Dreamworks Animation held a special presentation this morning at Los Angeles’ Pacific Design Center, showing off their 2010 slate, including a first look at the 3D super villain animated feature, Megamind.
Megamind is the third computer animated film from Dreamworks Animation this year (including How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek Forever After), setting the record for the most animated theatrical films from any studio in a single year. Though the final version of Megamind will be in 3D, today’s footage was largely unfinished and shown without use of the technology.
Megamind himself (voiced by Will Ferrell) has a similar origin to Superman; when he was a baby, his planet was destroyed and he was rocketed to Earth. His landing, however, was inside a penitentiary and he grew up a criminal genius.
By Megamind’s side is Minion (voice by David Cross), a combination robot/monkey with fish tank for a head and the mind of a talking piranha (presumably constructed by Megamind himself).
Metro City (mispronounced by Megamind as “metrocity”, rhyming with “velocity”) is championed by Metroman (voiced by Brad Pitt), a muscular superhero with a white Elvis-like costume and Reed Richards-style graying temples.
Metroman’s love interest is Roxanne Ritchie (voiced by Tina Fey), a TV news reporter who is Megamind’s go-to girl when he needs a damsel in distress. As such, Megamind and Roxanne are extremely familiar with one another and she has become bored by his failed plots to rule the world.
The footage opens with Metroman attending a museum ribbon cutting in his honor. He showboats for the crowd, flying, doing tricks and even juggling a woman’s babies, all the rounds of roaring applause.
Megamind, meanwhile, has kidnapped Roxanne and taken him to his secret lair. Tied to a chair, Roxanne is unimpressed with anything Megamind has, including a pit of alligators and an enormous machine gun.
Going on the air, Megamind broadcasts a message to Metroman, telling him off the kidnapping. Roxanne shouts to the hero that she’s being held at an abandoned observatory and Metroman rushes to her aid. The tables are turned on Metroman, however, as the observatory is revealed to be a fake. Metroman finds himself inside a large, domed building while Megamind watches from an adjacent base.
Telling Minion to fire his laser, Megamind is horrified to find that it’s going to take longer to load the programing than he had thought. Metroman and Megamind exchange some really funny superhero metaphors back and forth (“Justice is a non-corrodible metal!” shouts Metroman at one point). With the laser unable to fire, Megamind thinks he’s lost again, until he spots something unusual on his monitor: Metroman is trapped inside the dome. Copper, he reveals, is his secret weakness and Megamind has unwittingly lured him to a building that has sapped his energy. Unable to fly away, Metroman is struck by the laser blast and, apparently, completely destroyed.
The footage ends here, but a few slides were shown of what happens next; Megamind conquers the city, but finds that, without a rival, his life has no meaning. He goes to work creating a new superhero out of Hal Stewart, a cameraman for Roxanne (as voiced by Jonah Hill), creating the alternate superhero identity Titan.
Megamind is set to hit theaters on November 5, 2010.
Source: Silas Lesnick
