Valiant Part Deux

Good news! As far as I know, there is no sequel to Valiant on the way. Bad news is, if you've seen the recently released trailer for "The Wild", you may of guessed that we are in for another Valiant-like CG film.

Like Valiant, The Wild is being financed and distributed by Disney --although Valiant was not entirely financed by Mickey--. The film originally began life under the hat (not to be confused with another CG development called "Wild Life") and long story short, the film was given to a director/producer team based out of San Francisco. Steve Williams and Clint Goldman shopped the script around to several studios in the US and Canada. They had a small budget considering what they were looking for and CORE ended up winning the project with its lowball bid. Rumors started floating around that CORE was having a lot of problems. Although some of them were said to be typical newbie production problems, word has it that a lot of the problems were software based. They fought and pressed ahead and ended up overcoming whatever issues held them up in the beginning.

Unfortunately, the outcome looks weak. Even if The Wild began its life before Madagascar, it will surely be thought of as a bad carbon copy. Dark, murky environments and less than terrific character designs (or simply bad execution of those designs), and a familiar storyline adds up to stink. It just doesn't look that inspiring.

With all of that said. My prediction is that The Wild will suffer the same fate as Valiant. A half-assed Disney marketing campaign followed by a weak box office and slow home video sales. It will make more money than Valiant, but Disney has since put all of their cookies in their own CG jar and they no longer care much about these outsourced projects.