It's a CG affair

摘要

Back in October this year, to the delight of students, hippies and Gen Xers everywhere, it was announced that The Magic Roundabout was going to make a feature film comeback sometime in 2004. Of course, there are going to be a few changes. Out go Eric Thomson's narration and whimsical plotlines, in come celebrity voiceovers from the likes of Robbie Williams, Joanna Lumley and the mighty Tom Baker. Out presumably too goes Serge Danot's original French surreality to be replaced by something a bit more market-oriented, after all the core market of the film is likely to be children rather than simply stoned thirtysomethings at the late night showing. Also out go the original puppets, for The Magic Roundabout 2004 is destined to be a wholly CG affair. There's a been a bit of a rash of this sort of story lately, as production houses and film companies snap up the rights to old material with a proven track record and attempt to re-purpose it for the modern market (or indeed revisit their own hits, as Cosgrove Hall are doing with the splendid Dangermouse). 3D is the key to making it work too. Traditional cel animation is expensive to produce and needs vast serried ranks of workers to pull it off, one of the reasons why successful series like The Simpsons - which costs roughly $1 m per episode - ends up as a runaway production with a lot of work being done outside the US, in this case in South Korea. It also takes a long time, a single episode of Matt Groening's comic masterpiece taking anywhere between eight to nine months to produce.