Guillermo del Toro directing Roald Dahl's THE WITCHES!!!
I was right at the perfect age to catch Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of Road Dahl'sTHE WITCHES when it debuted in 1990. What a creepy, disturbing and effective movie. Roeg captured the essence of Road Dahl perfectly, I loved in particular the scene of the WITCHES reveal, with our little man hiding and witnessing the transformation for the first time. That scene used to scare the hell out of me. You can see it in full HERE on Youtube... I just watched it and it still works in scaring an adult! Amazingly, because I don't know how he is going to find the time to fit it in, but PAN'S LABYRINTH director Guillermo del Toro has found himself attached to direct an adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic story. His fellow Mexican helmer Alfonso Cuaron, who will executive produce, spilled the beans to Empire. They already have a script!...
"Guillermo wrote this amazing screenplay really quickly... ...It wont be like the original Nicolas Roeg version, which was a beautiful film," because (and this is the very exciting part), del Toro plans to "do it completely in stop-motion animation."Now, notoriously stop motion animation takes years to perfect so I don't think we can expect this one to be complete anytime soon with del Toro working on THE HOBBIT for the best part of the next five years. So unless he does a Tim Burton (where he has a co-director contributing most of the work on the projects like NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS and A CORPSE BRIDE) then I don't see how this can be done.
Love the original book, love the movie. But can del Toro deliver more and is stop motion really the right direction to go here?