Guillermo del Toro Producing PINOCCHIO With Pathe And The Jim Henson Company
According to a report from Deadline, Guillermo del Toro will soon be producing PINOCCHIO, yet another upcoming project on the workaholic's plate. He will be partnering with the illustrious Jim Henson Company and Pathe to bring about this movie using S3D stop motion!
Gris Grimly and Mark Gustafson will co-direct later this year. Their version of PINOCCHIO will be darker, naturally.
From Deadline: The storyline was hatched by Del Toro and Matthew Robbins, and the script was written by the latter, who has collaborated with del Toro on scripts for Mimic, the remake Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, and del Toro’s next directing project At the Mountains of Madness. Del Toro will produce with Jim Henson Company’s Lisa Henson and Jason Lust, and Allison Abbate. Gary Ungar is exec producer along with Pathe’s Francois Ivernel and Cameron McCracken.
This version is aimed at an audience 10 years and up, and a bit scarier than the Disney film. Australian rock musician and film composer Nick Cave has signed on to be music consultant and the puppets and 3D elements will be developed with MacKinnon and Saunders, the UK-based facility that worked on The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, and the upcoming Frankenweenie. Del Toro supplied the accompanying photos to convey the feel of a film that shares a core theme from the Disney film: the innocent whose inherent goodness, purity and love for his father saves him from a series of harrowing adventures and temptations in his quest to morph from wooden puppet to real boy.
“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,” del Toro said. “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.”
Of course he is on the precipice of starting work on the mammoth AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS with James Cameron as well! Mountains of work for this man!!
We'll have more info in the coming months about this stereoscopic 3D stop motion classic adventure!
