Pete Doctor did such a splendid job guiding Monsters Inc. to the screen that I’m going to pretend his next directorial effort, Up,
doesn’t sound like a joke project. I mean, what are we supposed to do
with a premise that has a seventy-year-old joining forces with a
"wilderness ranger" to fight "beasts and villains"?
Finding Nemo
co-writer Bob Peterson is writing the script for this bizarre
two-hander that, based on Pixar’s batting average, has a very good
chance of being wonderful even if I can’t picture how it will play. I
guess that’s part of the fun. Generally, when I think of old men
fighting (and, to be honest, it’s less often than you might imagine), I
conjure up this old piece of web flotsam; hopefully, Up‘s septuagenarian
protagonist will be a bit more agile.
Since this completes Pixar’s slate through 2010 (Ratatouille is the ’07 offering, Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E hits in ’08 and John Lasseter’s Toy Story 3 arrives in ’10), I wonder if this means John Carter of Mars
is set for ’11 or off the slate entirely. Having fallen in love with
the Edgar Rice Burroughs series thanks to a red-haired webmaster, I’d
hate to see Pixar give up on a project they could probably crack better
than anyone else. Brad Bird would be my director of choice, but he’s
apparently working on a San Francisco quake film called 1906.