Epic-Dark-Prince

When Martin Scorsese retitled Brian Selznick’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret to ‘Hugo’ there was a case to be made that the film’s title at least retained some of the original’s character, not so with William Joyce’s The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs which Fox have snappily retitled as ‘Epic’.

Good news then that they are working with Blue Sky Studios on this film, which is out on the 22nd of May here in the UK, as the partnership has a solid foundation for new projects. Today we’ve got a new look at a scene from the film which shows off the quality of animation as well as the tone of the film rather well.

Christoph Waltz is Mandrake and he is front and centre in this new clip. The character design is rather fetching and of course the animation is spot on. The Blue Sky team have honed their craft with Rio and the ever lasting Ice Age films and we should expect to see more of the same here.

A synopsis would look something like this,

EPIC tells the story of an ongoing battle deep in the forest between the forces of good who keep the natural world alive and the forces of evil who wish to destroy it. When a teen age girl finds herself magically transported into this secret universe, she must band together with a rag-tag team of fun and whimsical characters in order to save their world… and ours.

Here’s the scene,