Disney is the only movie studio that’s a brand name in its own right – when was the last time you said “let’s go check out a Paramount movie” – and judging by what was shown at a recent Melbourne preview of their upcoming films, they plan to keep it that way. Sure, the future of Disney seems to be increasingly in 3-D, with plenty of new 3-D titles alongside old 2-D films being re-released with an extra dimension, but as far as the actual content goes Disney remains a brand firmly committed to providing a safe pair of family-friendly hands for cinema-goers.
But who cares about that: you want to know what Tim Burton’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland looks like. The short answer: amazing. It’s impossible to get any kind of idea regarding the actual story from roughly a minutes’ worth of footage (and the fact that it’s not a straight adaptation of either of Lewis Carrol’s Alice books does raise a few questions), but based on the visuals alone this is going to be a very big hit for Disney. Though seeing a bobblehead version of Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen could be the stuff of nightmares when this hits cinemas March 4th 2010.
June 24th, 2010 is the release date for Toy Story 3, the first in the series animated with 3-D in mind (the first two are being re-released in 3-D as a double feature early in 2010). The third installment of any franchise is rarely worth breaking out the party poppers for, but Toy Story 3 might be an exception if the very funny promo short ‘Groovin’ With Ken’ – yes, that’s Ken as in “Barbie and Ken” - is anything to go by. The film’s plot involves Andy heading off to college and leaving his childhood toys behind. Somehow 90 minutes of them sitting in a plastic bag waiting to be dropped off at the Salvos doesn’t seem likely.
Pixar also has Cars 2 on the slate for June 2011, with a series of Cars-related short films – dubbed, logically enough Car Toons – coming out before then. The first, Tokyo Mater (in which rusty tow truck Mater reveals his unlikely adventures as a drift racer in Tokyo), will be shown before the upcoming hamster spy film G-Force, and is pretty much worth the price of admission on its own.
From the non-Pixar side of Disney animation we can expect a feisty updating of the Rapunzel story in, er, Rapunzel (“she may be locked in a tower, but that doesn’t mean she has to be saved”), and the toe-tapping animated musical The Princess and the Frog. The latter relocates the traditional tale to early 20th century New Orleans, features a bunch of new Randy Newman songs (they showed the clip for the black magic themed “Friends on the Other Side”) and is drawn entirely by hand. That might be swimming against the tide of current animation trends, but the whole project looks like an attempt to tap into the run of similar hits Disney had late last century (remember The Lion King? Aladdin? Beauty and the Beast?), so it just might pay off.
At the other end of the technological spectrum is the latest motion capture outing from Robert Zemeckis (The Polar Express), A Christmas Carol. Due out this November, this re-telling of the Charles Dickens’ classic looks like it stands a pretty good chance of finally creating motion capture animation that won’t creep viewers out. Having Jim Carrey chewing the scenery as Scrooge (and in various supporting roles) won’t exactly hurt either.
Outside of the animated entries Disney’s slate seems solid, with the Bruce Willis SF thriller Surrogates and the romantic comedy When in Rome looking like highlights. And while how much you’re anticipating the pairing of Robin Williams and John Travolta in Old Dogs will depend largely on how funny you find watching people getting hit in the balls, there’s no denying that testicle-pummelling and face-pulling school of comedy has a lot of fans out there.
Further down the line there’s a long list of soon-to-be big releases, including Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (with Johnny Depp), The Lone Ranger (with Johnny Depp as Tonto), National Treasure 3 (with Nicolas Cage), The Sorcerers Apprentice (with Nicolas Cage), and Prince of Persia – The Sands of Time (which stars neither Depp or Cage, but does feature an extremely buff Jake Gyllenhall).
Probably the most anticipated upcoming title from Disney though is Tron: Legacy. Going by the snippet of test footage that was shown (basically, a lightcycle chase scene in which both an old and young version of original Tron star Jeff Bridges play a role), this is going to be yet another visually stunning effort from The House that Walt Built. In fact, if there was a message to be taken away from Disney’s presentation it’s this: if you’re looking for a sound financial investment in these troubled financial times, you could do a whole lot worse than to sink your money into a company that makes 3-D glasses. Because the demand for those things is going to go through the roof.