The new Walt Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer film G-Force has secured most of its cast. The film is going to be a mixture of live action and CGI and so will feature real actors as well as computer generated animated characters who all obviously need voices providing for them.
Nicholas Cage, Steve Buscemi, and Tracy Morgan have all signed up to voice some of the CG characters, while British actor Bill Nighy, along with Will Arnett will be on screen characters in the film which marks the directorial début of Oscar-winning visual effects innovator Hoyt Yeatman.
The story is your everyday tale of a group of super intelligent animal commandos, and no hang on, that’s not an everyday plot is it, it’s just that there are soooo many animated features these days, reality has kind of started to get blurred with them.
Anyway, this outlandish plot involves a group of super intelligent animal commandos who are trying to prevent an evil billionaire from taking over the world.
The casting sound brilliant, just try and imagine the actors as the following animals, and you will see what I mean: Cage will play a mole called Speckles, Buscemi will play a hamster called Bucky, and Morgan will provide the voice for a guinea pig named Blaster. See, I told you, it all fits perfectly.
As for the human characters: Nighy will portray an industrialist, and Arnett will play an FBI agent. The film will also star Zach Galifianakis, Kelli Garner, Gabriel Casseus and Jack Conley, who will all be live action on screen actors.
Jerry Bruckheimer, who is producing the film told The Hollywood Reporter:
“It’s a good story; it’s unique characters, it’s half animation, half live action. It falls right into the Disney family of films – the kind of films we make, like ‘National Treasure,’ which entertain everybody from the smallest kid to the oldest grandparent.”
“Yeatman is a visual effects genius, and he has worked on a number of our movies in the past. He came up with this idea with his son, believe it or not. We developed the screenplay. Now we are filming. It’s pretty exciting for him – it’s his first time (directing) – and it’s exciting for us to get into a whole new medium.”
Yeatman won an Academy Award for visual effects on The Abyss, a movie I rate quite highly, so this film seems to hold a lot of promise. There’s a case for there being too many CG films these days, as to be honest, I’d be happy with just Toy Story and Shrek, but the mixture of live action and CGI should raise this film above the rest of the dross. And that’s quite a cast list too, so fingers crossed.
Production has already begun in Los Angeles, and G-Force is scheduled for a release on the 1st May 2009.
