Fans of very-much-not-Pixar animation may be stoked at the news that Czech mentalist Jan Svankmajer is at work on an adaptation of Josef and Karel Capek's **Insect Play.
Originally written in 1921, it's a satire on oppressive totalitarian regimes, in which humans act like insects, and insects - gloomy beetles, warrior ants, whimsical butterflies - have all the personality. Josef Kapek was killed at Belsen in 1945, giving the play a horrible prescience.
Svankmajer's version, to be simply titled Insects, will "combine dark comedy, grotesque, classic horror genre, and both animation and feature acting," he says, making it very much of a piece with the animator's previous Alice, Faust and Little Otik. He's wanted to make it since the 1970s: "I always liked it. It's very misanthropic. It reminds one a lot of Franz Kafka."
"Svankmajer is 76 and I'm 72," laments Jan's long-time producing partner Jaromir Kallista. "We are very old mates, but we are still filmmakers, and we still passionately need to shoot new films; it's like a breath of fresh air!"
The pair are currently at work on the screenplay and securing funding. They plan to have the film completed by 2015.