Guillermo del Toro is moving forward on his long-planned 3D stop-motion animation adaptation of Pinocchio, joining forces with The Jim Henson Company and Pathe to bring this unique project to life. Working as a producer on a story he has been toiling away on for the past four years, Guillermo del Toro has provided two pieces of concept art and a look at the stop-motion puppets from the upcoming reimagining of this iconic fairytale, which you can check out below.

Gris Grimly and Mark Gustafson will co-direct this new version of Pinocchio, which is said to be edgier than the original animated Disney Classic. Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins concocted the idea, with Robbins writing the screenplay.

Nick Cave will be a music supervisor on Pinocchio, which is being geared toward ten-year-olds and up. MacKinnon and Saunders, the UK Company behind the stop-motion characters seen in The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, will be bringing the various different denizens of Pinocchio's world to life.

Guillermo del Toro had the following to say about the upcoming project, which he has spoken about many times in the past.

"There has to be darkness in any fairy tale or children's narrative work, something the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney understood. We tend to call something Disney-fied, but a lot of people forget how powerfully disturbing the best animated Disney movies are, including those kids being turned into donkeys in Pinocchio. What we're trying to do is present a Pinocchio that is more faithful to the take that Carlo Collodi wrote. That is more surreal and slightly darker than what we've seen before."

Guillermo del Toro went onto describe some of those darker elements.

"The Blue Fairy is really a dead girl's spirit. Pinocchio has strange moments of lucid dreaming bordering on hallucinations, with black rabbits. The sperm whale that swallows Pinocchio was actually a giant dogfish, which allows for more classical scale and design. 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."

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