint in light of the deeper connection that Burton has to Disney and the process that has governed his career for at least a quarter of a century: the aesthetic logic of allusionism converging with the corporate logic of franchising.

On the back of the unexpected success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the big news isn’t a planned sequel but rather a “a healthy seven-figure deal for Andy Serkis to reprise his role as lead ape Caesar” along with the announcement that 20th Century Fox will be mounting an Oscar campaign aimed at getting Serkis a long overdue nod for Best Supporting Actor. It’s significant, too, because we never see Andy Serkis directly in Rise; rather, Caesar was created by the meshing of Serkis’s visceral, physical acting and the state-of-the-art computer wizardry from Weta Digital. Whether you prefer the term virtual actor, synthespian (‘synthetic thespian’) or just performance capture, an Academy Award for Serkis would demonstrate a widening understanding of what ‘acting’ actually means.

While synthespians aren’t entirely new, they’ve always been treated with a certain level of suspicion. On one hand, actors and unions feared that studios might find a way to do away with physical actors altogether, preferring the more reliable, less demanding and infinitely more malleable certainty of digital datasets. However, as Dan North convincingly argues in Performing Illusions, rather than making actors superfluous, synthespians actually illustrate ‘an interdependence between the human and the machine, the digital and the analogue, the real and the simulated’. Anyone who has worked with performance capture knows that it takes more people to facilitate the work of a virtual actor, not less. Perhaps more difficult to overcome is the sense that since the on-screen presence is necessarily created by digital technology, then for virtual actors it’s very difficult to tell where the actor ends and the virtual begins. If software like Photoshop has challenged the truth value of photographs, then a synthespian might embody that distrust writ large.

In some respect addressing the uncertainly associated with virtual acting, in the Rise of the Planet of the Apes – Weta Featurette released to showcase the film’s special effects on its initial cinema release, Serkis describes performance capture as a means to create ape characters “infused with the heart and soul of an actor”.  Director Rupert Wyatt goes a step further, arguing: “You can be blinded by the technology, you can find yourself weighed down by it, and I think Andy brings a spirit and an understanding and a simplicity. He’s able to push the technology to one side and just think about it interms of just a real live action performance.” These promotional clips could almost be seen as the opening salvo in 20th Century Fox’s Oscar campaign.

While Fox may be driving the campaign to get Academy recognition for Serkis’s work in Rise, in some respects the road to the Oscars has been part of an 8 year long argument made by Peter Jackson and Weta Digital. Amongst the vast sea of extra features on the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Extended Edition DVDs was a full 30 minute documentary about the creation of Gollum and how Andy Serkis’s performance completely changed director Jackson’s thinking about the character. An initial plan to animate Gollum and just use a voice actor (as seen in the brief glimpses of Gollum in Fellowship of the Ring) was discarded when Jackson saw the intense physicality Serkis brought when auditioning for the voice role. Instead, Serkis spent a large proportion of the following years working in a leotard covered with dozens (and then hundreds) of reference points. While a point of some humour, this was also the beginning of the process that Weta Digital has since dubbed Performance Capture.  And every time Performance Capture is mentioned, Weta, Jackson and anyone involved with the technology always goes to great pains to emphasise it only works if the underlying performance – the acting – is outstanding, a point reinforced in the promotional material surrounding Serkis’s subsequent work as the titular ape in Jackson’s King Kong.

If make-up and costuming can win Academy Awards at one end of the spectrum, and general achievement in special effects can be recognized at the other, perhaps it’s time to recognize that the category of acting is changing as well.  Whether performance capture is considered digital costuming or special effects, after seeing Serkis’s impressive performance as Caesar, it’s hard not to recognize the performance as a performance.

While still fairly small, a grassroots effort to recognize Serkis’s work began long before the Fox campaign was announced. The Oscar for Andy Serkis as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes Facebook group has around 750 members, and an associated Twitter account OscarForAndy has 400 followers. While even getting a best supporting actor nomination will be a big admission by the Academy about the changing nature of acting in the 21st century, it does seem timely. The original Planet of the Apes (1968) resulted in a Special Achievement Academy Awards for Makeup for John Chambers (the category didn’t become a regular award until 1981), perhaps Rise will cause the Academy to hedge their bets and have a similar special achievement award created. I, for one, can imagine no better acceptance speech than Andy Serkis walking onto the stage, looking the squarely at the camera and whispering, ‘Oscar is home’.