Dan Clowes To Write Paul And Michel Gondry's Animated Movie

Last year Michel Gondry let word leak that he and his 16-year-old son Paul are working on an animated film. Last week /Film got the chance to speak to Gondry in San Francisco, and learned that Dan Clowes, the comic book artist, best known for the film adaptation of Ghost World, is writing the film's screenplay. Clowes and Michel Gondry have discussed collaborating on a film adaptation of Rudy Rucker's novel Master of Space and Time, which has been in development heck since 2004. This would be their first collaboration.

"It's based on [Gondry's son Paul's] universe. He's a sixteen year old. He's very unique, very funny and very violent in his drawing and his art, showing everything that you could think of that I should have stopped him from coming in contact with, but I failed. He grew up watching Tom & Jerry and Ren and Stimpy, Sponge Bob. If you take all that and mix it with Gangster movies with blood, you get his universe."

"We're translating our relationship into a futuristic story with a dictator and a rebel. He's the dictator in the story and it will be based on his art."

Gondry also told me that the film is titled Migel Munya (SP? Gondry's French accent sometimes hakes him difficult to understand). So what is the movie about?

"[The movie is] about a dictator who runs a crazy world where hair is the source of energy. The people there are forced to create art, and if the art is too good they are executed. So the dictator there doesn't want anyone to be better than him so he kills the inmates who make good art. They try to make rubbish art but sometimes the worse it is for them, the better it is for the dictator."

Paul Gondry is a published comic book author who splits his time between New York and Paris. In July 2007, Paul made an animated music video for the Southern California garage band the Willowz. Titled "Take a Look Around", director-file described it "a sometimes-gory tale of war between robotic soldiers and mutants, with a heaping helping of apocalypse and anti-consumerism." Watch that video after the jump.

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