WONDERCON 2008: Disney's Prince Caspian and WALL-E

During this weekend's Wondercon in San Francisco, MovieWeb's man on the street, Stephen Reedy obtained the goods from behind-the-scenes as well as the convention floor. Here's how things presented during the Walt Disney panel, in which the studio only chose to promote a handful of upcoming films.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

KNB f/x guy Howard Berger gave a layout of the plot:
It's a year later on Earth, 13,000 years later in Narnia time. S--t in the magical forrest is not flying right.

A 5 minute "trailer" showed sweeping shots of beaches, forests and catacombs. The kids killed a lot of bad guys as evil doers battled with Minotaurs. It was like Rambo, but with magical creatures and little children. No sign of the lion from the first film. The tone was very dark and violent by kids movie standards. Unfinished CG hinted as some pretty epic battles. In Lord of the Rings fashion, battle trees joined the fight.

WALL-E

Director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) came out and showed us some tiny robot action.

A long time from now in a galaxy far far away, humans are contained in a deep space cruise ship because heavy consumerism made Earth unlivable. Wall-E, a conscious trash compactor with cute eyes, was left behind to pick up our mess.

And on went the clips:

CLIP 1:
Our binocular eyed hero runs around compacting trash into little cubes. With adorable curiosity, he explores strange discarded items: bras, car alarms and even a diamond ring box (enjoying the box more than the jewelry, he tosses the diamond).

CLIP 2:
A space probe visits Wall-E's "home," a truck trailer filled with prized junk. They spend a few minutes bonding by playing with trash. Cute stuff.

CLIP 3:
Wall-E hitches a ride on a giant shuttle leaving Earth. Clinging onto the outside of the vehicle, he gets hit by satellites and touches the rings of saturn. Pretty stuff.

Clip 4:
Aboard the human space cruiser, an evil little robot ejects Wall-E into space via escape pod. Suspense elements ensue as it's within seconds of self destruction. He escapes and has fun propelling himself thru zero G using a fire extinguisher as a janky jetpack. Fun stuff.

The movie seems to retain all the Pixar magic of their previous 9 films. The animation is great, sometimes 100% photorealistic with a stylized feel. As Stanton put it, "great attention was used to give it the feel of a 50's sci-fi movie."

Wall-E as a character oozes personality without ever saying a word (a large fraction of the movie is without dialog), expressing everything thru emotive binocular eyes (inspired by Stanton using binoculars at a baseball game) and physical exaggeration. The music (by Thomas Newman) and sound (by Ben Burt aka R2D2) pushes the subliminal characterization further.

In related news, Stanton revealed that Toy Story 3 (supposedly coming out June 18th, 2010) will be shown in 3D.