A Prince in Prague

Even as it was announced that ComicCon 2007 was completely sold out, day three of the expo rolled on Saturday and the throngs of rabid pop culture fans at the San Diego Convention Center showed no signs of abating or slowing down in their relentless pursuit of geeky enlightenment.

As they have all week, the major motion picture studios continued to draw huge crowds with a parade of stars such as Robert Downey Jr., Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scott Speedman and Kyra Sedgwick. This being ComicCon, producers, directors, and effects wizards of fantasy fan favorites and cult classics were also greeted by cheering crowds of enthusiastic ComicCon attendees.

Hall H, site of virtually all of the upcoming feature film sneaks, was once again the place to be Saturday as Walt Disney Pictures took its turn before the capacity crowd of 6,500 in the cavernous auditorium.

First up from the Mouse, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Live, via satellite, from Prague in the Czech Republic, director Andrew Adamson joined a panel of production specialists from the film as they gave fans their first look at rough footage of scenes from the movie.

Ben Barnes, the actor who will portray Prince Caspian in the film, joined Adamson, who is still in the middle of shooting, for the Prague video link.

[ComicCon did not publish the names of or place name placards in front of Prince Caspian panelists and audience cheering made it nearly impossible to hear each speaker’s name as he or she was introduced.—Editor]

Live, via satellite, from Prague actor Ben Barnes and director Andrew Adamson join a panel of production specialists from Disney's upcoming feature The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

Adamson and the panel promised audiences that Prince Caspian would be darker and feature much more action than the first Narnia film, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

“Whereas the big battle was the climax of the previous film,” Adamson said, “we’ll have much more action, as you’ve just seen (in the clips).” He went on to say that action sequences like those he’d just shown would take place much earlier in Prince Caspian than the first Narnia film.

Prince Caspian’s story takes place in Narnia some 1,300 years after the four Pevensie children returned to their lives as displaced children during World War II, although only a year has passed for them. All the magical creatures have been banished to the forests by King Miraz, who has usurped the throne of Narnia from his nephew Prince Caspian. Caspian summons Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy to aid him in leading an army of the outcast Narnians to reclaim the throne.

The audience in Hall H for Disney’s presentation was full of avid Narnia fans. So much so that director Adamson unintentionally set off a rumbling murmur and chorus of boos through the crowd as they mistook his answer to a question about preserving the integrity and continuity of C. S. Lewis’ original stories.

Noting that the Harry Potter novels have to be drastically cut down to conform to the confines of a feature film Adamson offhandedly remarked that with the Narnia books he was free to expand upon and embellish their stories. Because of the time delay involved with the satellite relay Adamson could be seen at the end of his answer to the question smiling and beaming away above a clearly distraught bunch of Narnia fanatics.

As soon as the sound of the audience’s discontent reached his ears in Prague, Adamson quickly went on to say that Lewis’ stories are slim books for children that leave much to the imagination. “It’s those sequences,” Adamson said, “where he (Lewis) simply says things like ‘and then a great battle took place’ that as filmmakers we have to fill in.”

It being nearly two in the morning in Prague, Adamson and Barnes said goodnight and goodbye to the audience. The remaining Narnia panelists in Hall H displayed some of the noncomputer-graphic technology behind Prince Caspian’s amazing creatures and warriors. One of the highlights of which was the appearance of an actor in full Telmarine warrior battle gear.

A Telmarine in full battle gear from The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

Sounds Like Wally to Me

Next up was Pixar Animation Studios director Andrew Stanton with a behind the scenes look at Pixar’s next animated feature WALL•E.

Waste
Allocation
Load
Lifter •
Earth Class

From Buy n Large is a series of trash compacting robots, according to Stanton, left on a planet Earth of the future literally choked by the volume of trash created by its mass consumer based culture.

Promising not to reveal any spoilers Stanton went on to say WALL•E is the story of the last of these robots that for some unknown reason is still working after mankind left Earth some 700 years earlier.

“You see,” said Stanton. “The original plan was for humanity to board these massive spaceship luxury liners and cruise around the galaxy for just five years while the WALL•Es cleaned up the planet.”

Writer/director of the upcoming Disney/Pixar animated feature WALL•E
All images copyright© obe-mediaone.

Well, as it so often does in a good story, something goes horribly wrong and the ships never return and all but one are lost. Meanwhile, back on Earth, not only is WALL•E the only surviving compactor robot, but after more than 700 years of processing the refuse of human society he’s amassed consciousness, as well as mountains of compacted garbage.

Somehow WALL•E and the surviving space cruiser containing the last of humanity are brought together. On board he discovers that after centuries of having their every whim catered to by robots and spending their days in hover chairs mankind has, literally, evolved/devolved into a race of gelatinous couch, or chair potatoes.

He also finds love in the form of a robot named EVE.

Stanton went on to say that since his leading characters were robots he wanted them to act and sound like robots. For the latter he enlisted the aid of Ben Burtt, the sound effects wizard behind the voice of the hero droid of Star Wars, R2D2.

Burtt joined Stanton on stage and gave a demonstration of the various effects he’d compiled to give voice and “personality” to WALL•E, EVE, and several of their automaton co-stars. Following the demonstration, Stanton and Burtt ran clips of character development footage for each character accompanied by their corresponding sounds.

Stanton concluded his presentation with an extended clip of nearly completed animation showing WALL•E at the start of a typical day compacting trash and collecting, what to him are, treasures of long lost human civilization.

The animation, as you might expect of Pixar, was breathtakingly beautiful. Even in complete decay and ruin the background of a city brought to the edge of oblivion by the weight of its own debris was a wonder to behold.

WALL•E’s character development is complete. Even before we fully understand the scope of his story, this little Energizer bunny of the future appears as a fully formed character with a personality and heart and soul that reaches out and embraces his audience.

A Vision in Darkness

You may be asking yourself, this is ComicCon, where’s the grainy camera phone video and blurry pictures of what was shown during the presentations. Come on now, you could be thinking, don’t all these studio suits bite the bullet and go wink-wink, nudge-nudge, while they’re admonishing the masses of geeks not to pirate images of what they’re seeing and put them up on the web. And, you would be right to do so.

However…

This was a presentation by the Walt Disney Company and unlike every other major studio presentation we attended, not only did the ComicCon announcers strongly warn attendees against attempting any form of recording during the film clips, Disney took the extra step of deploying an army of security personnel outfitted with night vision goggles to scan the audience for would-be picture pirates.

Kinda funny when you stop to think that this is the film studio that’s made over a billion dollars off of, well, pirates.

There may be braver souls out there than we were. You’ll just have to scan the Net for yourselves. In the meantime, you’ll just have to take our word for it, Prince Caspian and WALL•E are astonishingly beautiful to behold.