Following the success of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which is the heavy favorite to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature next month, Netflix is getting back in business with the Oscar-winning filmmaker, who has signed on to direct the animated movie The Buried Giant based on the fantasy novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go).
Guillermo Del Toro and Dennis Kelly, who recently worked with Netflix on Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, will co-write the script together, and the director will also produce the film.
Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize-winning British writer whose novel follows an elderly British couple, Axl and Beatrice, who live in a fictional post-Arthurian England where no one is able to retain long-term memories.
ShadowMachine’s stop motion studio will serve as the home base for the production, just as it did for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.
“Guillermo del Toro is a visionary filmmaker and master of his craft. We couldn’t be more proud of the prestigious recognition for his Pinocchio, and we’re pleased to continue our creative partnership as he develops his next project with Netflix,” the streamer’s film chairman, Scott Stuber, said in a statement to Deadline.
“The Buried Giant continues my animation partnership with Netflix and our pursuit of stop-motion as a medium to tell complex stories and build limitless worlds,” added del Toro. “It is a great honor and greater responsibility for me to direct this screenplay, which Dennis Kelly and I are adapting from Kazuo Ishiguro’s profound and imaginative novel.”
Del Toro co-directed Netflix’s Pinocchio movie with Mark Gustafson, and the film garnered more than 50 million views in its first 28 days of release. Del Toro won two Oscars for The Shape of Water, and he is currently up for a PGA Award this weekend for Pinocchio. He’s represented by WME and Exile Entertainment, and he first mentioned his involvement in The Buried Giant in an interview with The Telegraph [via The Playlist].
