From Iron Man to early man, Jon Favreau’s next directorial project is a fantastic leap in subject matter comparable to the 2001 bone toss. Fav tells MTV that he’s revving up to start on Neanderthals, an ambitious-sounding motion-capture animated film parked at Sony Pictures that will not borrow its visual cues from Robert Zemeckis’ lifelike mo-cap flicks Beowulf and The Polar Express.

“Mo-cap is a misleading term because the animation won’t resemble the animation of ‘Polar Express’ or ‘Monster House.’ That was very lifelike,” he asserted. “This will be comedic and stylized. The animation will appear more like a traditional animated film. The mo-cap will be used simply as a basis for animation and to allow the performers to all be in one space together. Hopefully, it will inherit some of their spontaneity.”

This news plays bumper cars with the director’s recent confession that he wants to tackle an Avengers flick for Marvel, but it’s clear that Neanderthals, which was also written by Favreau, is written in red ink and followed by eight exclamation points in his day planner.

“We’ve been discussing this for almost four years now and it’s finally coming to fruition. It’s written and ready to go,” he enthused of the motion capture film. “[I'm hoping] we could do the mo-cap before the potential actors strike [June 2008]. I would then theoretically work on the animated part of it over the next couple of years.”

No stars or usual suspects are attached just yet, but the movie’s casting won’t “follow the paradigm of a [traditional] animated film.” And when Fav drops the word “paradigm,” you know he means “that Geico cavemen TV show sucked.”