Toon Zone Talkback - Tim Burton and Disney to Produce Two New Films

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Tim Burton to Direct Alice and Frankenweenie
Source: Variety
November 16, 2007


Tim Burton is pairing up with Disney to direct two 3-D films, Alice in Wonderland and Frankenweenie.

Variety says the two-movie deal with Walt Disney Studios begins with Alice in Wonderland, which will combine performance-capture imagery, currently seen in Beowulf, with live-action footage.

The script by Linda Woolverton (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast) is based on the Lewis Carroll classic.

Burton, who is wrapping Sweeney Todd at Paramount and DreamWorks, will tackle Alice in Wonderland early next year, with production set to wrap by May.

After "Alice," Burton will helm and produce Frankenweenie, based on his 1984 short film about a pet dog brought back to life by his loyal owner. The movie will be shot in stop-motion animation and shown in digital 3-D.
 
I really do enjoy those great Tim Burton stop motion films. James and the Giant Peach, Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride... they are just beautiful to look at. I have always loved stop motion. It's extremely hard to do, and it's something I don't want a part of, but it's just my favorite medium of animation.

I always wanted him to go back and remake Beetlejuice as a stop motion film. Even if he just reused the soundtrack or something and did stop puppets for it.
 
AGGH! Why the hell does Disney wanna do a remake of one of their classic films?? Why fix it when it's not broken? And with MOCAP? Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Hopefully Burton will have some control over the look of the film and the mocap characters won't look so dang creepy.

I am looking forward to Frankenweenie though. I'm glad Burton still has a respect for stop motion. That's guaranteed to look amazing.
 
Who says it's a remake? It is based off of a novel, after all. If they happen to make several movies based on the same source, they aren't always going to be remakes.
 
They did say Wonderland would be live action with some motion capture, so Alice herself could be an actual actor while the rest of the weird creatures are basically actors that do the mo-cap thing and are CGI.
 
So . . . they really are going back to basics then, eh? I mean, the Alice shorts were among the first ones made post-Oswald if memory serves me correctly, and they were pretty much a live-action actress playing Alice in an environment full of animated characters.

And strangely enough, I'm kind of curious about this project now.

Oh, and James and the Giant Peach wasn't Burton. The Black Cauldron is more Burton than James and the Giant Peach was.
 
Burton had some involvement in the project. At the very least, he was a Producer or Executive producer. More of a spinoff type project than one he did himself. But quite a few people who worked on NBX worked on JGP.
 
I don't know about Frankenweenie, but as for Alice, people have already seen "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". What do I mean by this?

"Charlie...", while being closer to the book than the Gene Wilder version, was really just his (Burton's) personal vision of Roald Dahl's story; he gave Wonka a dentist father in order to explain why Wonka acts the way he does leading him to...

...tell Charlie of his intentions to give him the factory, but only if he abandons his family (because parents only tell you what to do). This is NOT what happened in book, plus, Willy Wonka did NOT have a dentist father. He doesn't need one. There is no explaination for his personality. He simply is who he is. That's all that needs to be said. There are some things in life that can't be explained, but I digress.

You see, it's not enough to stay true to the original writing. While the Gene Wilder version was only a loose adaptation, it nonetheless stayed true to the spirit of the original book: a whimsical fantasy adventure themed around chocolate, candy and other confectionery (sp?) (after all, the Chocolate Room was practically a "Candyland" of sorts). BTW, I know all this because I have actually read the original book.

All that said, it's likely that Burton's Alice movie will be no different; that is, even if it stays true to Carroll's original writing (which I have also read), it will likely just be his own personal vision of the story, plus considering Disney will release this, it may also be a semi-parody of/tribute to Disney's previous animated version (101 Dalmatians anybody?...).

In any event, while Disney seems to be attempting some form of "damage control" (for lack of a better term), they need to try harder. However, I digress, and I want to keep this on topic.
 
This is very interesting. I have a lot of respect for Tim Burton, so I'm glad to see him working on some new projects.

A Burton helmed Alice in Wonderland could be quite interesting. I'd love to see what type of twist he would put on it.
 
UGH. I'm sorry, but I'm none too happy about this. After Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I'm not looking forward to his endeavor on Alice in Wonderland.



Did anyone else beside me find the notion of a young boy being asked to abandon his family and coming to live alone with this version of Wonka creepy as hell?
 
Burton's working with Disney again? I thought he swore off ever working with them again, but maybe they made him an offer he couldn't refuse this time.

Not looking forward to the Alice remake with Mo-cap (ugh) but maybe they'll be able to pull it off... I've already seen Franken-weenie but I love the stop-motion idea.
 
Irrelevent. That doesn't change the fact that it wasn't in the original book. It was still his personal vision of the book.

I suppose now he's going to try to somehow rationalize Wonderland and all its characters; that is, make them more "realistic" (which they aren't, but only because they're not supposed to be; if anything they're surrealistic, which is NOT necessarily a bad thing)
 
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