The Legend of Zelda film director wants it to be "grounded" so don't expect a motion captured Tingle

The Legend of Zelda movie director Wes Ball has said he's aiming for something a little more "grounded" with his adaptation than he first envisioned a decade ago.

Now, admittedly, right off the bat when I saw Wes Ball, the guy behind the soon-to-be-released Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, say that he wants his Zelda move to be more "grounded" and "real" alarm bells went off in my head. You're telling me you want the series where its protagonist, Link, has been a furry, a painting, and a Deku scrub, to be grounded? But this is why it's important to read on a touch, as that's not exactly what he's getting at. Ball recently spoke in a brief interview with Polygon, where he was asked about his more than a decade old tweet about a hypothetical Zelda film, in which he said "Since I could never even hope to have the chance to direct it... the next big mo-cap Avatar-like movie should be... THE LEGEND OF ZELDA."

Bear in mind, this was literally a month after the original Avatar released, so it's no surprise it was on his mind. These days, though, Ball is singing a different tune, saying that a completely motion-capture Zelda film "probably isn't his choice." He then went on to say he wanted the film to be more "grounded" and "real" so it more sounds like he doesn't want a bunch of CGI elf-like people wandering around green-screen sets. I'm hoping that means he's leaning more towards practical effects, a bit of a dying artform in a post-MCU world.

Ball went on to say that the team developing the film is "working hard, and we’re gonna make something great," continuing on to joke that if he said anything else "Nintendo will pop out of the bushes here and like yank me away." It's also sounding like he got his motion-capture fix with his Apes film, which is due out next week, May 9. "Like Avatar, and unlike the other previous Apes movies, there’s about 30 or 40 minutes of full CG in this movie. Like every leaf, every piece of bark, you know, full CG. So I got to have a little taste of that Avatar experience, where it’s just actors on a mocap stage pretending with all this crazy boxes and proxies for objects. That was really fun."

Funnily enough, Ball also recently said that there'll essentially be a motion-capture-less cut of the film on the physical release, where it will show all of the film's raw dailies.