Iconic Hollywood auteur Tim Burton, the creative mind behind films like Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and Big Fish (2003), will be reuniting with Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the writers of his 1994 award-winning Ed Wood, for his own take on The Addams Family, Deadline reports.
Burton’s Addams Family will be based on the humorous, macabre drawings of Charles Addams, the cartoonist who created the Addams Family cast of characters that first appeared in the New Yorker in 1938. The project’s producer, Chris Meledandri, recently acquired the rights to those characters, and Burton plans to stick to their original sharp wit and visual style, rather than going off the trio of successful 90s movie adaptations.
Distinguishing the Burton reboot of the Addams franchise will be the relatively novel medium the director plans to work with: 3D stop-motion animation.
The film will be “based on artwork that Tim absolutely loves,” said Karasweski, one of the project’s writers. “The retrospective in New York of Tim’s own artwork showed how much of an influence Charles Addams was to him. We want the tone to be as darkly funny and subversive as the Addams drawings, and we’ve come up with an approach that nobody has done before.”
It sounds like the perfect return to form for Burton, whose latest Alice in Wonderland was something of a disappointment to those expecting another classic Burton product; his heart just didn’t seem in it. Thankfully, this sounds like the kind of project that Burton can really get passionate about, with the kind of grim visual style and dark wit that have always been at the center of his most successful films. And the addition of 3D to Burton’s beloved stop-motion animation opens up a whole new dimension of creativity possibilities.
Source: Deadline
