This past weekend, Andrew Stanton, the man behind many of the best animated movies of the last 15 years, said the upcoming John Carter of Mars movie will not be a Pixar movie, but will be firmly under the Disney banner. Stanton also dismissed rumors that the film would be entirely 3D in nature.
The look of the film will be “very real,” and not highly-stylized, due to what Stanton sees as the way the original story has been ripped off by many different movies over the years; it’ll also be a faithful retelling, with Carter remaining the Civil War soldier that he was in Burroughs’ original. Again, despite what many have been saying, the film will be both live action and not shot in 3-D (although he feels that Disney may end up disagreeing with him on that latter point), and he’s suitably daunted by the prospect of live action directing, commenting that, “It is huge, it is exciting, it scares the crap out of me. It’s either going to make me or break me.”
If Stanton is really going to be true to the original story, does that mean audiences will be subjected the wild wang of John Carter as he runs across the Martian landscape naked? Will Deja Thoris be nude the entire time? It’s Disney, I doubt it, which means this won’t be a faithful adaptation as Burroughs had the inhabitants of Mars running around naked the entire time. It would be interesting to see some Frank Frazetta stylings going on though.
Readers should also keep in mind that this film has been bounced around from studio to studio for almost a decade as everyone from Harry Knowles from Ain’t it Cool News and Robert Rodriguez have been attached as producers at one point. With the property now in the hands of Disney, this could go one of two ways; it’ll get done in the saccharine Disney way, or it will get shelved because it will be too expensive for the company to undertake in these economic times (and the fact they’ll have to cover up boobies).
