Zemeckis appeared to be over it as well, the mild response to his all-consuming passion project having eaten away at his resolve, and so when early tests of budget mo-cap work and digitally augmented doll joints came back looking like “a high end halloween costume,” the director turned toward despairing thoughts of A Christmas Carol’s production, quoted as saying “I can’t suffer that again on this movie.
Yet this new project called for something to this very effect - CG “plastic” doll characters bearing the fully expressive faces of the human cast - a bizarrely specific look to effectively realize that seemed exclusively suited to digital motion capture, a process the $50 million budget couldn’t accommodate.
By the time Welcome to Marwen began development at Universal, Disney had dissolved the ImageMovers Digital partnership with Zemeckis, killing off a long-in-the-works Yellow Submarine remake in the process, and effectively bringing the filmmaker’s mo-cap pursuits to a close. Zemeckis was keenly aware of his new method’s potentially ruinous impediment, and so for most of the 2000s, he and his team at production company ImageMovers channeled their energy and resources into the task of perfecting digital motion capture, eventually partnering with Disney as “ImageMovers Digital” for the 2009 A Christmas Carol, surely the company’s most successful demonstration of their technology’s potential (allowing a handful of actors to convincingly play a number of dramatically different characters via this sort of expressive digital costuming), but not enough to hold the confidence of their co-producers. All three met similar unfortunate fates (middling box office returns plus divisive critical receptions), with blame repeatedly leveled at the technology’s uncanny renderings of the human performers. This was back in 2013, almost a full decade after Zemeckis had made his first major foray into mo-cap-based, CG filmmaking with The Polar Express, a period of time during which he had released two more features in this style, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. When Robert Zemeckis set about making preparations for his adaptation of Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary Marwencol, he was immediately confronted with a potentially project-killing conundrum.
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