The white apes in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel aren’t a main narrative force, although that has changed in Andrew Stanton’s adaptation. Here’s what the director had to say.

“No, they’re sort of an oversized gorilla in the books, and they’re kind of ubiquitous. They’re littered everywhere through at least the first several novels. They were always cool, just from a visceral standpoint, [but] they don’t really have a narrative function in the first book. So what we did is we made the White Apes a formidable creature that you kind of hear about throughout the movie, but you never really witness. There’s a subtle sense of anticipation for what these things might be like. Then Michael Kutsche – who did a lot of the designs on [the Johnny Depp movie] Alice in Wonderland – came up with this design on his own, for just their scale. He made them nocturnal, almost like moles – they stopped using their eyes, and just had a heightened sense of smell. We just love that. We needed a scene where Carter was going have to get out of his execution sentence in order to move the story forward, and we thought what better than having to go up against this formidable creature?”

 

Not bad! Not what I expected but I am kinda digging the look of that ape. It doesn’t look drastically different than some of the more recent creature designs we’ve seen in movies with the white ape in particular seeming that he’d walked right off the set of Middle-Earth. The other creatures look like something out of Star Wars but they certainly give us an idea of the art direction they chose with this movie.

Can’t wait to see more and hopefully we’ll get a clip for this movie in the near future.

The Film Stage

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