MickeyMouse Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The first trailer for Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice is here, and if you were hoping for a faithful adaptation of the Mickey Mouse segment from Fantasia, you're somewhat in luck! As I watched the video over at Apple.com (also see it after the jump) I waited and waited and waited for some recognizable shot that would connect it to its source. And then, there it was: a scene in which Jay Baruchel, in the Mickey role, is dealing with a flooded laboratory and a (hopefully possessed) mop. It may be a short sequence just to appease us sticklers, but I'm thankful for it, nonetheless.

Otherwise, the trailer is a repetitive and confusing mess, and it doesn't help me understand what this thing is about in the least. All I know is The Sorcerer's Apprentice will feature a whole bunch of CG and way too many shots of the Chrysler Building, which is where I'm assuming Nic Cage resides and plays Dumbledore to Baruchel's reluctant Harry Potter. Unfortunately, it reminds me a lot of the terrible Bulletproof Monk. Also, Cage looks like a freakin' nutcase, but we already knew that, and anyway it's not like we can expect much else from the guy these days.

If there was a shot of Alfred Molina in there, I must have missed it (there is; I went back and checked), which is a shame since he's apparently the film's villain, and you'd think Disney would want to let kids know the baddie from Spider-Man 2 is back to doing evil. It also might be good for those of us who love the actor's recent performance in An Education. Between Molina and Baruchel, who I honestly thought was the best part of Tropic Thunder (okay, maybe second best part), I'm still likely to give this a shot. Are you?

The Sorcerer's Apprentice opens July 16, 2010.

Apparently the gaming community is all gung ho this week after details emerged regarding the upcoming video game Epic Mickey, which originally was designed as a Wii exclusive, but may branch out to other systems. The reason folks are all excited over a Disney game involving Mickey Mouse is because it carries what I think is one of the coolest concepts to ever come out of the Mouse House.

Essentially, the game's plot revolves around a whole bunch of "forgotten" Disney characters who, for one reason or another, were pushed aside when the more popular characters like Mickey, Goofy and Donald took over the Disney landscape. Now, rallied together by Disney's first ever cartoon hero, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (also the game's main villain), all of these pissed off, jaded Disney characters set out to destroy the Disney universe by unleashing the Phantom Blot, which uses black ink and melting colors to distort the world we've all come to know and love. Obviously it's then up to Mickey Mouse to be the hero and fix this giant mess before the wonderful world of Disney is erased forever.

Pretty cool, right? Even cooler is the news that Warren Spector and Junction Point Studios have been "working hard on our own and (get ready for the cool factor to go way up) in collaboration with folks from Disney Feature Animation and Pixar," according to an interview from awhile back. So, yeah, while we'll probably see some cool animated cut scenes designed (in part) by Pixar and Disney Animation, I wonder whether the game's popularity could then spawn a feature film. Why not? Or perhaps they're already working on one as we speak ...

Check out some stills from the game below and tell me this wouldn't make for a very cool animated movie.

Disney is awfully good at depreciating the value of its animated classics. Sometimes it makes useless sequels to films, as in Bambi II and The Lion King 1½. Other times it produces live-action remakes, such as 101 Dalmatians. Now, it is going a little too far. Not only will there be a live-action version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but it may well star Nicolas Cage, who is so far only confirmed as a producer.

Of course, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is much older than the segment of Disney's Fantasia. The story goes back 210 years to a poem by Goethe called Der Zauberlehrling. But most people these days are more familiar with the Mickey Mouse version set to Paul Dukas' symphonic poem L'apprenti-sorcier (itself an adaptation of the Goethe). The animated sequence is so popular that it was even reused for the sorta-sequel Fantasia 2000. Obviously most viewers of this new film are going to be thinking about Mickey while watching Cage. That can't be good.

To make matters even worse, it is difficult to imagine the story -- a lazy sorcerer's apprentice misuses his magic by giving life to a broomstick -- being enough to fill a feature-length film. Apparently Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal have completed a script, but none of its details have yet been revealed. Anyway, it must be possible because a straight-to-video version of Goethe's tale was made in 2002 with Kelly LeBrock (interestingly enough, Weird Science has some of the same themes).

I don't often sit around thinking about the artistic and financial fate of major media conglomerates (no more than two, three times a day, anyhow), but between The Wild's release last Friday and last weekend's scathing TV Funhouse mockery of all things mouse on SNL, I've been thinking about Disney Animation, their merger with Pixar, and where they're going.

First off, I don't know if The Wild is the last film to come out of Disney Animation before Pixar takes over, but regardless, it's a great demonstration of why that deal seems so necessary. The Wild was, perhaps, the most tired animated film I've seen in a long time; boring, bland, re-hashed and recycled, with a tag-team script that had been bounced between writing pairs for so long that you could see the bruises. Wow, break-dancing lions! Ooh, inter-species romance! Carmen Miranda jokes that no one under the age of 60 is going to get! What's worse than the script is the look of the film -- clumsy, inelegant, bumbling; we're getting to the point where computer-animated films essentially look as cheaply-made and dull as cut-scenes from videogames, and not like works of art.

So, something had to happen to change Disney Animation-- I guess the question is if the Pixar deal is going to be enough to do it. I keep thinking of Hong Kong's transfer to China -- when a solid, inertia-bound object takes on a small, new motor, which gets affected more? Making a change at a movie studio normally is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier by dangling your hand in the water behind it as a rudder; I can't even imagine what it's like at Disney, where the normal long-term development pipeline of a studio is lengthened by the work required to craft animation … and stretched even longer by the years of tradition in the company's past.