The new trend with animated features seems to be shifting – the happy-go-lucky kiddie tales are out and complex, visually stunning masterpieces are in (How To Train Your Dragon, anyone?). DreamWorks Animation stepped out of their comfort zone with Dragon, and now they’re taking another giant leap – inking a deal with the creator of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro, as he makes the shift from writer/producer/director to all around movie mogul.
With the help of the studio, he’ll bring a new project, Trollhunters, to life – well, animated life, anyway. He just submitted the project to a publisher in the form of a young-adult novel and now he’s started to pen a screen version. But just because he’s working with DWA, don’t expect him to go all cheery on us. Del Toro says the project will be fairly dark, exploring the difficulties of being a kid using fairy tale elements in a modern setting. Fantasy mixed with reality? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? You can’t really expect anything different from someone like Del Toro, but we’ll see how far DreamWorks lets him go with the scarier elements of the project.
Though other DWA projects like the Shrek movies, Shark Tale, and Madagascar are on the sunnier side of things, it looks like the studio may be willing to get a little darker. In fact, they’re not just working with Del Toro for Trollhunters. He hit it off with DWA CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and as a result, he’s also signing on to act as a consultant and executive producer on a handful of DWA’s upcoming projects – Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots. But even before a deal was set, Del Toro agreed to help out with November’s Megamind, so we can look forward to a sneak peek of the elements he may bring to the table in the future.
Though he’s entrenching himself with work for DWA, Del Toro’s still got his hands in a few other projects including a few at Universal and another Haunted Mansion movie for Disney. (I guess the mouseketeers are hoping we forgot about their first feeble attempt at a Mansion movie.) He’s also continuing to develop a vampire trilogy with the author of Prince of Thieves (the inspiration for Ben Affleck’s The Town), Chuck Hogan. Man, this guy’s busy. I think Samuel L. Jackson may have lost his status as the hardest working man in Hollywood.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
