James Gunn said that his new DCU will have actors following their characters into and out of animation.
James Gunn recently made his earth-shaking announcement of the new DCU slate, detailing the first ten movies and shows he intends to put out. Though it’s a great deal of exciting projects to look forward to, it doesn’t even make up the entire first chapter of DC’s new plan under the leadership of James Gunn and Peter Safran. During his announcement, Gunn noted that he would have characters “move into animation, out of animation, and usually have the same actor play their voice as who plays them in live action.” It’s an interesting prospect that makes characters familiar and easily identifiable no matter what project they are in.
When Gunn was talking about this transition between animation and live-action projects he introduced a series called Creature Commandos, which would be the first new project from DC Studios under Gunn’s reign so to speak. This following of actors from animation to live-action is something we saw in Marvel’s What If…? series, and now seems to be becoming a common practice as DC follows suit. But what does it mean for DC’s new shared narrative? There are only a few projects that Gunn calls “Elsewhere” existing outside the DCU storyline. So when an actor moves between live-action and animation, will the story come with them?
A Bigger Opportunity for DC
The first thing this might mean for the DCU is that the story Gunn and Safran plan to tell will be exponentially bigger. And if fans want to follow it, they’ll have to watch every show and movie that comes from DC. In a way, this will shrink the universe, with each project telling its own individual story, but at the same time folding into the larger universe. There will be more to find in this new system of storytelling, and it will make characters more recognizable. When you see one actor in their live-action costume, it will look like how it had been designed in animation.
Integrating the DC Universe like this requires a different system of organizing production. Directors of different projects may have to speak more openly with one another in order to ensure uniformity in story and character. Costume designers may have to collaborate with animators to make sure the physics of a superhero is understood on the same level. Perhaps the only people that will have a clear through-line for a particular character are the actors.
An actor who plays a certain superhero in this system will automatically follow that character through not just all of their adventures, but all of their incarnations in the DCU as well. So when one character is created in animation and then is seen in a live-action movie, the actor will know exactly what kind of experiences, inflection, and personality are unique to that character. In a way, the actors will be the binding forces between productions. And to have this big over-arching narrative is to make sure that what these heroes encounter continually builds to a single ultimate destination.
If the DCU can bind its projects together like this, the entire franchise will contribute to several projects. Where television and films were once exclusively individual, James Gunn may be introducing a different way to work in Hollywood. He might be building an entire ecosystem of actors, writers, and directors that will work cooperatively on multiple projects, instead of just a single movie.
Into and Out of Animation
One property we’ve seen about these moves between live-action and animation is a strange multiversal affectation between projects. In the way that Who Framed Roger Rabbit? worked with both live-action actors and animated characters, so too might Gunn’s DCU walk that line between realities. But it’s not likely that we’ll see one of these types of projects from a franchise as big as DC. That sort of animation/live-action movie might be too risky for them in today’s market. However, when one character moves from being drawn to being played in full costume, and the story and the actor come with them, a question gets raised. How did this event affect the character’s experience?
A lot of times, like in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or WandaVision, characters can cross these lines of what would be an in-story “reality” and in-story “fiction.” A character might tell their story by traveling between the lines of what’s real inside their universe, and we as an audience see that character affected by how they question what they perceive as reality. Most of the time, writers can explain this away easily enough by saying the words “multiverse” or “magic.”
But if James Gunn plans to take these characters out of a fully animated series and drop them into live-action projects, it will be interesting to see if that character is aware that they’ve switched mediums in storytelling space. It would be interesting to see a hero realize they’re no longer a cartoon. But in this case, it may be easier (for the writer and the audience) not to question anything and to just get on with the story. Either way, Gunn certainly has a big project ahead of him, as Marvel and DC continue to change the Hollywood landscape.
