Holiday Treat: Rise of the Guardians

I do enjoy the concept of the TV show Once Upon A Time, which expands the personalities and back-story’s of fairytale and legendary characters. This season even goes so far as to have Snow White and Sir Lancelot be old friends and Mulan is quite familiar with Rumpelstiltskin.  What I don’t like about “Once” is simple – it’s poorly written.  The plots never really grab you or make very good use of these fabled, beloved heroes, heroines, villains and creatures.

Going into Rise of the Guardians I expected to feel pretty much the same, as this story brings together Santa Claus/North (Alec Baldwin), The Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher), The Sandman (who doesn’t speak, but communicates through sand images that he conjures above his head) The Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), Jack Frost (Chris Pine) and the Bogeyman (Jude Law).  Impressive cast, but the trailer features all those gnome like elves running around looking very commercial. And never having read “The Guardians Of Childhood” series by William Joyce, the books from which this latest DreamWorks feature is based – the whole concept seemed cutesy at best.

Boy was I wrong!  Rise of the Guardians is absolutely engaging, interesting, spiritual, mature yet child-like and exquisitely beautiful.  The film deals with concepts of finding one’s center; the insidiousness of fear and the higher consciousness and knowledge that each one of us possesses the power to bring light into the world and defeat the evil grip of dark thoughts. At the same time, the movie is never preachy, or esoteric, it’s completely kid friendly and there’s plenty of action and humor for all!

Does anyone really know much about Jack Frost? We all know the saying “Jack Frost is nipping at your nose” but we don’t really have a concept of who Jack Frost really is. Well, in the movie, neither does he, and that’s our hook into the plot, discovering who Jack Frost is, how he came to be, and why is he being called to join “The Guardians”.

Santa Claus is not your typical St. Nick, he’s a Russian Cossack warrior:

“We looked at Russian architecture such as the Kremlin,” art
director Max Boas says. “His home in the North Pole is a giant
wooden fortress. He’s a gung-ho, untamable wild guy, so we wanted his
architecture to be very masculine and strong. His home is built by
interlocking wood pieces, a bit like the game Tetris”

The Easter Bunny is a bad tempered, bad-ass, nature loving Australian:

“Easter Bunny’s garden home is an underground oasis where all life
originates. Bunny lives there with giant sentinel eggs, ancient stone
sculptures that come to life when invaders intrude…Since his home
is the birthplace of nature, we designed a shrine environment after
doing a lot of research on old temples, forest spirits, hieroglyphs
and ancient carvings.”

The most lovable character is The Sandman:

“He lives on a Dream Cloud right between night and day and travels
with the sunset.”Think of him as navigating an ocean of clouds,” Hanenberger says. “If you’re on
a red-eye flight to the East Coast at sunset and you see that last little bit of
sunlight hitting the clouds, you should look outside for Sandman, because that’s
where he would be.”

The Tooth Fairy has a bird-like appearance, but I think her coloring should have been yellow and orange tones, rather than the greens and blues of the sea:

“For the Tooth Fairy’s palace, located in Southeast Asia, the team
turned to Thai architecture. It’s very bird-based and has a lot of
wing and beak motifs,” Boas says. Since she stores the baby
teeth of all mankind, she’s basically a librarian, so there’s tons of
detail everywhere: carvings, mosaics and wall murals, it’s all about
communication and visual information.”

Rise of the Guardians is Peter Ramsey’s, directorial debut, having begun as a
storyboard artist working for David Fincher on Fight Club and Steven
Spielberg on A.I., He has the distinction of being the first
African-American filmmaker to direct a major, big budget CG-animated
motion picture. Yet for Ramsey, himself, the milestone feels more
like a necessary progression of sorts than an executed plan.

“It’s just like any other part of the industry, or any other
part of the working world,” Ramsey told theGrio. “It’s just
part of the evolution. Why’d it take so long to have a black
president? Same kind of thing, but I think it’s one of the those
things – there were a lot of people’s shoulders that I stood
on…It was all based on work, and being ready when the right
opportunity came along…

Me being an African-American filmmaker – [I] didn’t
necessarily bring anything about that experience to this [film], but
[that] a black filmmaker can make movies that anybody can enjoy,”
he adds. “That we’re universal people too. I think that’s just
as important as literally being represented on screen in that way.”  READ MORE

Philly Film Blog