Here's the first trailer for Steven Spielberg's The BFG, his adaptation of Roald Dahl's beloved story of a friendly giant and the little girl he befriends on a great big adventure. Not unlike Robert Zemeckis' adventures in motion capture, such as The Polar Express and The Christmas Carol, the glances at the big giant, played in motion-capture by Mark Rylance, suggest a weird and frankly off-putting tendency towards realism in the general look of the creature, which did no major favors for Zemeckis in either case.
Rylance, who recently partnered with Spielberg on the undervalued Bridge of Spies, for which the actor will almost certainly score an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, is a great choice to voice the tremendous creature, and he has the ability to map out the physicality of the character through his many years on stage. That being said, the design of the creature, from what's gleaned here, doesn't have the imaginative quality that even the illustrations in Dahl's modest, magnificent book did.
Here's the teaser trailer for The BFG:
Beyond this, things generally look to be on the up and up, with Ruby Barnhill as the young girl who discovers the giant on one fateful night at "the witching hour" and the overall production design looks more than competent. The trailer is devoid of any images of Rebecca Hall, Jemaine Clement, or Bill Hader, who will co-star alongside Rylance and Barnhill, but there will no doubt be a bigger view of Spielberg's world in the coming months. As a bit of a Dahl die-hard, I'm excited to see how the whole thing will turn out, but from the looks of things here, we're a long ways away from the miracle that was Wes Anderson's adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
The BFG will be released in theaters nationwide on July 1st, 2016.
