Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley is moving from the world of animation and into live-action. According to THR, he’ll head to Sony and make his live-action feature debut with Malamander, an adaptation of Thomas Taylor’s bestselling adventure novel published last year.
Cooley has signed on to write and direct Malamander, a children’s adventure story “set in Eerie-on-Sea, a seaside town filled with oddball characters and mysteries as murky as its winter fog. A young boy named Herbert Lemon, who acts as a hotel’s lost-and-found director, teams up with Violet Parma, a young girl who is looking for parents she lost as a baby, setting off on an adventure that involves a half-man, half-monster who is said to make dreams come true and a hook-handed man pursuing them.”
Cooley is hardly the first animator to make the move to live-action. He’s not even the first from Pixar to do it. Brad Bird jumped from The Incredibles and gave us the awesome Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol and not-so-awesome (but ambitious) Tomorrowland.
It’s been a 17-year journey at Pixar for Cooley, and deciding to leave isn’t something he has taken lightly.
“Creating films and telling stories at Pixar for 17 years has been a dream. The quality of our storytelling was a direct correlation to the quality of the people at Pixar who shaped those stories together, and they will always be my family. And while it was a hard decision to leave, I am so excited to jump into and create new worlds with new collaborators and partners. There are so many stories that I want to tell, and I hope to bring some of that Pixar magic with me wherever I go.”
First up for Cooley is an animated Transformers prequel movie for Paramount, after which he’ll jump right into Malamander.
