Anyone who has been reading the site for a while knows that I’m a huge fan of Jim Henson’s work, and the ongoing projects from The Jim Henson Company. Topping my anticipation list of their upcoming projects is the sequel to Henson’s classic The Dark Crystal, a movie that created a fantasy world entirely inhabited by Henson’s creations without any straight human characters at all.
The sequel, titled Power of the Dark Crystal has been in development for almost a year now. In fact, it was last February that Henson Company announced animation director Genndy Tartakovsky would be helming the project, which would mesh puppetry with CG creations in an effort to recreate the majesty of The Dark Crystal without the cost of all of those massive set pieces.
Yesterday, we reported some disappointing news; that it looked like Power of the Dark Crystal was heading straight to DVD, and would contain more animation than previously expected. To say this is greatly disappointing news is an understatement, so we decided to dig further, where we've discovered a lot of rumor and misinterpretation.
Nicole Goldman, Vice President of Marketing and Publicity for The Jim Henson Company, gave us the following: "We are thrilled and grateful that fans are so interested in the progress of Power of the Dark Crystal - an especially important project to us that will require great care and attention throughout the production process. A project of this scale takes a lot of time and energy and we continue to work through the development phase, maintaining our original vision of a film for theatrical release that combines traditional puppetry and animatronics with cutting edge CG animation. We'll be sure to keep fans up to date as more information is confirmed."
The best piece of this is that a theatrical release is still the plan for the movie. Not that I’m opposed to direct to DVD, as long as the medium can support what’s being planned, and it’s not just being used to turn a quick profit and cut budgets for films. Henson still plans to seek a theatrical release, so those direct-to-DVD rumors are just that – rumor.
The other side, the combination of CG animation and puppetry, is still vague enough that we don’t really know what to expect, but let’s remember that, in his final days, Henson himself was messing around with combining computer animation and puppetry. Creating the world of The Dark Crystal through CG isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly improves the chances of movies like this being made, even after the box office failure of Mirrormask. Puppetry is still part of the plan as well however, so let’s not go running around claiming that the movie is mostly animation until we see some footage.
I remain excited about Power of the Dark Crystal. The first production photos released had the right look to them, enough for me to give Tartakovsky the benefit of the doubt, despite a strong traditional-animation heritage on his resume. Hopefully he can pull off a movie that honors the original and continues the story in a respectful way.
