But how did this movie come to exist? And why, two decades later, does it maintain a strange gravitational pull for nostalgic millennials and ironic meme-lords alike? Let’s blast off.
For all its narrative struggles, Baby Geniuses does possess one unexpected distinction in cinematic history. It was the first full-length feature film to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) for the synthesis of human visual speech. This means that when the babies appear to be talking, the filmmakers used a 2D warping technique to digitally animate the mouth movements (visemes) of the babies, who were originally filmed with their mouths closed. While this technical achievement was a novelty, the final effect was frequently described as “creepy” by critics and audiences alike, with the unnatural lip movements adding to the film’s unsettling atmosphere. Baby Geniuses and the Space Baby