A couple decades ago, legendary filmmaker David Lynch – who we have to thank for Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, the 1984 version of Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive, among other things – started working with The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, The Addams Family, and Welcome to Marwen writer Caroline Thompson on the screenplay for an animated movie called Snootworld… and even though the Netflix streaming service recently turned down the chance to bring Snootworld into our world, Lynch told Deadline that he’s not giving up on getting the movie made.
Lynch said, “I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge. I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it. Snootworld is kind of an old fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes. Old fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.“
Thompson told Deadline that the story of Snootworld is “wackadoo.” She said, “It takes my breath away how wacky it is. The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world.“
Thompson wrote the first and third acts of the screenplay, while Lynch wrote the second act. Lynch is on board to produce the film if and when it gets rolling, but isn’t sure if he’ll direct it. He had hoped that his daughter Jennifer Lynch, who has directed several feature films and a whole lot of television, could direct Snootworld, but she’s so busy that she thought her father should consider directing the movie himself or passing it to someone else. David Lynch hasn’t directed a feature film since Inland Empire in 2006, but he has directed many shorts since then, as well as all 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return.
Lynch hopes to find a home for Snootworld because, “I like this story. It’s something that children and adults can both appreciate…I’ve never really done a straight animation but with computers today it’s possible to do some spectacular things.“
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