It was just a month ago that Disney dealt a somewhat crushing blow to A Christmas Carol and Beowulf director Robert Zemeckis, closing down the ImageMovers Digital company that had produced those films, and basically telling the industry veteran, "Yeah, your mo-cap experiments? They're creepy and they're costing us a fortune."

But apparently not all bridges have been burned over there, as Variety is reporting that Zemeckis and his remaining ImageMovers company will adapt the forthcoming young adult novel Dark Life, with motion-capture animation quite possibly coming into play. The story is set on the ocean floor, where humans have begun to settle thanks to rising ocean levels and global warming. A teenage boy and a girl still living on the Earth's surface team together to uncover a conspiracy.

Much as it may be tempting to mo-cap all kinds of fish-human hybrids and create a bizarre underwater world, I'd be way more interested to see Zemeckis do this the old-fashioned way, creating an underwater seascape using good old-fashioned ingenuity. If Disney is as broke from all this mo-cap as they're claiming to me, that may easily wind up being what he has to do; let's just hope Zemeckis hasn't forgotten how to work with actors who don't have ping-pong balls on their faces.