The Legend of Zelda (film)

The Legend of Zelda is a 2006 computer-animated fantasy adventure film directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin. Based on the video game series, it is the reboot in The Legend of Zelda film series, preceded by 1996's The Legend of Zelda.

The film became a critical and commercial success, grossing $434 million worldwide and becoming the eighth-highest-grossing film of 2006, behind Mission: Impossible III. It was praised for its darker plot, sets and a story appropriate for a young audience. It was followed by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (2010).

Plot
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Cast

 * Tom Cruise as Link (motion-capture)
 * Bill Hader as Link (voice)
 * Nicole Kidman as Princess Zelda
 * Christopher Plummer as King Harkinikan
 * Russi Taylor as Spryte
 * Mona Marshall as Impa
 * April Winchell as Triforce of Power
 * Julie Andrews as Triforce of Wisdom
 * Jason Marsden as Prince of Hyrule
 * Jim Cummings as Error
 * Jonathan Frakes as Bagu
 * Drew Barrymore as Kidnapped Child
 * Jonathan Winters as The Wise Men
 * Robin Williams as Tingle
 * Rob Paulsen as The Riven Man
 * Kath Soucie as The Healing Lady
 * Frank Welker as Magician

Pre-production
Immediately after finishing the 1996 film, director Robert Zemeckis with help from James Keltie and Shigeru Miyamoto segued into directing The Legend of Zelda reboot. In late August 2002, Universal hired Paul Haggins to write a script of the film. On November 10, 2002, Universal Pictures announced a reboot for 2006. The film, originally envisioned as a live-action film with an action-adventure fantasy-drama tone, was intended to be developed by DreamWorks Pictures. Around the same time, Brian Grazer, founder of Imagine Entertainment, was bought out by ImageMovers, a studio which uses motion-capture technology to create three-dimensional CGI images of characters.

Tom Cruise described doing the motion-capture as physically demanding work: "A lot of running, jumping, falling, hitting, spinning. I wore a harness for, like, 85 percent of the movie. It was uncomfortable." After spending six weeks outfitted in a special sensor-equipped performance-capture suit while simultaneously performing Link's lines, Cruise's voice sounded too mature for the character and was dubbed over by that of 23-year-old newcomer Bill Hader.

Filming, animation and visual effects
Over 450 graphic designers were chosen for the project, the largest team ever assembled for a Sony Pictures Imageworks-produced movie as of 2006. Designers at Imageworks generated new animation tools for facial, body and cloth design especially for the movie, and elements of keyframe animation were incorporated into the film in order to capture the facial expressions of the actors and actresses. The mead hall battle scene near the beginning of the film, among others, required numerous props that served as additional markers; these markers allowed for a more accurate manifestation of a battlefield setting as the battle progressed. However, the data being collected by the markers slowed down the studios' computer equipment and five months were spent developing a new save/load system that would increase the efficiency of the studios' resources. To aid in the process of rendering the massive quantities of information, the development team used cached data. In the cases that using cached data was not possible, the scenes were rendered using foreground occlusion, which involves the blurring of different overlays of a single scene in an attempt to generate a single scene film.

Music

 * Main article: The Legend of Zelda (soundtrack)

Theatrical
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Home media
The Legend of Zelda was released on home media on May 22, 2007 in the United States on DVD (in separate widescreen and pan and scan editions), HD-DVD, and on Blu-ray Disc on August 12, 2008.

Box office
The Legend of Zelda opened theatrically on May 12, 2006, alongside Just My Luck and Poseidon, and grossed $22.2 million in its opening weekend, ranking number three at the North American box office behind Mission: Impossible III. The film ended its theatrical run on September 18, 2006, having grossed $73.7 million in North America and $68.2 million overseas for a worldwide total of $141.9 million against a production budget of $75 million.

Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 78% based on 205 reviews, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A life-affirming, if saccharine, epic treatment of a spirit-lifting figure in sports history". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 43 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade A on scale of A to F.

Robert Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4, and wrote: "The movie's races are thrilling because they must be thrilling; there's no way for the movie to miss on those, but Zemeckis and cinematographer, Erik Messerschmidt, get amazingly close to the action."

Accolades
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Sequels
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Transcripts
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