The most common complaint leveled at The Lord Of The Rings’ film trilogy is that there are just way too many human actors in it. There are humans playing dwarves, humans playing elves, humans playing orcs, and even, most appalling of all, humans playing humans.
Luckily, a team from the Isart Digital 3D animation and visual effects school have solved this problem by creating a CGI retelling of Tolkien’s fantasy series called“Mice.” As you may have guessed, it stars a bunch of mice.
We may never know what inspired the students to shift The Lord Of The Rings’ setting from the majestic mountains and vast plains of Middle-earth to a damp subway tunnel littered with cigarette butts that likely smells like stale urine, but they’ve done it. And now, for our pleasure, we get to watch some polygonal mice go to war with a nasty old owl over an old pop can’s shiny pull tab and a number of other reworked scenes. In one, the mice chew an electrical cable in half to collapse a pathway and lose a dear rodent friend just like Gandalf falling off the bridge in Moria. In another, just after this, our heroes are surrounded by enemy vermin and are saved at the last moment by the appearance of a white mouse, reborn like Gandalf leading the reinforcements at Helm’s Deep.
It’s very well done. The mice look just lifelike enough that they’re adorable, but not so lifelike that the viewer has to dwell on the thought of all the disgusting parasites the creatures have undoubtedly picked up across their damp, filthy odyssey. Seeing how successful the adaptation is, we can only imagine what other, completely different projects the team will take on next—like, say, redoing all of The Hobbit with a bunch of CGI pigeons.
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