Next February brings the DC Universe Original Animated Movie
Wonder Woman, the fourth in the company's extremely successful direct-to-DVD line.
Last month at San Diego's Comic-Con International, CBR News's JAMI PHILBRICK had the opportunity to speak with the creative forces behind the new flick.
When DC first started talking about doing the DC Universe animated movies, the idea was to adapt directly from source material and give the fans the stories that they've always wanted to see on the screen.
Throughout Wonder Woman's history, there are many very cinematic scenes and a terrific story, said Executive Producer
Gregory Noveck. "But is there a core storyline that says, 'This is the movie that not only appeals to the fans but is also not so inside-baseball that it is going to alienate people'? Then you start saying, 'Let's change this and let's move that. Well why base it on that then? Let's just do an original story that has the spirit of it.'"
So, unlike the first two films in the series,
Superman: Doomsday and
Justice League: The New Frontier,
Wonder Woman is not based on any particular comic, but instead is an original story, akin to the recent
Batman: Gotham Knight.
"It has a lot of Golden Age elements, it's got a little of the [
George]
Perez revamp, and it's even got some stuff from the
Lynda Carter version," said Producer
Bruce Timm. "So it's an amalgamation of all the different things that we love about Wonder Woman."
The film is a present-day retelling of Wonder Woman's origin story, and includes classic elements such as her winning the contest to bear the Wonder Woman mantle on Paradise Island. And, according to Timm, "it has lots and lots of fighting."
The voice cast for
Wonder Woman includes
Keri Russell (
Mission: Impossible III) as Wonder Woman,
Nathan Fillion (
Serenity) as Steve Trevor,
Alfred Molina (
Spider-Man 2) as Ares,
Rosario Dawson (
Sin City) as Artemis,
Virginia Madsen (
Sideways) as Hippolyta and
Oliver Platt (
Flatliners) as Hades.
"The casting was kind of a no-brainer as far as Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor go," said Casting Director
Andrea Romano. "I had recently seen
Waitress with Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion and thought that they had some nice chemistry there."
After all the testosterone-driven projects for which she's cast over the past twenty years, Romano was excited to work on a female-centric animated film. "I wanted so much to do a project that had a lot of women in it. So many of the DC properties are male orientated, and I wanted to do something that was a female driven show."
"I've always preferred working with female characters because they have a much wider range of emotions you can address," explained director
Laura Montgomery. "If you have Batman crying in a corner, people are going to look at it a little odd. But with Wonder Woman, she can cry and that's okay, and she can kick ass and that's okay, too."
Timm, who has worked on nearly every DC animated project since
Batman: The Animated Series, admitted that he'd like to focus on some other DCU characters. "Personally, I'm much more interested in getting deeper into the back-log of really odd-ball characters like The Question, The New Gods or Jonah Hex. Hopefully, this series will continue to sell well and we'll get there eventually."
Wonder Woman is scheduled for release on DVD in February 2009.