In a quiet, nondescript building in Santa Monica, Chris Meledandri is laying the foundation for an animation studio that could one day challenge Pixar’s unquestioned supremacy over the booming genre. Working in tandem with animators in Paris, the digital artists at Illumination Entertainment, Meledandri's ambitious start-up, are busy readying for the July 2010 release of Despicable Me, the first film in a partnership with Universal that he expects will produce two animated features per year over the next half-decade.
A veteran producer with credits include several blockbusters (Horton Hears a Who!, the Ice Age films) and one monumental flop (Titan A.E., which he calls "kinda mediocre" -- a mild affront to the large subset of fanboys who regard the 2000 flop as one of the great Lost Classics of our time), Meledandri clearly eyes Despicable Me as a solid, safe bet, an audience-friendly flick with a cast of recognizable faces and a familiar storyline. Traces of both Shrek and Up can be found in its tale of Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), a supervillain whose contented life of cartoonish villainy is upended by the emergence of both a cocky young rival and three adorable orphan girls. Other members of the voice cast include Russell Brand, Julie Andrews, Danny McBride, Jason Segel, and Will Arnett.
Star power played a major role in Despicable Me's casting process. "It is important to us that our actors are able to help us communicate about the film because we're not branded," says Meledandri. "We're not Pixar. We don't have any brand, and we need to excite and audience about our movie. One of the ways that we can reach an audience is by our actors helping to do that." The promotional efforts of Carell and the rest of the cast, he believes, will play a vital role in raising audience awareness in summer 2010 movie season crowded with big, recognizable titles like Iron Man 2 and Toy Story 3. "We don't believe that just the name of an actor is going to motivate an audience to go see an animated film," he adds. "It's the enthusiastic support of an actor when they hear it and hear about the movie that will do it."
In both style and tone, Despicable Me is heavily inspired by Charles Addams, the legendary cartoonist whose offbeat, benignly macabre characters were the primary basis for TV's The Addams Family. "The Charles Addams influence, in terms of his humor, where you can have humor that has edge and charm simultaneously -- we certain aspired to it," says Meledandri. "Comedically, Addams is very near and dear to us."
Despicable Me is Illumination's first 3D release, and Meledandri is excited to explore the potential of the burgeoning format. "There are a lot of sequences in the movie that take advantage of the dimensional space in a dynamic way," he says. "I think that it's important for a film that's in 3D that the filmmakers create the movie from a staging and scene planning standpoint with the dimensional space as one of their storytelling components...I think that you've got to demonstrate in the film that it's conscious utilization of space as opposed to just a simple transfer."
An unabashed fan of Coraline, Meledandri hopes that the success of Despicable Me will help pave the way for Illumination to greenlight bolder, more innovative efforts on par with Henry Selick's acclaimed 2009 film. "The challenge now is that we're a new company and we're in a much more challenged time economically and so we have to lay the foundation initially with films that play to a broader audience" he says."We are working on projects, one of which we'll announce shortly, that begin to go and push off again. We have some ideas for the future that push even further, but the pace at which we would realize those films that depart from just the traditional model is somewhat slowed based on the environment that we're in now, where the industry as a whole is facing tougher economic challenges. So with that it becomes more difficult to stray toward or into uncharted terrain."
Despicable Me opens July 9, 2010.
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