Richard Kelly has a screenplay for an animated Southland Tales prequel

Poor Richard Kelly.

The man broke onto the scene with DONNIE DARKO becoming a huge cult classic for a number of years, although far AFTER its theatrical release.

Later he tried going more commercial with THE BOX, which disappointed both critics and audiences alike.

In between he directed a very strange film called SOUTHLAND TALES, and despite featuring recognizable faces like The Rock, Justin Timberlake, Seann Wiliam Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar and having a bit of a FIFTH ELEMENT vibe, it didn’t catch on and is slowly fading into obscurity.

Now I don’t subscribe to the theory that Kelly’s misfortune is deserved. I liked DONNIE DARKO back when it was cool to (now it’s cool to hate it). I actually thought THE BOX was pretty well done, and I appreciated most of the weirdness of SOUTHLAND TALES.

But as it turns out, the vast majority of those who saw it didn’t realize that it was chapters 4-6 of a six chapter story, with the previous installments existing as graphic novels that few read.

Kelly recently spoke at Kevin Smith’s Smodcastle, and had some news about what he’s been working on.

“There is another screenplay in place. It’s funny because I wrote scripts that I handed over to Brett Weldele to illustrate for the graphic novel, and now I’ve taken that graphic novel and adapted it into a new screenplay, which is streamlined and more coherent. So it’s becoming so meta that I don’t know what”s reality anymore.”

“I knew I had bitten off more than I could chew. I knew that people wouldn’t understand Southland Tales unless they read the graphic novels. And .5% of the people who see this movie are going to have read the books… … But I still to this day feel like Southland Tales is an unfinished film, and if it takes me until I’m in a wheelchair breathing oxygen, I’m going to figure out how to advance the graphic novels further — whether its trying to put them together as a low budget animated film, whether it looks like Waltz with Bashir or it looks like one of The Animatrix prequels… I still want to figure out a way to tell the entire Southland Tales story over six chapters because I think it would make a lot more sense to people and I think people would reassess the entire film and what it is.”

So that’s right, an animated SOUTHLAND TALES prequel could be in the works in the style of “THE ANIMATRIX.” Do you think there’s an audience here? Even if it was straight to DVD? Are there any actual actively interested SOUTHLAND fans out there or is he just talking to an abyss at this point?