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Happy Atlantis: The Lost Empire Anniversary, y'all! To commemorate this occasion, I thought it'd be a great time to remind everyone that this wonderful film was under consideration for the original Kingdom Hearts~
Back in October 2002, the Official U.S. Playstation Magazine did a special Q&A with key members of the development team, including Tetsuya Nomura (Director), Jun Akiyama (Event Planning Director + Scenario Writer), Tatsuya Kando (Animation Director) and Yuichi Kanemori (Battle Planning Director).
And now that I have your attention, here are some other interesting quotes:
On casting Haley Joel Osment:
Ideas rejected by Disney:
Read the rest here.
Back in October 2002, the Official U.S. Playstation Magazine did a special Q&A with key members of the development team, including Tetsuya Nomura (Director), Jun Akiyama (Event Planning Director + Scenario Writer), Tatsuya Kando (Animation Director) and Yuichi Kanemori (Battle Planning Director).
—What part wound up on the cutting-room floor that you most wanted to see make the game [character, level, gameplay idea, etc.]?
Nomura: A lot! In the very beginning, we were thinking about 30 worlds. In my mind, it’s natural that you have a larger piece to work with, then go through the elimination process. So 30 might sound like a lot, but if you think about it, in the end, you really have to cut out a lot of things. If there was a small number from the very beginning, you never know how many worlds you’d end up with.
One world we cut was Atlantis. It would have been a great opportunity to actually promote Atlantis itself. But the movie has a lot of vehicles, and we just have the Gummi Ship. So it wasn’t really a good fit in this game, because it would only be to place those vehicles or robots and fight with them. There was no good connection to the other worlds, and the story just didn’t fit that well.
And now that I have your attention, here are some other interesting quotes:
On casting Haley Joel Osment:
—Why Haley Joel Osment?
Nomura: Finding the right Japanese voice was a very extensive process, especially for Sora, Riku, and Kairi, the main three characters. We had many, many auditions to find the perfect people to fit those three characters’ images. Even with some of the other characters, we looked for the perfect matches, and we would call back actors several times to read the lines again. For the U.S. version, even before the Japanese Sora was cast, I already had Haley Joel Osment in mind. I hoped he would play the role, and I’m very happy he has done it. For the other characters, it was more of matching up their voices to the Japanese voices – to be as similar and to be as close as they can in English to the Japanese voices. When foreign movies, especially Hollywood films are shown in Japan, Japanese people can’t really judge the skills of actors and actresses from U.S. But his [Haley Joel Osment’s] skills are very apparent; it’s very clear that he’s a very good actor. I’m a big fan of his work.
Ideas rejected by Disney:
—Were there any ideas from Disney or Square that the other group didn’t agree with?
Akiyama: We had quite a bit of freedom crafting the storyline by combining various worlds through a theme, but one rule we had to go by was that characters from independent stories do not cross over with each other – meaning Aladdin would not meet Tarzan. Within the game, each world is depicted like a planet floating in space and Aladdin would not travel with Tarzan [Goofy, Donald, and the Princesses of Heart were the exceptions]. However, there were a few ideas in the early scripts that got rejected – they all had to do with the “bathroom”. I don’t think there were any other strict guidelines other than that.
Nomura: I wanted to include Walt Disney in the game, but that got rejected!
Read the rest here.
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