Fox Animation Developing ‘The Dam Keeper’ Movie
Tonko House and 20th Century Fox Animation are partnering to develop a feature film based on the short film “The Dam Keeper,” which was nominated for a 2015 Academy Award.
Tonko House founders Robert Kondo and Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi will direct the feature film and Fox will distribute. They founded Tonko House in 2014 after working as art directors at Pixar and on “Toy Story 3,” “Monsters University” and “Ratatouille.”
Kane Lee, an independent producer formerly of Jane Startz Productions and Blue Sky Studios, will produce. Vanessa Morrison, president of Fox Animation, said, “We are thrilled to be in business with Tonko House and honored to help develop their groundbreaking short into a feature.”
The short film, which had no dialogue, was based on 8,000 digital paintings and centered on the friendship between the introverted Pig and the artistic Fox. The Tonko House team developed a pitch deepening and expanding the characters and world of the short film, which 20th Century Fox Animation executive Darlene Caamaño Loquet has shepherded and will continue to oversee for the studio.
The new film will have full dialogue and is intended to be made primarily in CG. Kondo and Tsutsumi are currently writing and illustrating a trilogy of “The Dam Keeper” graphic novels, the first of which will be released in 2017 by First Second Books, an imprint of Macmillan.
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