Kira in the 21st Century

After May’s screening of the Dark Crystal, Ami informed me that a long planned sequel to the film was being made. I discovered when doing some research on the 1982 film that The Dark Crystal is, rather unsurprisingly a film with quite a cult following. Like website upon blog cult following. The fittingly extensive Power of the Dark Crystal blog has meticulously tracked the status of the film’s preproduction through late last fall. The film is being directed by Gendy Tartovsky, of Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls, and Samurai Jack fame, and if anything bodes well for a quality sequel-- or rather re-imagining of the Dark Crystal world, as Tartovsky himself is pitching it—it’s having one of the premiere western animation directors as the auteur. But how much Tartovsky aesthetic will be at play in The Power of the Dark Crystal? Tartovsky supposedly only agreed to direct the film if Brian Froud, the nutty 70s fantasy illustrator, designed the films characters, as he did in the original Crystal. Moreover, the Power of the Dark Crystal is of course a Jim Henson Co. Production. Since Henson Productions’ recent collaboration with Neil Gaiman, MirrorMask, was such an incoherent mash of weird psychedelic CGI, and decidedly un-Gaimanlike in its aesthetic (or maybe I’m just expecting all Sandman all the time from him) and since the director of MirrorMask, Dave McKean was originally slated to direct Power of the Dark Crystal and backed out, I can only imagine that Tartovsky will merely serve as a hollow vessel for supposedly channeling Jim Henson himself back from the beyond. In fact even Frank Oz responded to the idea of a Dark Crystal sequel with only “Why?” Sometimes collaboration can lead to great cinema, and sometimes it just becomes a horribly diluted power struggle.