What’s New?: A Brief Look at Two Upcoming Animated Features

Two highly anticipated animated films are to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. Ratchet and Clank, Rainmaker Entertainment and Blockade Entertainment’s movie based on the video-game of the same name, has video-game and nostalgia fanatics eagerly licking their lips, while Kung Fu Panda co-director Mark Osborne’s adaptation of Le Petit Prince, based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella, sees what promises to be a charming and unique juxtaposition of modern and traditional animation.

Ratchet and Clank will follow the eponymous pair in an elaborate retelling of their initial meeting and collaboration. Ratchet, a ‘Lombax’ (a feline-style alien creature), unites with Clank, a robot fugitive, in order to hunt down and defeat Chairman Drek, a villain hell-bent on destroying the ‘Solana’ Galaxy for his own needs. Typically, movies based on video-games generally do not have a good reputation (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), anyone?). But this has promise. For starters, the animation quality, based on the trailers that have been seen so far, looks tremendous, and the character designs haven’t been altered too drastically. Throw all that together with a decent plot (which the original game already has) and this film has serious potential. The only thing that would concern me is their decision to incorporate certain characters and elements from the game sequels, such as the Galactic Rangers introduced in Up Your Arsenal (2004), as this might upset hard-core fans.

Paramount’s The Little Prince also looks intriguing, although, as of yet, only for its visual appeal. The original story, about a small prince who lives on a tiny asteroid, first published in 1943, has seen various adaptations in a variety of media. This new filmic adaptation presents the ‘real world’ in CG and the ‘imaginary world’ of the little prince in traditional, stop-motion animation. Whether or not the film will maintain the same level of charm and abstract surrealism as its basis is yet to be seen, but we look forward to finding out.