Genndy Tartakovsky's POPEYE Film Project Has Been Revived By King Features
Samurai Jack and Primal creator Genndy Tartakovsky has been wanting to develop a CGI animated Popeye movie for years. Over six years ago, Sony Pictures Animation announced that they would be producing the film for Tartakovsky. The filmmaker shared some test animation for the film giving us a little taste of what he was planning, but then nothing ever happened with it.
In 2015 Tartakovsky said he was leaving the project and Sony Animation was going to move forward without him, but that obviously didn’t happen. In a previous interview, he said:
“I was in love with what we were doing, but I think the studio is going through changes and I don’t know if they want to make the Popeye that I want to make.”
Animation Magazine is now reporting that Genndy Tartakovsky is back on the project and is teaming up with King Features to continue his development on it, which is great news! Tartakovsky, who also directed the Hotel Transylvania films, is a great storyteller, and this is a project that I’ve been wanting to see happen.
When talking about it in the video for the test animation, which you can watch below, he said:
"From a young child, I was really destined to make one movie, and that movie was Popeye. Even so much, that when I first started animation, my very first teacher was a 90-year-old Popeye animator from the Fleischer studios, Gordon Sheehan. So I feel like it’s destiny that’s brought me here to Sony Pictures Animation to make Popeye an animated feature."
He also gives some insight into the challenges of adapting this 1929 character for a modern-day audience, saying:
"Popeye more than anything else really embodies the physical humor, and the whole reason I do animation is to laugh at movement… We’ve been working on Popeye for a little while now and we wanted to really explore how Popeye would translate from the old ’30s cartoons and ’40s cartoons to today. To contemporize him without losing the heart and sincerity of what Popeye really is, and what he meant to me as a kid and as an adult.
With the project now set up at King Features, Tartakovsky is said to be going back to the drawing board. This is obviously a passion project for the filmmaker, and as a fan of all his past work, I’m excited to see his vision for Popeye brought to life!