Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda movie won’t be as heavy on motion capture as director Wes Ball once envisioned.
In 2010, long before Nintendo announced Ball as the man responsible for the highly anticipated fantasy adaptation, and even before he had directed his first feature film, The maze runnerthe director tweeted which he thought was a completely mo-cap version The Legend of Zelda, along the lines of James Cameron’s Avatar, would be a great idea. But after working with Weta FX on May’s mo-cap intensive film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apesit seems he has other things in mind for Link.
In an interview with Polygon, Ball laughingly said that a fully mo-capped version of The Legend of Zelda “is probably not his choice.” Instead, he said the project needs to be a bit more “grounded” and “real.” But Ball also cautiously said he couldn’t say much about the film yet.
“We’re working hard, and we’re going to make something great,” he said, before joking that if he said much more, “Nintendo would jump out of the bushes here and snatch me away.”
Ball is a huge supporter of animation and broke into the industry with his stylized CG animated film Destroy before directing three Maze Runner films. After completing the trilogy, he developed an animated version The Mouse Guard, although the ambitious feature fell apart following Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox. But the studio was clearly a fan, putting Ball in charge of the next chapter in the Apes franchise – a film that would reunite him with Weta and test his rare aptitude for live-action and animation. Ball may have imagined a fully animated Legend of Zelda movie fourteen years ago, but he’s actually made his Avatar dreams come true with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
“Like it Avatar, and unlike the other previous Apes films, there are about 30 or 40 minutes of full CG in this film. Like every leaf, every piece of bark, you know, full C.G. So I have to taste a bit of that Avatar experience, where it’s just actors on a mocap stage pretending with all those crazy boxes and proxies for objects. That was really fun.”
There’s no word yet on when we can expect The Legend of Zeldawhich was only announced last November, but Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes can be seen in cinemas from May 10.