Johnny Depp is "Rango" - ILM's first animated movie

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Depp and Verbinski Reteam on Rango
Source: Variety
September 10, 2008


Johnny Depp will reunite with "Pirates of the Caribbean" trilogy director Gore Verbinski on Rango, an animated film that Paramount will finance and distribute.

Variety says the studio has slotted the film for a March 2011 release.

Depp will voice the lead character, a household pet that goes on an adventure to discover its true self.

John Logan (The Aviator) has written the script from an idea hatched by Verbinski. Verbinski will work with Industrial Light & Magic on the animation.

The trade adds that the CG Rango will be Paramount's most ambitious star-driven entry into animation.

Depp is set to start working on the film in January. Verbinski will direct the project as he continues to develop an adaptation of the Take-Two video game BioShock for Universal.
 
Okay I liked the Pirates movies and all but this idea doesn't speak to me as good. This sounds like it's taking style over substance and will be yet another of those films that bring forth the "Moviepocolypse" so to speak.
 
So wait... the main character of the film is a household pet... and they are motion-capturing a human's face for it?

I sense Nightmare Fuel of epic proportions.
 
Those newcomers to the animated feature biz should realise these formulas can work only for Pixar and Dreamworks, and that's only because everything works for Pixar and Dreamworks. And just merely work - the best Pixar and Dreamworks movies - crtical and box office-wise - weren't so obviously formulatic. it's funny how, when they copy Pixar, they just copy the worst part of Pixar. Does that makes any sense?
 
Probably. You just know if they've got Johnny Depp they're going to want to make sure you know it's Johnny Depp. So we'll either get the "human face on animal body" nonsense from Shark Tale, or motion capture.

Frickin' pathetic.
 
Therein lies one of the biggest problems I have with animated features nowadays: too many rely far too much on celebrity pull to carry them, to the point where reminding the audience of the A-list stars providing the voices becomes more important to the filmmakers than the characters these actors are portraying. Ideally, you should be so immersed into the story and caring so deeply about the characters that you shouldn't be giving a crud about who's voicing them until the end credits are rolling.

Whenever a animated movie trailer starts out blaring, "Featuring the voices of..." and then when the characters first appear on screen, they're dead ringers for the actors voicing them, I cringe in my chair.
 
Since the original article mentions the mocap tech that Verbinski used to create Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, it's an almost sure thing that this is another CGI mocap movie, except this time they're doing an entire movie instead of just one character. The good news is that Davy Jones is the only CGI mocap character that I thought worked as animation (except for the 2 Appleseed movies). The bad news is that I think at least part of the reason why is that the mocap really wasn't that heavy -- I'm pretty sure that the limit of what was done was to replace Bill Nighy's head with one that was much more tentacled.

I'm not as rabidly against the technique as many in the animation industry or animation fandom (mostly because I really liked what they did in the Appleseed movies), but so far, every single time someone's attempted to use it, it's wanna-be animators who think that it's a cheap way to turn a live-action movie into an animated one. It betrays the fact that they think animation is a purely technical accident, not a medium with art and technique of its own.

Either way, I'm still curious about the results, but I was curious about how Beowulf was going to turn out, too. This might be the one that shows how to do mocap CGI right, but I'm not exactly holding my breath.

-- Ed
 
Though to get technical, Paramount and Dreamworks Animation are both owned by Viacom, so they could very well just have the same people on all the movies. I never realized how much of this crap Viacom owns....Dreamworks, Paramount, BET, MTV, VH-1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, CBS, etc.
 
Viacom does not own Dreamworks Animation, though. They only have the rights to distribute their films.

Besides the animation is being produced by Industrial Light and Magic, a Lucasfilm Company, which is their first movie.
 
My interest is slightly piqued, for obvious reasons. Still sounds a bit trite but its still early so I should probably hold off on the judgements.


I feel like it's going to be a cross between Shark Tale and The Love Guru in visuals. In other words, simply horrifying. Couldn't they have just stuck to generic CGI like everyone else? D:
 
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