Savage Popcorn

Red Princess Blues Animated: The Book of Violence is an animated short film prequel to Alex Ferrari’s upcoming feature film Red Princess Blues and provides some of the backstory of “Princess” - the main character in both films – as well as giving us an opportunity to see some of her world.

The story is told entirely from the perspective of “Princess” who, as a 12 year old little girl, finds herself in a strange country looking for her father. After being taken in by Nino, she discovers the “Book of Violence” and slowly begins her journey that one day will lead to vengeance.

It’s a cracking film and one that is well worth seeing. But don’t take my word for it because the film is available online. And here it is:

There’s also a trailer here and a review here.

… as this rather amusing machinima video from Spiffworld (via) all too accurately reveals.

George thinks so.

The “multiplatform” project is an expansion of the Clone Wars microseries which previously aired on Cartoon Network. It’ll kick off with the 100-minute movie, which picks up between episodes II and III when Anakin Skywalker is not yet Darth Vader, continuing in 30-minute TV episodes.

And this 100 minute pilot episode is going to be shown in American cinemas. Maybe the multiplexes are too big.

I mentioned the Peach project a couple of weeks ago and have been following their blog ever since. And the more I see, the more appealing it sounds.

And now, after much discussion, the people behind the film have announced that the final title of the Peach Open Movie is: Big Buck Bunny.

I do like alliteration, which is probably why I was rather fond of the working title of Rabbits Revenge.

Blender is a free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. The first open movie - made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license - was Elephants Dream which was released in 2006.

Not content to sit on their laurels, however, the Blender team are moving onward and upward with Peach, which promises to be funny and furry!

The DVD is available for pre-order now and - if you want to get a sense of the animation - check it out here.

I know I said I wouldn’t be blogging again until 2008, but this is too good to ignore. The first few seconds of Coraline - Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel - have turned up online. The footage is not quite finished but looks absolutely stunning already.

In Coraline the titular character finds herself in a parallel dimension where everybody has buttons for eyes, where Coraline has Another Mother and Another Father. And where Keith David is a cat, and you know what he’s going to demand of Coraline when she and her parallel world self meet. Button to button, indeed.

Coraline is due to be released in 2008 and the sneak preview can be found by clicking here.

(Synopsis lifted from CHUD)

Back in the late 1980s I picked up Michael Moorcock’s Warrior of Mars trilogy which was - and still is - a lot of good pulpy fun. In the introduction to the book, Moorcock talks about the influence Edgar Rice Burroughs had on him and the fact that his trilogy was an attempt to produce a series completely within the Burroughs tradition. This led the nerdy completest in me to spend far too much time in second hand bookshops seeking out tatty old copies of Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars stories (it’s just not the same these days when you can achieve the same results with a few clicks) and I have to say that the time was very well spent - Burroughs’ books are great, in a very classic 1930s sense of the word.

Consequently, I have followed the ups and downs (mainly downs) of the proposed John Carter of Mars film with some interest and much disappointment. However, the latest twist sounds very interesting indeed.

John Carter of Mars is going to be made as a trilogy of films by Pixar, with Andrew Stanton directing. Not only will this be Pixar’s first foray into live-action film making, it will also be the first time they have adapted someone else’s story rather than coming up with their own.

It all represents quite a big step for Pixar, but they do sound committed and I think that they have a good chance of pulling it off. It’s also nice to see a studio branching out for once rather than relying on rehashing past successes.

After parting company with Dreamworks and then signing a deal with Sony, Aardman Animation has unveiled a superb slate of upcoming projects.

Writers Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah of Life on Mars fame are to join director Steve Box on The Cat Burglars, a claymation film milk thieving stray cats. The film promises to combine the comedy action of Wallace and Gromit with the cool styling of Ocean’s Eleven.

Peter Lord also returns to the directors chair with a comedy adventure based on the Pirates series of books written by Gideon Defoe. Lord and Defoe will be joined by writers ndy Riley and Kevin Cecil, whose credits include Hyperdrive and Slacker Cats.

Also signed up is Peter Baynham who is developing Operation Rudolph, an action film set on Christmas night that will show the North Pole operation as an exhilarating ultra high-tech military procedure on a massive scale, revealing how Santa and his huge army of combat elves get round the whole world in one night.

And Nick Park is working on something, but no-one is saying what yet.

As Todd at Twitch remarks: Everyone at Dreamworks, Prepare to Kick Yourselves. Hard.

I mentioned back in March that Dreamworks were intending to produce at least one film about the adventures of the Herge’s intrepid Belgian reporter, Tintin. At the time, I remarked that a live action Tintin would be silly.

So I was rather pleased with the news that Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital have been hired to provide the 3D animation to bring the character to life.

And things get even better with Steven Spielberg’s comments to Variety on the subject:

“Herge’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul which goes far beyond anything we’ve seen to date with computer animated characters.

“We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honour the distinctive look of the characters and world that Herge created.”

Both Spielberg and Jackson become available at the end of this year once they have finished working on Indiana Jones 4 and Lovely Bones, respectively so it sounds like we can expect a real treat in 2009.