After watching the pilot, it seems to definitely be heading that way.
“Tron: Uprising,” currently airing on Disney XD, takes place before the events “Tron: Legacy,” though for some reason it feels somewhat more intimate that the feature film it’s based upon. Part of that is because TV tends to be that way generally, as opposed to most of today’s movies that play on a significantly larger canvas.
Though that’s not all. Another important factor is that the voice work, by Bruce Boxneitler (who played Tron in Steven Lisberger’s original film) and Elijah Wood that really bring the characters to life.
It’s also a bit more mature than I expected it to be and doesn’t seem to talk down to younger viewers, which is always a good thing.
It also explores how Tron became Renzler, something ‘Legacy’ couldn’t find the time to do.
But what many people watch the Tron films for are the innovative vehicles, such as the light cycles and light jets. “Tron: Uprising” introduces a few of it’s own, two of which I have pictured below.
The animation is primarily CGI, though people–particularly their faces–are done in a cartoon-like fashion. I mentioned in a prior post that the characters are similar to those done by Peter Chung, though upon closer inspection, there’s little resemblance than the linearity of the characters to his work.
It looks like an expensive cartoon, and I hope that it stays that way because the characters are rendered in a very beautiful and fluid fashion, though what most interests me about ‘Uprising’ is that it has the potential to introduce viewers to new characters that could appear in an upcoming sequel to “Tron: Legacy.”
Sometimes, when novels and comics are adapted into movies, filmmakers take liberties with one aspect or another of the production, in an effort to create something that doesn’t alienate fans or casual viewers. Sometimes these changes are necessary for numerous reasons, such as: a particular novel may be too long, and scenes may require cutting if it’s to fit the running time allocated; or characters as written don’t work in the film’s context.
When that happens they may be removed all together, or perhaps re-written as composites of various other characters that didn’t exist in the original source material.
This approach is also used with comic-based films, with varying degrees of success. For example, anyone that has read the X-Men comics noticed immediately that the costumes vaguely, if at all, resembled those from the comics. This was probably done because the filmmakers believed that the costumes worked for that particular milieu, but wouldn’t translate outside of it.
