One of the biggest losses in the Disney acquisition of FOX was the cancellation of the CGI adaptation of the Mouse Guard graphic novel series. Today, we are getting a look at how big a loss it really is. In a move that might be the same kind of hail Mary pulled by Ryan Reynolds when he was trying to get Deadpool made several years ago, director Wes Ball has released several images and a 9-minute demo reel of the pre-visualization animation for the film. We can only hope that the release of the footage causes enough support online that Disney reconsiders bringing the film back into green light status.
The following is a collection of tests that explore the visual potential of a Mouse Guard movie. Everything you see here is rendered in realtime using Epic’s UNREAL ENGINE.
Basically what you’re watching is very good looking previz, with environments capable of streaming live to stage during motion capture with our actors.
While the visual quality is impressive, it’s important to note this is only meant to illustrate how the movie will ‘feel’ not how it will ‘look’. Everything will ultimately be sent to WETA Digital to be recreated with cutting-age photorealistic CG.
This was made from scratch in about 12 weeks with a relatively small team. Credit goes to our team at Halon (led by Casey Pyke) and Fox VFX labs (led by Glenn Derry)
Thanks for watching y’all!
~wes
