The Return of Sinbad

By: SCOTT COLLURA
Date: Tuesday, July 01, 2003

For many of us, the character of Sinbad"the most daring and notorious rogue ever to sail the Seven Seas"resides mainly in our recollections of the semi-classic trilogy of Ray Harryhausen films based on the figure. But for all their stop-motion animation glory, pictures like THE 7^th VOYAGE OF SINBAD had strict limitations in terms of budget and effects when it came to realizing the fantastic voyage of the Arabian sailor.

Now, however, Sinbad has found the perfect medium to fully bring his wondrous world to life: animation. SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS, which opens tomorrow nationwide, is the latest animated effort from DreamWorks, and the two have proven to be the perfect match. For while Sinbad has been realized in cartoon form before, never has he been given the epic, no-holds-barred treatment that he receives in this new film. As director Tim Johnson explains, the idea for the film really just started with one word: the name "Sinbad."

"Jeffrey Katzenberg

really was the one who got the ball rolling," says Johnson, who co-helmed the film with Patrick Gilmore. "You say 'Sinbad' and you get this great, wonderful sort of image of a classic adventure and a fantastic time. So he said, 'We've go to do something with this. We should play around with a story around this character.'"

The story that would result finds Sinbad (voiced by Brad Pitt) getting framed by the nasty goddess of chaos, Eris (Michelle Pfeiffer), for stealing the priceless, magical Book of Peace. Sinbad must set sail with his crew in order to find the book, or else his best friend Proteus (Joseph Fiennes) will be put to death for the crime in Sinbad's place. Joining our hero on his quest is the lovely Marina (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Proteus' betrothed who tags along to make sure the wayward sailor does his best to find the book.

Surprisingly, the man who wound up penning the script for SINBAD was John Logan, who would become Hollywood's go-to-guy at about the same time when his GLADIATOR script became a hit film.

"He was a big name right from the start," says Johnson. "You often don't see that kind of talent work on an animated picture, mostly because they don't have the patience like John had. John stayed involved from start to finishhe was a trooper. You know how animation works is you sort of storyboard stuff, you [work] stuff out, you go back and talk to the writer, and a lot of writers just get too buffaloed by all that. But John loved it, he loved seeing what the story artists brought to him, and [he'd] re-write and come up with new stuff. They'd work off of each other."

Of course,

Johnson and his team of animators also brought their own unique take to the character of Sinbad. For the director, that meant drawing upon the notion of Sinbad that has permeated the pop culture lexicon, rather than relying on one specific incarnation of the character.

"It's all part of that mixed bag of cultural reference that we carry around with us," he explains. "Sinbad from THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, [that's] the first place you start, going to a text that's 1,000 years old. And then you can't help, especially from when I was a little boy, loving those Ray Harryhausen animated pictures. So there's this kind of rich text to pull from and then this great outrageous action stuff from the '60s. And nobody had done much with it since then, so it was sort of up to us to bring Sinbad into the 21^st century."

For Johnson, a large part of updating the legend was in humanizing Sinbad, to bring a vulnerability to a character that is usually seen as only an action hero. To give Sinbad a heart, so to speak.

"The big discovery there was casting Brad Pitt. He just propelled us," says the director, while also pointing out that the character of Marina is equally important to the film. "We approached [Catherine Zeta-Jones] right after, I think, ENTRAPMENT. So she was considered a young star, but now she's won an Academy Award. We certainly knew we'd seen talent in her, and now the rest of the world's seen it in spades."

Another aspect

of the film that departs from previous Sinbad movies is in the specific adventures that he has and the threats that he must face. Rather than resorting to depicting sword-wielding skeletons again, the SINBAD team decided to expand upon the standard rogues gallery. At times, this meant taking inspiration from other mythology, such as in the fantastic sequence where Sinbad encounters a group of beguiling Sirens. In fact, the entire relationship between Sinbad and Proteus comes from Greek myth.

"The whole backbone of the story is based on a Greek story, 'Damon and Pythias,' a story where a man is falsely accused and his best friend takes his place on death row to allow his friend to prove his innocence," explains Johnson. "We looked at Sinbad and all of the adventures and whatnot, and they didn't really haveeven in the original texta sort of overarching story. And we really wanted to tell something contemporary and full of a lot of heart, so we looked at that ancient Greek story and we pinned a lot of the story on that."

Finally, Johnson and his team saw animation as the only truly viable means of portraying a Sinbad for a new generation.

"The greatest thing about any animated picture is ultimately it is a fantasy," he says. "Animation creates a world from scratch. Here we have a genre that is fantasy. We were trying to make a film that was competitive with the likes of LORD OF THE RINGS. So you can spend $200 million to make a big effects-laden live-action film, or spend considerably less and, just by the fact that it's animated, get an instant entry into the world of fantasy, and create a colorful, magical world."

DreamWorks is offering a special giveaway during the opening weekend of SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS. From Wednesday, July 2, through Sunday, July 6, each paid child's admission ticket will come, free of charge, with an exclusive limited edition read-along CD of SHREK AND FIONA'S HONEYMOON STORYBOOK (as long as supplies last). Cool stuff, huh?

Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think at feedback@cinescape.com.