Andrew Stanton conquers Mars

Though he wrote Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters¬†Inc., Finding Nemo and WALL‚Ä¢E, Pixar’s Andrew Stanton may not have quite the household name recognition Brad Bird has achieved. On the verge of raising Stanton’s banner tonight, I was in the middle of putting this post together when Buddy beat me to it in a comment to the WALL-E post below. (Polanski doc had me otherwise engaged).

Google claims “Brad Bird” has appeared on the pages of AD 68 times. (That seems wrong by roughly a factor of 10.) Our internal search engine says Andrew Stanton has been mentioned 4 times this year. elessar wins “first” honors by name-dropping Stanton as early as February 28th. (in the same comment elessar says, “I truly think Speed Racer will crash badly. The trailer nearly made me go color-blind, and it reminds me of a Joel Schumacher film without the homoeroticism.” We would be unwise not to heed the word of elessar and Tufas when it comes to AD’s strategic early warning defense system. They have a knack for sensing incoming bombs months before they’re launched.)

Not to be outdone, I’d like to go on record predicting multiple nominations for Andrew Stanton in 2012 — but maybe not for animation… Details after the cut. (somewhat NSFW)

Several sources since Friday confirm that WALL-E director Andrew Stanton is writing the screenplay adaptation of the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs serial, John Carter of Mars.

“…a wonderful scientific romance that perhaps can be best described as early science fiction melded with an epic dose of romantic adventure. A Princess of Mars is the first adventure of John Carter, a Civil War veteran who unexpectedly find himself transplanted to the planet Mars. Yet this red planet is far more than a dusty, barren place; it’s a fantasy world populated with giant green barbarians, beautiful maidens in distress, and weird flora and monstrous fauna the likes of which could only exist in the author’s boundless imagination.”

There’s speculation this may be the first of a trilogy (there were 11 novels in Rice’s Mars series, the first published in 1912). Also some chatter that the film might be not be animated, based on Stanton’s recent remark that he’s “caught the live-action bug.” Whether it’s animation, motion capture, live-action, should be fun to see how Stanton handles aspects of the plot like this:

Except for some jewelry, all of the planet’s races seem to eschew clothing and look down upon Earth’s inhabitants because they do wear clothing. Burroughs describes Dejah Thoris thus:

And the sight which met my eyes was that of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life…. Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.

She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.

I too look down upon Earth’s inhabitants because they wear clothing, so here’s hoping by 2012 there’s some sort of 3-D immersive CGI interactive film projection process.

Brad Bird
2 Oscars (4 nominations) • 7 Annie awards (7 nominations)
Andrew Stanton
1 Oscar (3 nominations) • 4 Annie Awards (7 nominations)
John Lasseter
1 Oscar (6 nominations) • 3 Annie Awards (6 nominations)