Pocahontas Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Almost one year ago, I fell head over heels for Annie Leibovitz's photographic recreations of famous, animated Disney scenes. She shot Scarlett Johansson as the running Cinderella, Beyonce Knowles as Alice in Wonderland, spinning around in teacups that came from Disney World, and David Beckham as the Prince who fights off Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. Now the next set of images have hit the net. They are housed over at The Disney Blog, and I'm still swooning.

I think that what I like most about these images is that they're awesome even if I don't particularly care for the people in them. Leibovitz knows how to capture the essence of each scene, and it makes me wonder just how stunning a carefully-plotted, full-length feature would look. (D*mn good, but long to do, and expensive to boot!) This time around, we've got the above, which features Mikhail Baryshnikov as Peter Pan with Gisele Bundchen as Wendy Darling and a teeny Tina Fey as Tinker Bell. But there's also images with Jessica Biel as Pocahontas, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony taking a magic carpet ride in Aladdin, and one more from that film, which looks split from the first, that has Whoopi Goldberg as the Genie.

As an added bonus, TDB also has a bunch of behind-the-scenes pics, which help you see how these great images came to be.

The story of Noah and the flood will be told a million more times in some medium or other. But following the disappointment of Evan Almighty, it seems a little soon for a new movie version. Sure, Evan wasn't exactly a strict adaptation of the Bible tale, but it was based enough on it to make audiences not so hungry for another Ark adventure. Yet, according to Variety, Unified Pictures (Don't Move) has announced plans to do a computer-animated Noah's Ark, which will be scripted by Philip LaZebnik, who has worked on Dreamworks' Biblical kids film The Prince of Egypt and Disney's Pocahontas and Mulan. Religious films, whether live-action or animated, can be hit or miss, but like Evan Almighty, this new project is not a straightforward telling of Noah and the flood; instead it will focus on the story from the point of view of the animals.

Personally, I love the idea. But I'd love it much better if it was coming from Nick Park and Aardman Animation. It would be like Creature Comforts ... on a boat. The connection between Unified and Park exists: the indie studio has worked many times with Northern Arts Entertainment, which distributed a lot of Aardman shorts, including Park's Wallace and Gromit films. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that dream will happen. Unified seems pretty set on making a CG pic that resembles those made by the big studios. The best way of doing that, of course, is to get some familiar comedic voices involved. If this pic is more successful than Evan Almighty, perhaps we'll then get to see a greenlight on Darren Aronofsky's own Noah's Ark movie, which he's been interested in doing since he was 13.