rise of the guardians : first look.

from dreamworks animation, via hitfix.

on his Motion/Captured blog over on HITFIX, drew mcweeny does a very nice write-up of our fall 2012 release, rise of the guardians, which he got to preview earlier this week. it includes our very first poster for the film as well (above), which is pretty sweet in my opinion. reading through it, i had no idea how much of a media franchise this was for william joyce, with an accompanying thirteen illustrated childrens chapter-books called the guardians of childhood (two of which are released, the man in the moon and nicholas st. north and the battle of the nightmare king).

from mcweeny:

I like that the film feels very different from the sort of bright comic adventures that most animated films aspire to these days.  Each of the Guardians lives in very different worlds, with very different palettes, and as we were shown a few sequences and some design work and a rough trailer, we got to see the way the characters have evolved visually over time.  The Tooth Fairy, for example, originally had a much stronger Hindu influence, classically Indian in design, but her finished design makes her look more like a hummingbird or a tiny parakeet.  Jackman's getting a chance to turn up the Australian as the Easter Bunny.  He's heavily armed and he's got a swagger to him, designed as a long, lean, muscular character.

My favorite design has to be The Sandman, though.  I love that he doesn't speak, and he rides around on a cloud of golden sand, perpetually chasing the sunset, showering the cities below him with the very stuff of dreams.  He's played for comic relief in some ways, but he's also very wise.  It's going to be interesting to see how these very different characters play off of one another, and how they face down the challenge of Pitch, the force of evil in the film.

Pitch is being designed as a very real threat, and this is where you can see a bit of the Guillermo Del Toro in there.  Joyce and his director Ramsey talked to us about how important it is to them to make the scary parts genuinely scary, and the movies they mentioned as touchstones, like "Sleeping Beauty" or "Fantasia" were movies that made huge impressions on young viewers because of the way the images seemed to be very primal and dark and terrifying on a basic level.  Everyone we spoke with talked about how important it was to them to make the film feel like a big adventure, with peril and stakes and real scale.

it's not one that i'm working on, but i know quite a few people who are.