Film superstar and heart-throb Antonio Banderas is moving from voicing an animated character (Shrek’s Puss in Boots) into animation production; Variety reports that Banderas’ production company Green Moon Producciones is forming a new animation house in partnership with Spanish animation studio Kandor Graphics. Spain’s brand-new animation house doesn’t have a name yet, but it does have ambitions to create five animated features over the next decade or so, with the first film, ‘The Missing Lynx’ (think about it) already in production.
(picture of Felix from The Missing Lynx, borrowed from the Kandor website)
The film, directed by Kandor’s Manuel Sicilia and Raul Garcia (a former Pixar and Disney animator), follows a bunch of animals escaping from an eccentric millionaire’s new Noah’s Ark. Banderas reportedly sees this move as combining both his love of animation and his support for encouraging new film-making in his native Andalusia. Kandor’s website already has a character guide, gallery and trailer up to browse; scenes in the trailer of the animals being herded into a prison camp evoked pleasant associations with Chicken Run for me.
(Antonio Banderas with one of his biggest fans; pic source: AFP)
In other movie news Variety notes that Barrie Osborne, producer on the stonking Lord of the Rings trilogy, is returning to New Zealand to produce a new fantasy movie. ‘Laundry Warrior’ – interesting title – is directed and written by Sngmoo Lee and stars Geoffrey Rush and Kate Bosworth. “We draw on two great milieux, the Samurai movie and the Western. We will deliver a stylized, partly anime feel, with the techniques of ‘300,’ but a look that is brighter,” commented Michael Peyser from production company Sad Flutes who are brokering the money to make the film. There isn’t a lot more detail other than the fact they will use a fair bit of green-screen in the production (hence the 300 reference, I imagine), but Geoffrey Rush is usually one of my quality seals on a movie – if he is in it, its going to be unusual and worth watching.
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