A theatrically-released Family Guy movie is apparently just a matter of time, and we’re guessing it will be animated. Just a hunch.
Buuuuuut…. if it wasn’t animated, it might look something like this. Here’s our casting choices: Mad Men’s curvy Christina Hendricks as Lois and the recently sober Artie Lange as Peter Griffin.
Here’s a new music video for a track in the upcoming Moomins and the Comet Chase feature. The film was produced by the Finnish company Filmkompaniet.
The trailer for the film has been out for a while, but here’s another look:
You had me at “Terry Gilliam and puppetry.” Gilliam, one of the founders of Monty Python (and a damn-fine animator too), is Exec Producing this project, which is still hunting for funding. The director is Tim Ollive, who was an animator on The Meaning of Life, and he has set puppets (with CG mouths?) against a composited world of steampunkery in the 1800s. 1884: Yesterday’s Future is a bit rough around the edges, I would say – the voice acting is a bit wobbly, the puppetry a bit jerky, and the storytelling could use a kick in the pants – but they surely have my attention. Hell, it’s test footage, so we’ll cut them some slack. The project was developed by Peculiar Pictures and Steam Driven Films.
I’m still cautious about falling for Tangled (in theaters November 24, 2010), what with the director change, the name change and the general goofiness of the whole thing. Not that I don’t like goofy, but it all feels a bit like an after school special to me. However, the Walt Disney Animation team sure know how to dress up a feature. It looks familiar, while quite stunning all at the same time. Painterly, but full of the depth that you can only get with CG.
In this featurette below, titled A Tangled World: Creating the Look, we hear from directors Bryon Howard and Nathan Greno, production designer Doug Rogers, art director Dave Goetz and visual development artist Victoria Ying.
Some of your missed Comic-con this year (like me), while others went, but couldn’t get into the panels they wanted to. I’m guessing the queue for DreamWorks Animation’s upcoming feature Megamind was a 3-hour wait, but thanks to your ol’ friend the Internet, you can see the extended Megamind trailer they showed inside those soft, movable walls.
Check out this trailer for the upcoming stop-motion feature Jackboots on Whitehall, a revisionist history film about WWII which stars Ewan McGregor. The process uses animatronic puppets to bring the characters to life, and the director hopes the audience will be captured by characters with almost no facial acting. This was done with success in A Town Called Panic, mainly because the characters were animated with almost spastic enthusiasm and we never got too close to their faces. Here, the whole production looks more wooden, and the script and voice acting had better be amazing, or I doubt it can hold an audience. Edward McHenry directed Jackboots on Whitehall, which arrives in theaters later this year.
Victor Ens was one of the talented artists working The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet’s upcoming 2D feature. Here’s a shot that he animated, first as a pencil test:
… and the final (no sound):
