Robert Zemeckis going to make a motion-capture movie about gnomes whether you like it or not

By Sean O'Neal | April 15, 2011 | 5:47pm

Aux Features Film

The poor critical and commercial performance of Mars Needs Moms—and Disney’s subsequent scrapping of a similarly motion-captured Yellow Submarine remake—seems to have merely steeled Robert Zemeckis’ resolve. Despite reports that he may have been finally shamed into abandoning his creepy, lifeless idiom and returning to directing actual people for the first time in over a decade, The Hollywood Reporter says that Zemeckis is currently developing How To Survive A Garden Gnome Attack with his same old ImageMovers studio, suggesting Zemeckis’ commitment to motion-capture animation has taken on an almost antagonistic bent.

How To Survive A Garden Gnome Attack is exactly what it sounds like: ~~an allegory about the Holocaust~~ an adaptation of one of those kitschy, bookstore-impulse-buy “survival guides” about fighting off sentient garden gnomes. Of course, gnomes just had their own CGI movie in Gnomeo And Juliet, not that Zemeckis seems to care about that either. Perhaps such single-minded obsessions mean Zemeckis is gradually turning into Howard Hughes, sitting in his private screening room watching The Polar Express on an endless loop with only a napkin covering his genitals. We’d rather see a movie about that.