Abstract: Lo
oking at the chatter surrounding James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and Beowulf (Zemeckis, 2008) among other films, this paper examines how and why industry rhetoric framing hybrid screen characters has shifted from discussing the labour of animators and VFX technicians to emphasising the labour of actors, and the discursive reassertion of the index.Biographical statement: Lisa Bode is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research is primarily concerned with the shifting discursive and ontological relationships between animation and screen acting in CGI heavy cinema, and their impact on film meaning, affect and reception. She has published articles in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Cinema Journal (forthcoming).