New Details on the Plot and Characters of Disney's Giants

Last month we heard a lot of exciting details about Walt Disney Animation Studios' upcoming slate. Then at D23 a couple of weeks ago, that was all seemingly confirmed with the official announcement of the first film we'd heard about, Zootopia. Now we've just heard substantially more about Disney's next film after that, the Nathan Greno-directed Giants, via Bleeding Cool.

We speculated, back when he heard all the upcoming slate details from Blue Sky Disney, that Giants would be a Jack and the Beanstalk adaptation, and apparently that's bang-on. Bleeding Cool says that Giants "will be to Jack and the Beanstalk as Tangled was to Rapunzel and Frozen is to The Snow Queen."

Giants director Nathan Greno.

The post's author Brendon Connelly stresses that the film is early in development, and could easily fall by the wayside, as Disney's King of the Elves has done. "I understand," though, "that director Nathan Greno has had a couple of table reads and is getting the basic shape of the film into good order," says the article.

Bleeding Cool says the film shares some similarities with Bryan Singer's recent live-action flick, Jack the Giant Slayer, (hopefully quality isn't one such similarity). Here's the plot and character details BC outline for Giants:

• It features five Giants, named for the Fee Fi Fo Fum rhyme. "In this story, these names are abbreviations of Feebus, Fifen, Fogel and Fobert, a family of giants at the heart of the tale. There’s another brother too, Faustus, their leader;" Faustus is apparently the film's villain.
• The film has "a love interest from a class above Jack." The girl is called Angelina.
• There's a love triangle for Angelina's affections though; Jack's rival is Marco, who was "born to nobility. He’s a good guy, though, and the only reason he and Jack can’t be fast friends from the off is that they’re both drawn to Angelina."
• "The fourth human lead is Inma, a scrappy tomboy type – and something of a class warrior."
• In Giants, "the Storm Giants have made a pact with the humans. If the humans work for them and give them a percentage of their harvest and livestock, they’ll return the favour by keeping danger and threats at bay. At first, it must have been appealing to have a Giant agree to fight your corner, but the people aren’t getting enough for themselves now. As you might expect, there’s then a journey up to where the Giants live and some terrible conflict between the humans and the Storm Giants."
• The main crux of the story, though, is apparently "how Jack ends up befriending one of the Storm Giants."

Concept art for 2016's Zootopia, which is being directed by Giants director
Nathan Greno's Tangled cohort, Byron Howard.

Giants director Nathan Greno's biggest credit thus far is co-helming Tangled with Byron Howard. Howard is the man directing Zootopia; Zootopia "is creating an animal civilization where rabbits, wildebeests, foxes… act and dress like humans," and the film's "main character is a fox named Nick Wilde. He will be paired with a cop-bunny, Lt. Judy Hops." (More details on that and other projects discussed at D23 here.)

While we had previously, by default, associated Giants with the previously pegged release date of 23rd November, 2016, this post stresses that there's no release date yet settled on for the project. But regardless of how long it takes, this is yet another exciting project on the WDAS radar; I am a massive fan of Tangled and have very high hopes for Frozen, so you can colour me interested in another Disney fairytale with a twist.

Also of note, Connelly said in this post that he's also "seen a good chunk of [Frozen] and enjoyed it a great deal." That film hits cinemas on 27th November (US)/6th December (UK).