Favreau Mo-Caps Neanderthals
Iron Man Director To Write, Produce Caveman Comedy for Sony Pictures
Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Elf) will write and produce Neanderthals for Sony Pictures Animation. Movie will be done in motion-capture.
Writer/director Jon Favreau will be turning to motion-capture for his next movie, the caveman comedy Neanderthals. Sony Pictures Animation, who used Favreau to voice the role of Reilly the beaver in their 2006 flick Open Season, will distribute the movie.
Neanderthals has been in development for nearly four years. The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news in October of 2005, but Favreau back-burnered the project in favour of live-action flicks like his current box office champ Iron Man. Now that Iron Man is completed and a possible actors' strike is looming this June, this seems like the perfect time for Favreau to get into Neanderthals.
“We’ve been discussing this (movie) for almost four years now and it’s finally coming to fruition. It’s written and ready to go,” he told MTV.com in January. “(I’m hoping) we could do the mo-cap before the potential actors strike. I would then theoretically work on the animated part of it over the next couple of years.”
More "comedic and stylized" motion-capture for Neanderthals
Despite using the same performance-capture method that Paramount used for Beowulf or Sony with Monster House, Favreau says he's going for a very different aesthetic.
“Mo-cap is a misleading term because the animation won’t resemble the animation of Polar Express or Monster House. That was very lifelike,” he said. “This will be comedic and stylized. The animation will appear more like a traditional animated film. The mo-cap will be used simply as a basis for animation and to allow the performers to all be in one space together. Hopefully, it will inherit some of their spontaneity.”
Essentially Favreau hopes to create a movie that combines the look of cel animation with the improvisational spontaneity of comedies like his 2003 movie Elf.
"My taste lies in all of the conventions that have come from animation, like squash and stretch and the way that you stylize the laws of physics," he told Variety in December. "What I'm hoping to get is a spontaneity in performance, comedy and timing -- all the areas that are very difficult to achieve in traditional animation."
Favreau hasn't cast Neanderthals yet, but he knows what kind of actors he wants in the flick.
“We haven’t cast it yet, but I like working with people who have a background in improvisation,” he said. “I don’t want to follow the paradigm of a (traditional) animated film.”
So far, Neanderthals is listed with a 2009 release date, but don't expect it before 2010 or 2011.
DreamWorks' caveman comedy Crood Awakening
Not surprisingly in the monkey-see-monkey-do atmosphere of Hollyweird, Neanderthals isn't the only caveman comedy going.
Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch) and Kirk DiMicco (Racing Stripes) are currently rewriting comedy legend John Cleese's script, called Crood Awakening, for DreamWorks Animation. That movie was originally going to be animated by Aardman (Wallace and Gromit), but the script stayed with DreamWorks after the two studios divorced in January of 2007.
The synopsis for Crood Awakening (lifted from IMDb) goes as follows: "Set in the prehistoric era, a man's position as Leader of the Hunt is threatened by the arrival of a prehistoric genius who comes up with revolutionary new inventions . . . like fire."
Crood Awakening is tentatively scheduled for a 2009 release.
