Animated Fantasy "Darkmouth" Snags Directors

You may or may not be familiar with the Darkmouth series of books- depending on whether or not you keep up to date with children's literature. Written by Irish author Shane Hegarty, the fantasy series centres around a young monster hunter named Finn. The book series was picked up by Alcon Entertainment back in 2015 as their first animated project.

Animation industry veterans David Pimentel and Douglas Sweetland have now come aboard as directors. Pimentel has worked on a long list of animated features including How To Train Your Dragon, Tarzan, Big Hero 6 and most recently, Moana. Sweetland was the director of Pixar's short Presto, co-director on 2016's Storks as well as working on a long list of animated films including Monsters Inc and Toy Story.


The pair will work from a screenplay set to be penned by Lloyd Taylor (writer of the now largely forgotten The Wild, and the upcoming Pigeon Impossible). The producers are Kira Davis, Simon Brooks, Craig Peck, Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson.

Three books have been published in the series so far- the most recent of which- Chaos Descends- was published in 2016. Alcon may well be hoping for a series if this does well.

This film was not on our radar until now, but this sounds like this could be in the vein of the How To Train Your Dragon series. The fact that they've signed on a veteran of the first film as their director is unlikely to be a coincidence, we suspect. Whatever inspired it, we're excited at the prospect of more full-blooded fantasy animation movies in future.

No release date has been announced at this time.

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