When it started out, Dreamworks Animation went down the hand-drawn route, making the likes of The Prince Of Egypt and The Road To Eldorado, but dropped the traditional method almost completely following the failure of Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron. Well now they’re announced a partial return, with an ambitious idea to mix CG and hand-drawn styles in one movie.
The film will be called Mes And My Shadow and tells the story of Shadow Stan, an extremely frustrated shadow who yearns for a dynamic life but happens to be stuck with Stanley Grubb, the world’s most boring human. Finally pushed to the brink, Shadow Stan breaks the singular rule of the Shadow World (“They lead, we follow”), and takes control of Stanley!
According to Variety, the idea is that the film will move between the human world and shadow world, with the former rendered in CG, while the latter will be drawn by hand, which is certainly an interesting idea. Bill Damaschke, Co-President of Production for DreamWorks Animation says, “We are embarking on an exciting goal to break new creative ground at DreamWorks Animation by combining the time-honored tradition of hand drawn animation with the magical sophistication of CG characters and worlds in ways that have never been experienced by audiences before.”
The film will hit cinemas March 2013, so we have a while to wait yet!