The lineage of parent-child cinema collaborations is as variable as my commitment to the rent payment each month. Sometimes you get Ladd and Dern in Wild At Heart; other times you get Coppola and Coppola on The Godfather III, or for that matter on Dracula.
Which one will it be when Michel Gondry co-directs an animated feature with his son? Knowing Gondry, it’ll be none of the above, and…actually, I can’t even predict where this might go any more than you can. Doing so would be crazier than buying running shoes for Ron Kovic.
The filmmaker told MTV News that he and son are "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."
No comments on what form the animation will take — a futuristic story could be told with clay or stick figures or stop-motion mashed potatoes — but I can’t see him constraining things to one media. We know he’s got stop motion in his bag of tricks, and his feature films have featured touches of more traditional animation, as well.
Actually, I get a vibe off this that’s vaguely analogous to Ponyo On A Cliff, Miyazaki’s upcoming film that he plans to animate in a more loose style based on a story that came to him while spending time in a rented house near a cliff and which is partly inspired by his son. I’m sure it’s just the family relationships talking, and the fact that neither is likely to be conventional. Certainly the two films will be nothing alike, but the similarities are worth blind speculation until we have more real details on either one.