Future Film News: Guillermo Del Toro and Henson Team Up for Stop-Motion 'Pinocchio'

Guillermo Del Toro probably never sleeps.

After leaving "The Hobbit," which he was going to direct, he immediately announced that he'd be directing "At the Mountains of Madness" with James Cameron producing.

There's still talk of him doing "Frankenstein" with frequent collaborator Doug Jones as the monster, a new version of "The Haunted Mansion" for Disney, he has the third book in his "Strain" trilogy still to go, and he's producing his first video game, due out in 2013. He also has an active career as a producer, pushing everything from small Spanish projects like "Julia's Eyes" and surefire bets like "Kung-Fu Panda 2."

Now, Deadline reports that he's producing an "edgy" version of "Pinocchio" with The Jim Henson Company and Pathé, which produced last year's "The Illusionist." Gris Grimly, who illustrated a 2002 book based on the Carlo Collodi fairy tale upon which the film will be based, will direct alongside Mark Gustafson, the animation director on Wes Anderson's "The Fantastic Mr. Fox."

This version, aimed at audiences 10 and up, was written by Matthew Robbins, the cowriter on "At the Mountains of Madness," and will be "more surreal and slightly darker than what we've seen before," according to Del Toro, who hatched the story with Robbins.

Del Toro went into specifics about how this will bear out.

"The Blue Fairy is really a dead girl’s spirit. Pinocchio has strange moments of lucid dreaming bordering on hallucinations, with black rabbits," he said. "The many mishaps Pinocchio goes through include several near-death close calls, a lot more harrowing moments. The key with this is not making any of it feel gratuitous, because the story is integrated with moments of comedy and beauty. He’s one of the great characters, whose purity and innocence allows him to survive in this bleak landscape of robbers and thugs, emerging from the darkness with his soul intact.”

That "gratuitous" part is important, because even though the classic fairy tales are a little scarier than what we often see onscreen, "edgy" has become too much a buzz word and a cheap way to get people into seats.

Last year's "Alice in Wonderland" was a much "edgier" version of the story we were used to, but completely jettisoned the core elements that made the story special in the first place. It sounds like Del Toro and company are committed to striking just the right tone here.