[Peter T Chattaway]

Tim Burton Next 3D Animated Film? Da Da Da, Da, Snap Snap, `The Addams Family'
EXCLUSIVE: Alice in Wonderland director Tim Burton has found a new 3D project. He will direct a stop-motion animated film based on Charles Addams' original ghoulish cartoon drawings of The Addams Family. Illumination Entertainment, the Universal-based family film unit headed by Chris Meledandri, has acquired the underlying rights of the Addams drawings, once a staple of The New Yorker magazine.
Other than being inspired by the same source material, the animated feature is unrelated to previous incarnations of Addams’ work, the 60s TV series, the two `90s feature film comedies that Barry Sonnenfeld directed with Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston, or the Broadway musical opening this spring with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in the starring roles. . . .
Mike Fleming, March 18

- - -

And so Tim Burton continues to strip-mine existing pop-culture artifacts instead of inventing something new and original.

Like, seriously, nearly every feature film he has directed has been a remake or a spin-off of an existing property on some level:

• Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)
  
• Batman (1989)
  
• Batman Returns (1992)
  
• Ed Wood (1994) -- debatable, perhaps, but it does remake several scenes from Wood's movies
  
• Mars Attacks! (1996)
  
• Sleepy Hollow (1999)
  
• Planet of the Apes (2001)
  
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
  
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
  
• Alice in Wonderland (2010)

And then there are the very few films he has directed that were "original" on some level -- only one of which, incidentally, is a live-action effort from the past two decades:

• Beetle Juice (1988)
  
• Edward Scissorhands (1990)
  
• Big Fish (2003)
  
• Corpse Bride (2005)

Which is not to say that Burton has always adhered to his sources. Indeed, he usually DOESN'T; he usually turns each of the properties he adapts into some weirdly Burtonish thing that has very little to do with the original source material. Hence, e.g., Batman Returns turns one of its main villains from an eccentric gent with a thing for gadgets into a cartoonish freak that my friends and I called "Oswald Flipperhands". Hence also this review of Sleepy Hollow that just went up at Jonathan Rosenbaum's website the other day (I'm tempted to excerpt it here, but the whole thing is pretty good).

So I'm a little skeptical when Fleming says the new film will be "based on" the original cartoons.

FWIW, there was also a TV series in the late '90s called The New Addams Family that Fleming doesn't mention in his list of adaptations above.

This post has been edited by Peter T Chattaway: 18 March 2010 - 02:52 PM

[Tyler]

Peter T Chattaway, on 18 March 2010 - 03:48 PM, said:

And then there are the very few films he has directed that were "original" on some level -- only one of which, incidentally, is a live-action effort from the past two decades:

• Beetle Juice (1988)
• Edward Scissorhands (1990)
• Big Fish (2003)
• Corpse Bride (2005)

Big Fish was based on a novel by Daniel Wallace, too. FWIW, Burton changed quite a few things from the book for the movie.

[NBooth]

There have also been at least two cartoons and one straight-to-video release (as a back-door pilot to the TV show Peter mentions). The Addams Family have gotten around. I'm dubious of the claim that the TV show will have no bearing on the film--the relationships between the characters are, if I'm not mistaken, far more ambiguous in the original comic. Just by deciding, for instance, whether Uncle Fester is an uncle on Gomez' side or Morticia's will call in associations to previous incarnations. Even the characters' [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Addams_Family#Names"]names/url] are in some sense products of the original TV show.

I'm actually interested to see what Burton does with this. It seems more up his alley than Alice in Wonderland (in fact, for the longest time I thought the first two Addams movies were Burton productions).

This post has been edited by NBooth: 18 March 2010 - 03:53 PM

[Persona]

Thank you, Peter. You just explained something I couldn't figure out for myself, which is why I thought Burton was the next big thing with Edward Scissorhands, and haven't really cared for him since.

This post has been edited by Persona: 18 March 2010 - 03:34 PM

[Peter T Chattaway]

MTV Movies Blog is now reporting that Tim Burton has denied the initial report. Which, given MTV's track record in these matters, probably means the initial report is true. Recall, if you will, how MTV once reported that there was no truth to the rumours about the plug being pulled on Spider-Man 4.

[Ryan H.]

Burton has made a handful of good films (ED WOOD and SWEENEY TODD are my two faves), but I'm increasingly growing tired of his shtick, particularly since Burton selects projects so obviously suited to his sensibilities that I feel as though I've already seen them before I actually sit down to view them. No ADDAMS FAMILY, please.

This post has been edited by Ryan H.: 19 March 2010 - 03:35 PM

[Persona]

It would be cool to see Burton pull a transition like Aronofsky ala The Wrestler. It doesn't appear to be in his interest now, though.

This post has been edited by Persona: 19 March 2010 - 03:25 PM