Robert Zemeckis has had a fairly diverse pick of material for his 3-D motion capture films so far — from children’s picture book “The Polar Express,” to early Anglo-Saxon literature in “Beowulf” (a film which would be regarded as a classic if it didn’t look like a Playstation 2 cut scene for most of its running time), to a well-trodden holiday classic for “A Christmas Carol.”
But easily the most left-field choice of his career is the one that was announced tonight — that the “Back To The Future” director, and his ImageMovers company, will remake “Yellow Submarine,” in Zemeckis’ favored 3-D motion capture format for Disney Animation, as Mike Fleming reports over at Variety.
From the hints in the trade’s piece, it sounds like the remake will be sticking pretty closely to the original — all the songs he mentions as being mooted for inclusion (the likes of “All Together Now,” “All You Need Is Love,” “When I’m 64,” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”) were in the original animated version, and he states that Disney “has been quietly brokering a complicated rights deal that would give Zemeckis access to 16 original Beatles songs.”
This actually marks a neat circularity to Zemeckis’ career — his first major film was the Beatlemania homage “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and god knows no one is more familiar with this technology than him at this point (which, dude might want to give it a rest with the mo-cap; even though we all know that will never happen). There is a whiff of opportunism in the air — Variety crows about “the release of a flurry of remastered records and the videogame ‘The Beatles: Rock Band,’ ” and the films release is set to coincide with the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. But one feels that Zemeckis wouldn’t make this his next project without a genuine love for the band, as well as the source material, and the technology appears to be overcoming The Uncanny Valley for the first time.
The petition for Crispin Glover to play a Blue Meanie starts here…
