Tim Burton likes a bit of stop-motion animation. From Nightmare Before Christmas to Corpse Bride and onto the upcoming Frankenweenie, it’s a form of filmmaking he just can’t seen to get enough of. Now it seems he’s found a new project to animate in time-consuming frame-by-frame fashion, which would seem to fit many of his gothic interests as well – The Addams Family.
Deadline is reporting that Burton will direct a 3D stop-motion animated film based on Charles Addams’ original cartoon drawings of The Addams Family. As it’ll be based on the original images, the film isn’t going to be tied to the 60s TV series or the 90s movies (although Barry Sonnenfeld’s films stuck visually closer to Charles Addams’ original designs than you might think – which oddly at the the time led the comparisons to Tim Burton’s).
It would seem to be a perfect fit between director and material, with the only downside being that it’d be fascinating to see what he’d do with the death-obsessed family in live action. The movie has been set up at the Universal housed Illumination Entertainment, which is set to burst onto the scene later this year with the CG supervillain comedy, Despicable Me.
Burton is planning to delve back into the archives of the darkly comic images Charles Addams drew for the New Yorker, which show a sharper wit and social satire than we’ve previously seen from the strange family on screen. No writer is hired as yet, but apparently that will be remedied shortly.