Behold the 8-Bit Apocalypse in Pixels (2010)




When Tron hit the theaters back in 1982, it didn't become the overnight sensation that Disney had hoped it would be. Nevertheless, it led to some other movies, TV series, cartoons and comic books play with the concept of people becoming trapped inside of computers or things emerging from computers and into our real world. (See the Videoman episodes of the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends cartoon and the short-lived TV series Automan.) What I didn't know until a few hours ago is that French filmmaker Patrick Jean did a delightful short about this idea back in 2010 called Pixels, where characters from classic video games emerge from an old TV set to attack New York. It's a brilliantly bizarre short, and you can see it for yourself in the window below.




The good news is that Pixels is being adapted by Sony into a feature-length film that's set for release in 2016. The bad news is that the film will feature Adam Sandler as the star. (You can read a story about this over at The Wrap here.) I've never been a fan of Sandler's style of humor and something as strange and absurd as Pixels appears to me to be out of his comedic range. Even though Chris Columbus is scheduled to direct, maybe Sandler can bring in animator Genndy Tartakovsky to consult. He directed Sandler in Hotel Transylvania and Pixels is so close in concept and style to Tartakovsky's previous work that it can only benefit from his involvement.



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