What would you do if you were an 18-year-old American finishing high school and a film crew offered you a free holiday to the Mexican resort town Cancun for your spring break (the American equivalent of schoolies week at Rotto or the Gold Coast).

Blockbuster cinema has morphed into a soulless, clanging gallery of CGI, thin characters and endless marketing tie-ins that just make cynics of us all. When studios invest more in animation software than stories and writers, try to spread the cost by enlisting armies of licensing partners and product placement, no wonder the results are getting blander.

Motion Theory is one of the new breed of companies to capitalise on the creative outsourcing of the digital effects era, comparable to the league Sydney’s Animal Logic launched itself into with the release of George Miller’s Happy Feet .