Hannover House has released the first trailer for its upcoming family fantasy.
Toys in the Attic is the tale of a magical attic where toys come to life when no one is watching. The adventure begins for a heroic marionette when a malevolent toy kidnaps Buttercup, the beautiful doll.
Just from the trailer, it feels like a very heavy handed version of Toy Story. It hardly even feels like a children’s movie, though the promotional material clearly claims that genre. That same material tells us that the film was inspired by actual political events in the Czech Republic during the Cold War. Perhaps children in the Czech Republic would get that reference, but I don’t think most members of the American audience would understand.
The film was originally filmed with Czech voice actors, but for the US dub, some well-known US actors were found.
Here’s the synopsis:
The despotic Head of State rules over the Land of Evil with a band of sinister minions, insects and rotted vegetables. When the lovely Buttercup (Vivian Schilling) is kidnapped and held prisoner by The Head (Jiri Labus, with voice by Douglas Urbanski), it is up to her friends – a teddy bear (Forest Whitaker), a mechanical mouse (Joan Cusack) and marionette puppet (Cary Elwes) to cross the international boundary and attempt their daring rescue.
With uneven animation (some commenters who saw the film at European film festivals compared the animation to Tim Burton, which is laughable at best) and a baseball bat for a moral/political tale, I’m not sure who this film is really for outside of the festival circuit, but they’re giving it a shot anyhow with a limited theatrical release on September 7th, 2012.
