The WonderCon website talks with Darwyn Cooke about the animated Justice League: The New Frontier, which has its world premiere at the February convention:
CCI: New Frontier is an epic work. How much of it will we see translated to the movie version and how difficult was it to let some of the story go?
Darwyn: It’s like a lot of things: it feels a lot worse than it is at first. We were all pretty daunted by trying to compress this material down to a 70-minut video. But Stan Berkowitz did a great job of objectively going through the story and finding out what needed to stay and what could go. The screenplay he pulled together did a very good job of that, so it was just a matter of us playing with it a bit more. It was really kind of difficult and hard to let go, but in the end we were all pretty amazed at how much of the story actually made it into the video and how much does feel like the book.
The direct-to-DVD movie is due in stores on Feb. 26.
(Via Comics2Film, which has a few more stills.)
November 15th, 2007 at 11:55 am
I bet they cut out all the stuff about John Henry.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
wow, what’s the budget for these direct-to-video DVDs?? the stills (and I presume animation) look horrible! The Death of Superman was way sub-par to the TV series, i had hoped more for NF, but I guess I’m in for a surprise…
November 15th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
The movie looks pretty much how I thought it would. It’s Cooke’s style minus the thick inking and extra detail lines which are impossible to translate into animation. But the design aesthetic is still obviously his, and he DID do all the main designs for the film. There’s a certain quality to a hand-drawn comic that is impossible to even suggest in an animated movie unless it has a ridiculous budget. And for a storyline that I thought would never be considered for animation, I couldn’t be happier with how this project is turning out.