They wanted to adapt Joyce's Christmas story, ''Santa Calls." It didn't happen. In the mid-1990s, Fox Animation president Chris Meledandri introduced the distinctive, whimsical Joyce, who has created classic comic-fantasy characters and landscapes, to the humorous, casual visionary Wedge.
#CHRIS MELEDANDRI CHRIS WEDGE MOVIE#
The whole movie is a Rube Goldberg device, but it arose from the same ''simple, nerdy" motivation Wedge had as a kid: ''To see what this different world would look like." They include references to movies that only parents will have seen, such as ''Do the Right Thing," and to acts so old they actually appeared on ''The Ed Sullivan Show."Īlong with production designer William Joyce (the beloved author-illustrator of children's books such as ''Dinosaur Bob") and legions of artisans and actors, Wedge has created an imaginative environment as detailed as Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and lots more lighthearted. cartoons and makes pop-culture allusions that are more purely bizarre and thus more engaging than the pandering to brand names in ''Shrek 2." It overflows with verbal and visual puns, musical flights, burlesque pratfalls steals from Harpo Marx and wild Warner Bros. ''Robots," as Ed Sullivan might have said, is a really, really big show. Seuss's ''Horton Hears a Who" as a computer-animated movie. The company, with 20th Century Fox Animation, has just landed the rights to adapt Dr. Three of them, including Wedge, still work there. Wedge and five of his colleagues on that movie, from the pioneering MAGI/SynthaVision company, formed Blue Sky in 1987, after MAGI became defunct.
'' 'Tron' was panned at the time," Wedge says, ''but these days some people will bow down before you when you say you worked on it." He earned a master of arts in CG programming at Ohio State and got in on the ground floor of digital effects with Disney's breakthrough picture ''Tron" in 1982. He figured, correctly, that computer graphics would be the answer. ''When you looked at them through an eyepiece, you would see a different world, and if you lit it right, you could make it seem small or really big."īut Wedge wanted to combine the 3-D quality he loved in puppets with the expressive movement of hand-drawn animation. ''I always liked making little puppets and little sets and lighting them," says Wedge, recalling his film student days at the State University of New York at Purchase, where he specialized in puppet animation.
Like Emeryville, Calif.-based Pixar, it's a cutting-edge computer-animation company on a mission to move and dazzle audiences with original comic creations.
The director of 2002's cartoon smash ''Ice Age" and of the giddy new animated thrill ride ''Robots" (which opened Friday) also heads the creative side of Blue Sky Studios, not far from his home. (He and his wife also have a 20-year-old daughter, off at college.)īut Wedge has an alternate identity as one of the most successful filmmakers on the planet. He's trying to conduct a phone interview while his 8-year-old son fiddles with the fax machine. On a recent weekday morning, Wedge, 47, sounds like any other sleepy, harried family man in White Plains, N.Y., getting a slow start on the workday because of an overnight snowfall. Think of Chris Wedge as a suburban superhero from his rival Pixar's ''The Incredibles."
0 kommentar(er)
