Amelie's Jean-Pierre Jeunet Developing Animated Sci-Fi Feature

French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet has quite the unusual CV.  He is best known for the films Amelie, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, but he also directed Alien Resurrection. What is lesser known is that he also has a past in animation.

In total, he has co-directed four animated shorts, the first in 1978 and the most recent in 2016. His 1981 Le Manage even won a Cesar award for best short. His most recent animated film was called Deux Escargots S'en Vont or Two Snails Set Off. It's a stop-motion film set to a poem by Jacques Prévert, and co-directed with Romain Segaud. The models are produced by Jeunet himself.



He has now announced that he intends to make his first animated feature. Very little is known about the project, other than the fact it is sci-fi. Jeunet plans to direct the film from a script from Laurent Witz, writer and co-director of Mr Hublot. which won an Oscar for Best Animated Short a few years ago.

Other than that, we know very little about what to expect. Jeunet mainly produces films for adult audiences but has also worked on family films. It's not clear who this will be aimed at.

This is unlikely to be Jeunet's next film, and is only one of a number of projects that he is developing at this time. So it's likely to be some time before we see it- if indeed it gets the greenlight at all.  We hope it does come to fruition though, because it's always fascinating to see a filmmaker better known for live-action moving into the animation world (or in his case, moving back).

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