Big news from The Jim Henson Company! Power of the Dark Crystal, the sequel to the 1982 film The Dark Crystal that’s been gestating for a few years now, is ready to go forward with Michael and Peter Spierig directing. The pair previously made the films Undead and Daybreakers, so this is a fairly significant shifting of gears for them. The script comes from Craig Pearce (Moulin Rouge!) based off a story by Annette Duffy and David Odell. If you’ll recall, this film was once going to be directed by Genndy Tartakovsky (creator of Samurai Jack). Fortunately, one part of the original announcement remains true, with The Dark Crystal‘s concept designer Brian Froud back to continue creating the characters he was responsible for nearly three decades ago. The picture I’ve included with this post is a conceptual piece provided when the film was first announced back in 2006.
The film will be produced using a combination of puppets, animatronics, live-action elements and CGI. In the press release, Michael Spierig says “we feel a tremendous amount of responsibility in telling this story with the same meticulous care that Jim Henson and Frank Oz gave the 1982 original.” Peter Spierig follows up by explaining that “this is a chance to take the world of puppetry into the modern age by using modern techniques (like motion capture CGI) and the tried and true methods (like puppetry and animatronics) to create a one hundred percent real world that is unique to The Dark Crystal.” Hopefully this isn’t just lip service.
The official story premise is as follows:
Set hundreds of years after the events of the first movie when the world has once again fallen into darkness, “Power of the Dark Crystal” follows the adventures of a mysterious girl made of fire who, together with a Gelfling outcast, steals a shard of the legendary Crystal in an attempt to reignite the dying sun that exists at the center of the planet.
For those that care (read: not me), Power of the Dark Crystal will be produced in 3D. The movie does not currently have any distributors signed on.
