Director Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) was on hand at the D23 Expo this past weekend as part of the Let The Adventures Begin: Live Action At The Walt Disney Studios presentation. Bird, along with co-writer Damon Lindelof (Lost), presented artifacts in their continued myth building for the 2014 Disney live-action film, Tomorrowland. The mysterious “1952” box, which has been utilized for the last several months to tease the film, was brought out on stage and explored in front of the audience. A few enigmatic items from the Disney studios past were unveiled, a doctored picture of Walt Disney with Amelia Earhart was shown and a vintage copy of Amazing Stories was used as a key for some cryptic message decoding. But by far the most interesting and entertaining portion of the presentation – and the bit that had me most intrigued about the project – was a clip of animation that has ties to Pixar.
The Pixar Perspective on Breaking Into Live-Action
As unlikely as it may have seemed a few years ago, or even a few months ago if you were stubbornly holding out against the truth, there will be a sequel to the 2003 Pixar classic Finding Nemo, opening in 2015. Of course, more than 30 months from its release, we know very little about Finding Dory, aside from that title, its release date, the involvement of Albert Brooks and—in a more pronounced fashion—Ellen DeGeneres, and little else. But that title can, if nothing else, allow us to assume we have a general notion of what the film will entail: instead of the harried, neurotic Marlin searching the ocean for his son Nemo, he’ll have to do so for the unlikely friend he picked up on that first journey, Dory. These are the facts—at least based on Disney’s recent press release—but those meager crumbs have inspired a great deal of worrisome Internet fervor in the last couple weeks.
