Mix Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and the Jim Henson Company and you’re bound to get something good. Throw in a beloved fairy tale and stop motion animation and you’ve got yourself greatness. Deadline reports that Del Toro is producing a 3D stop motion Pinocchio film based on the Gris Grimly illustrated book of the story. Grimly will also be co-directing the film version with Mark Gustafson, the animation director of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Hit “more” for a few more stills and all the info we know about the upcoming film!
If you think the designs have a vaguely Tim Burton style to them, you have a good eye: MacKinnon and Saunders, the design studio who worked on The Corpse Bride, will develop the puppets for the film. Naturally the film will be a “darker” take on the fairy tale classic (which seems to be in vogue now with these fairy tale adaptations) and Del Toro tells Deadline:
“There has to be darkness in any fairy tale or children’s narrative work, something the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson and Walt Disney understood. We tend to call something Disney-fied, but a lot of people forget how powerfully disturbing the best animated Disney movies are, including those kids being turned into donkeys in Pinocchio. What we’re trying to do is present a Pinocchio that is more faithful to the take that Collodi wrote. That is more surreal and slightly darker than what we’ve seen before.”
Music for the film will be done by famed Australian musician Nick Cave, but that’s about as much as we know about the project so far. It’s likely that the release date is a good two or three years off due to the extensive, lengthy process that stop-motion animation takes, but it’s great news to know that not EVERY animated film has to be done by a computer, right?
Like the news or are you furious that another childhood classic is being “darkened”? Let us know in the comments below!
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