Virtual Pwnies

Virtual Pwnies
Delving into the overlooked world of horses in media and video games.

Monday, July 4, 2011

"Horse Trailers" Brave & War Horse

So 2 trailers of movies on my "to see" list came out recently.

The first is the latest Pixar movie Brave. WSTopdeck and I saw one of the Pixar guys named Eben Ostby at Vassar College this past February at NonCon (the non-convention convention). This is some of his early work in the Pixar short Beach Chair. He mentioned this project stating that Pixar was finally doing a "princess movie". However, this is Pixar and they really try to do things right in their animation and storyline. This is a Scottish tale of a princess who defies her family and tradition to carve her own path in life. Vague story description, but at least they don't give away the whole plot before you can see it like most family movies these days. The animators had to make a specialized custom physics program just for the main character's hair!



Did you see that Shire? The hair, the feather, the movement, the expressions. I'm a sucker for fantasy too and the lush environment with magical creatures is major eye candy.

The next is War Horse. Earlier this year WSTopdeck, Beautygirl151o and I saved our money and traveled to Lincoln Center in NY to see War Horse the play on stage. It was an amazing production with larger than life sized handspring-puppets, wonderful music, and a dramatic and heart wrenching storyline (because all horse stories need to be sad, it's pretty much mandatory). You know a story is good when it makes you laugh and cry during the performance. This play originally started in the New London Theater, but was temporarily presented across the pond for us Yankees to take a gander at. Let's just say after seeing the play in person that all three of us optimistically hope to one day make the trek to London to see it again.

The play was based off a book by Michael Morpurgo. The director Steven Spielberg got his hands on the rights to make a movie about the story. Let us hope it will be better than Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls. The trailer for the War Horse movie was recently released and I am hopeful that it will be good (glad the main equine character Joey wasn't recast as a Friesian!) The horses and people at least visually appear to fit their characters and the feel of the time period and environment is well established.



Can't wait for the releases of these two.

~~~
Brave Update: here
War Horse Update: here

1 comment:

alforddm said...

I don't watch movies much but I think Brave is going on my need to watch list.