Ooops! Noah is Gone… Animated movie announcement by Fred Patten.
by Patch O'Furr
Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.
Ooops! Noah is Gone…, directed by Toby Genkel and Sean McCormack. For Summer 2015.
The number of theatrical animated features coming in 2015 keeps getting larger.
There have been uncountable magazine cartoon variations of a pair of unicorns standing on a rainswept mountaintop, watching Noah’s Ark sailing off into the distance. But up to now, no animated feature has concentrated upon the animals that didn’t get onto the Ark.
Well, mainly just a couple of the animals; the nestrians and the grymps. No, I haven’t heard of them before, either. The German film sales company Global Screen has announced that Ulysses Filmproduktion in Hamburg is just finishing production of Ooops! Noah is Gone… (Ooops! Die Arche ist Weg …), a CGI “end of the world comedy” for families/children about the “untold story of the animals that didn’t get on the ark”.
The nestrians are represented by Dave and his young son, Finney. They are garishly colored, monkey-sized, timid “things” that might roughly be described as Sock Monkeys with tapirlike snouts. Dave is bright purple with turquoise trim, and Finney is bright orange, also with turquoise trim. They get to the Ark in time, but the supercilious lion, who seems to be running things (the trailer shows no sign of Noah or any other humans), tells them that they cannot board because they “aren’t on Noah’s list.” (Maybe they aren’t because they are a father and son, not a breeding pair.)
Since getting onto the Ark is vital to their survival, Dave screws up his courage and disguises them as … well, presumably something that’s on the approved list. More importantly, they make friends with the two grymps, the feisty Hazel and her daughter Leah. The grymps resemble foxes with raccoon markings. Something goes wrong, and the two preadolescents get separated from their parents, lost in the scaffolding for the Ark rather than the Ark itself, and fall to the ground. The lion seizes the opportunity to try to get rid of both nestrians, but Hazel is determined to rescue her daughter. Dave and Hazel fight the other animals to turn the Ark around and go back for their children, while Finney and Leah scramble to reach higher and higher ground ahead of the rising waters, while fighting griffins and other animals who did not make it aboard the Ark.
Since neither the nestrians nor the grymps are around today, the implication is that Dave, Hazel, and their kids do not succeed. But Ooops! Noah is Gone… is a family/children’s film, which implies a happy ending somehow. The trailer promises smooth and colorful 3-D/CGI animation, although the animals’ fur looks more like fuzzy cloth, and the lion has a chin that outdoes Jay Leno’s.
The feature (a co-production of Ulysses Filmproduktion in Germany, Moetion Films in Ireland, Fabrique d’Images in Luxembourg, and a studio in Belgium listed on some newssites as Skyline Entertainment and on others as Grid Animation) is slated for completion and a German release in Summer. The press release from Global Screen announces all the territories in which Ooops! Noah is Gone… has been sold, which pretty well cover the world. Entertainment One (eOne) in Toronto has picked up all rights for the US, Canada, UK/ROI and Australia/NZ, although no North American release is planned yet. However, as Jerry Beck’s Animation Scoop says, “it’s not impossible to see this film qualified late next year for Oscar consideration.”
Does a family/children’s feature need a happy ending? When Roald Dahl died on November 23, 1990, he was thunderously denouncing (and maybe threatening to sue; I forget) Jim Henson Productions and Warner Bros. for changing the ending of his children’s novel “The Witches”, which they had just turned into a live-action feature, despite his refusal to allow it. The novel is about Luke, an 8-year-old boy who is turned into a mouse by evil witches but continues to fight them. At the end, Luke has won but he’s still a mouse, and since the life-span of a mouse is only about two years, he can expect to die in about a year. The movie changed this to have a friendly witch change Luke back into a boy to resume living his human life. Dahl and Henson & Warner Bros. were still arguing over “you can’t have an unhappy ending for families and children / then why is my book so popular?” when Dahl died.
If I were an editor here, I would write about this. I knew someone would, the second I saw the trailer. I said to myself “this is going to get a mention on a furry news site, I just know it!”
Here is the film’s British trailer under the title “Two By Two”. This is considerably different, and shows more of the movie.