In yet another Grimm-style fairy tale adaptation, which has seen some of our most beloved classics take the road down Macabre Lane; Guillermo del Toro has confirmed he’ll produce a 3D stop-motion feature version of ‘Pinocchio.’ And joining him in recreating the dark tale will be our very own Australian rocker: the prolific Nick Cave.
Cave will act as music consultant for the film, which will begin production later this year. Del Toro has developed the story with frequent collaborator Matthew Robbins (as scriptwriter), which they began hatching as far back as 2005. When they came back to it in 2008, they “added some great ideas that made it funnier and livelier, and we enlisted the aid of Nick Cave. For me, it was most important to find that voice and a big part of that is the music of the movie,” says del Toro.
“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… 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,” del Toro told Deadline.
The Jim Henson Co. and Pathe have signed on to produce the project, with Mark Gustafen co-directing alongside Gris Grimly (who illustrated a 2002 book of Carlo Collodi’s 19th century tale).
Del Toro explains: “The many mishaps Pinocchio goes through include several near-death close calls, a lot more harrowing moments. The key with this is not making any of it feel gratuitous, because the story is integrated with moments of comedy and beauty. He’s one of the great characters, whose purity and innocence allows him to survive in this bleak landscape of robbers and thugs, emerging from the darkness with his soul intact.”
Via Deadline
