New Movie Poster Released for Catherine Hardwicke's "Red Riding Hood"

The movie is opening March 11, 2011 and this poster is doing a great job of making me even more curious about it. Gorgeous image and great use of imagery too! Thorny trees? Not only teeth and claws but iron maidens come to mind. Yikes! And something about the tilt and movement of the shapes puts me in mind of a figure -ie. prey- caught via infrared vision...

A plot/premise summary, if you don't know the variations this particular movie is exploring, can be found HERE at the image source.

The previous movie poster is below:

Red With A Twist Makes "Top 10" Best Designed Movie Posters

The movie is "Hard Candy", the year was 2006 and features our beloved Red - sort of. It's a psychological thriller (as you might have guessed from the poster) and it doesn't take much to see why this design is so good.

From Total Film:

... the best thing about this poster is that it throws us a complete curveball – our immediate assumption that this kid is in for a torrid time, but then we look again and notice, hey, she isn’t actually caught in that trap...

You can read the rest of the poster review HERE.If you're interested, you can learn more about the movie on Wikipedia HERE but please note: this movie (or its description) is not for the faint of heart. The review excerpt above has given you a clue...

Red Riding Hood in Blue

Yep. Red Riding Hood is wearing blue - at least in the photos we've seen so far. Cast-in-costume photos shot behind-the-scenes of the movie-currently being shot in Vancouver, Canada, include pics of co-stars Virginia Madsen (Red’s mom), Gary Oldman, Cole Heppell, Jen Halley, Billy Burke and Lukas Haas.

(Yes, that's the on-screen love interest, played by Shiloh Fernandez.)

You can see all 17 photos HERE.

But that's not all.

All sites posting and commenting on the photos agree the costuming for Amanda Seyfried, who plays the title role in The Girl With the Red Riding Hood (working title), isn't sporting the iconic Red Riding look. But I suggest you take a closer look.

Maybe I'm reading much more into this than is intended but is anybody else looking at the virgin blue, the red threads woven in, the 'horny' headdress and thinking that maybe the costume is perhaps closer to a red hood than it first appears? Of course I could totally be reading into it. I do love symbology and have a tendency to see it everywhere but if this isn't intentional I'll be very surprised. Any costume designer worth their salt builds story into their characters' costumes, even if it's story that's never directly addressed. This appears a little less subtle than that to me, but it's effective, nevertheless.

The plot remains largely a mystery at this point other than "a Gothic retelling of Red Riding Hood" (actually it would be 'Little Red Cap' as 'Hood' is the Perrault version) and the IMDB one sentence synopsis:

Set in a medieval village that is haunted by a werewolf, a young girl falls for an orphaned woodcutter, much to her family's displeasure.

... but the dress, particularly the one with the horned headdress (which would logically appear to follow the 'walking in blue with boots' one at the head of this post), says a lot. Particularly about transformation, magic, blood magic, lust (and hormones) and innocence.

Until the script and story come to light speculation is king but so far I haven't seen anyone connect the dots like in this particular way. iO9 mentions magic but even the 'sexy superstar' sites haven't twigged to the horned = lust = sexual maturation aspect of Red that I've seen.

Just my take.

Of course, you didn't really think they would do a 'Red' film completely minus the hood, did you? I found the other half to the top photo. Take a look at what Amanda's harried assistant (dresser?) is holding over her arm.
Note: Additional horned headdress costume images via HERE and Amanda-plus-assistant photo found HERE.

"The Secret of Kells"

This post was set to go live on Sunday before the Oscars but I didn't have time to finish it. I'm completing and posting it late anyway because this movie is worth watching (doubly so if you're interested in Celtic tales and myths) and is continuing to have incredible impact, including selling out to audiences in New York this week and breaking records for an Indie release.

The official website is HERE and includes resources for schools, wonderful music and much more (including even more images than are shown here).Now that Oscar nominated film "The Secret of Kells" (titled "Brendan and the Secret of Kells" in the UK and Europe) is opening in theaters in the US, a whole lot of people are being wowed by the visuals and story telling of this Celtic story, that's already received multiple awards and continues to garner critical acclaim. All the designs, including the characters, are based on the actual Book of Kells, making for a stunning and very different family animated film.Today, collected for your enjoyment from all over the web, I'm posting a variety of scenes from the movie.And if you don't know anything about the movie, here's a synopsis from Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com:

A haunting blend of history, fairy tale and pure invention, Moore's film follows a young student monk named Brendan, who has spent his whole life inside the fortified walls of the Abbey of Kells, whose forbidding abbot (voiced by Brendan Gleeson) has built it as a sanctuary against the Viking raiders who are pillaging and burning Irish villages at will. (It's somewhere around the year 800 A.D., give or take.) Into Brendan's cloistered life comes a playful monastic wanderer named Aidan (Mick Lally), who apparently studied with the legendary St. Colum Cille (aka St. Columba) on the Scottish isle of Iona, and carries with him perhaps the single greatest treasure of medieval Ireland.

That treasure is neither gold nor jewels but a book -- a lavish illustrated manuscript version of the Gospels that in centuries to come will be known as the Book of Kells. (Today it is considered Ireland's most important single cultural artifact, and can be seen under glass in the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin.) Brendan's yearning to help Aidan complete the manuscript, and safeguard it from Scandinavian marauders, leads him outside the walls of Kells into the magical forest around it -- and also out of the then-new Christian world into the pagan past.

Borrowing a wide range of illustrations and motifs from the Book of Kells and numerous other medieval and indigenous sources, Moore and his team of Irish, Belgian and French animators send Brendan on a mystical voyage. He is aided by an irrepressible forest sprite named Aisling ("ASH-ling"), but must go alone to face the terrifying Crom Cruach, an ancient and perhaps demonic Celtic deity who -- at least in some legends -- required the sacrifice of first-born children to ensure the harvest.

Want to see more? There's a blog HERE which has chronicled the production since it began and is refreshingly personal and positive (as opposed to a selection of marketing releases). And here's the new trailer for the current US release:


And here, at a glance, you can see how it all works together. Just gorgeous!
There's a special film story book released too, in which they've made an effort to capture the sense of style of the film, rather than just show images from the movie with text.Here are just a few of the pages (not in order):
You can find that book HERE. (Note: Amazon is currently selling this book for over $100 but you can find it in non-US stores, who ship to the US, for much, much less.)

Moving art full of myths and tales. This film is enough to make me consider going back into animation. I hope there are lots of extras included on the DVD and I can't wait to see how the next feature "Song of the Sea" turns out (think selkies and Irish folklore - see development pic and conceptual trailer below)!