Since finishing Castaway in 2000, Robert Zemeckis has been on a mission to make motion-capture animation happen.  People hated it when he first finished Polar Express in 2004, and they’re only casually dismissive of it now, so I guess that’s progress.  Just last week he was still defending the process while promoting Mars Needs Moms, which he produced.

“The thing that’s always been at the core of the performance capture artform is the performance of the actor. The emotional warmth and the performance is what that performer has done, exactly like if a musician sits at a keyboard and plays, but then a processor takes those keystrokes and turns them into an entire orchestra.”

I’d say it’s more like auto-tune, which has so far given us a few funny parodies and thousands of Rebecca Blacks.

And in Mars Needs Moms, [using motion-capture] means Seth Green can play a nine-year-old, an insolent kid who gets what he arrogantly asked for when Martians kidnap his mom (Joan Cusack) to suck the “mom-ness” out of her and implant it in an army of “nannybots” to raise the Martian children. The diminutive Green has the physicality to pull off a child’s movements, but his beard would otherwise be an impediment.

Yes, or he could just voice a character that someone else drew, allowing him to play a monkey, a rocketship, or a yak fetus, all without having to shave his beard or even change clothes (thank God we finally have the technologies to make the job of a big Hollywood actor a little more comfortable, btw).  Put it this way: have you ever heard anyone complain about what a terrible actress Bambi or the Little Mermaid was?  I thought not.  In fact, we’ve long had non-motion capture cartoons lifelike enough to satisfy even the most discriminating of sex-pillow enthusiasts.  There’s just not a lot of upside to digitizing an actor’s entire face. Draw it or don’t.  Avatar, okay maybe, but let’s try not to shoe horn performance capture into every project like an Asian teen who just discovered emoticons.

Fast-forward to today, after Mars Needs Moms became the lowest-grossing opening ever for a broadly-released modern 3D-animated movie, when Disney chair Rich Ross strode into the boardroom atop his most muscular man servant and proudly knocked Zemeckis’ next mo-cap experiment into the sh*t pile with his pimp cane.

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Cary Elwes, star of Robin Hood: Men in Control-Top Tights (because he’s put on a few pounds since ’87, you see. Haha, have some more ice cream soup, fatty.), has joined the cast of Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming 3D remake of Yellow Submarine.  The who with the what now?  From THR:

Cary Elwes, Dean Lennox Kelly, Peter Serafinowicz and Adam Campbell are in negotiations to portray the members of the band in “Yellow Submarine,” which the director is remaking for Disney.
The original 1968 animated movie was based on the music by the Beatles and featured a storyline wherein a soldier called Old Fred meets up with the Beatles and travels in a yellow submersible to Pepperland. Among the group’s encounters are the music-hating Blue Meanies [Na'avi?].
Zemeckis is making the movie using 3D performance-capture technology. [of course]
The Beatles tribute band the Fab Four will be motion-captured as the ensemble for the musical performance sequences.

And so the Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture, condom-people experiment continues (I hear his nickname for his wife’s vagina is the ‘uncanny valley’).  Anyway, a 3-D movie featuring Beatles music?  1966 is going to be so jealous.

(I CAN HAZ DINNER FOR 6? OM NOM NOM NOM…)

/You keeled my father, prepare to diet.

Okay, now I’ve never heard of these dudes before, but I guess there is this band called The Beatles and apparently they’ve had a couple of hits over years…I guess. It’s hard to tell if they’re popular or not, because I recently bought Now That’s What I Call Music 30 and none of their songs were on it. Pussycat Dolls were on there for sure, but not these dudes called The Beatles.

Anyway, news today is that Robert Zemeckis and Disney are in talks to remake Yellow Submarine into a 3-D bigscreen feature. Don’t choke on the bong water, Spicoli, you read that correctly: a 3-D version of Yellow Submarine; an experience that sounds both amazingly awesome and yet horribly terrifying, all at the same time.

Disney and Robert Zemeckis are looking to catch the wave of Beatlemania, floating a new 3-D “Yellow Submarine” for the bigscreen, with merchandising in tow and prospects for spinning off both a Broadway musical and a Cirque du Soleil stage production. [Variety]

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