The good news to come out of Disney canceling the Mouse Guard movie, a casualty of the mega-company’s buyout of Fox where the project was originally set up, is that you can get a look at some of the beautiful concept art from artist Darek Zabrocki. The bad news, of course, is that the movie is still canceled as of this writing. But who knows, if you like this art enough and make enough noise about it, maybe the Mouse House will reconsider canceling the adaptation of the medieval-themed comic series written and illustrated by David Petersen. Doubtful, but worth the effort.

Here’s a bit of what Zabrocki had to say about his time on the project and the art created for it:

This project took us in total +12 months of constant concept phase overlapping with already in-progress world building. Around half of the time we spent on just pre-production and brainstorming with different concept ideas. At the beginning there was just me, @kenbarthelmey and Wes Ball the director of the movie. We had so much fun since the project was so free to interpreting that let us go crazy with world and look of it. Later the team grew tremendously and the whole production took a route that brought in a new level of animation, cgi and interaction between concept team and actual animators from Weta. Which was quite new to me since intensity and live interaction was obviously visible day by day. Honestly being on this project from the very beginning made me aware and pumped onto how important and inspiring is to create a new Vast world. For me it was the biggest, most elaborate and in depth full of freedom project I ever took part in. Sadly cancelled but hey whatever was done was golden and its gonna resonate through my works in upcoming weeks, months or even years? in total I was responsible for the world building, props and a lot of action scenes. Cant wait to just spit it all out here!



Check out the concept art for Mouse Guard via Zabrocki’s Instagram (via CBR):

Gorgeous, no? Sadly, this is probably the closest we’ll get to seeing a big-screen adaptation of Mouse Guard any time soon.

For more on Mouse Guard, be sure to check out our recent, related write-ups: