The witty Peter David is the latest of several folks to send me this link to a blog post by Heidi Gilbert, an artist who thinks that the movie version of the Broadway show Wicked should be animated, not live-action. She makes her case quite nicely with a video she cobbled up with a song (the best song, most feel) from the show. Never having seen Wicked, I don't know what to think of this notion…but I do believe that the whole concept of musical comedy in the cinema has been served better by animation the last few decades than by live-action.
About a dozen years ago, I was briefly involved with an attempt to bring a Broadway musical to the screen in animated form. In that case, it was a show that no one wanted to film in live-action and the argument against doing it as a cartoon (which won out with the studio) was that if the show had any true following, it would have been done with real people, not drawn ones. In other words, they were afraid it would look like, "We did this in animation because it wasn't important enough to be done live-action." Silly, I know…but it would have cost an awful lot of money to do it animated and even that much of a negative was reason enough to not proceed with it. I don't think anyone would think that of Wicked. It's just too popular a show. What they would think is that in live-action, it might snag all those Glee watchers, whereas in animation it might get lumped in with kiddy fare. So even if it's a good idea, I doubt they'd chance it.