Philip K. Dick's King of the Elves movie

07 June 2008

Gerard Wood

If Walt Disney Animation Studios was ever going to adapt a Philip K. Dick story for the big screen, it was going to be The King of the Elves. Though not the only fantasy Dick wrote, it is very Disney friendly. A digital 3-D animation, King of the Elves will be the Studio’s 50th feature. The team responsible for Brother Bear, producer Chuck Williams, and directors Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, are helming the project. Wallace Wolodarsky wrote the screenplay (he wrote and produced some 50 episodes of The Simpsons), and David Arquette is the only cast announcement so far.

Disney describes the story as a:

...fantastic and imaginative tale about an average man living in the Mississippi Delta, whose reluctant actions to help a desperate band of elves leads them to name him their new king. Joining the innocent and endangered elves as they attempt to escape from an evil and menacing troll, their unlikely new leader finds himself caught on a journey filled with unimaginable dangers and a chance to bring real meaning back to his own life.

If you’re thinking Tolkien elves, think again. Phil Dick’s elves have more in common with Dobby than Legolas. For a start they’re all of about a foot tall. Quint at AICN describes early Disney art work in which the elves are “all green, with leaves and foliage growing off of them”. Which is a departure from Dick's elves who don't have a twig to share between them. In the Disney version this is clearly meant to explain why no one has seen the elves until now: it’s the perfect camouflage... assuming there are lots of trees and bushes, of course. This perhaps explains why Wolodarsky relocates the story from Colorado, where Dick set it, to the Mississippi Delta. More foliage, I guess.

Dick’s short story first appeared in print in 1953. It tells the story of Shadrach Jones, a kindly old fella who runs a gas station on a deserted highway in the middle of nowhere (if it’s not aliens, it’s bloody elves!). Fleeing with their dying king from bloodthirsty trolls, the elves turn up on Shadrach’s doorstep; he helps them out and before he knows it the old king has named him successor to the throne. For he is The One and will lead them into battle against the trolls and bring about the revival of the glorious Elf Empire. Go Shadrach!

There are some familiar, if undeveloped, Dickian themes here – the world is not as it seems - but good fun though it is, this is not overly sophisticated stuff. Two things stand out as far as the development of Dick’s writing from this early fantasy to his later SF is concerned: visited by elves, Shadrach barely questions his sanity and then it’s not the existence of Elves he questions, it’s their presence in Colorado. And perhaps most telling, unlike Dick’s later dystopian fiction this ending is pleasantly escapist.

All of which makes this an ideal project for Disney. Don’t hold your breath, though, this one has a scheduled release of December 2012.

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