Michael Jackson’s Chimpanzee is Getting a Stop-Motion Animated Movie

Bubbles is finally getting his moment in the spotlight.

Netflix is talks to produce Bubbles, a stop-motion animated feature film about Michael Jackson’s most famous pet, who accompanied the singer/songwriter on his many travels through the 1980s. Hollywood Reporter reports that the film will be directed by Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok) and Mark Gustafson, who was the animation director for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, and who won an Emmy Award for his work on Claymation Easter.

Bubbles will tell the story of Michael Jackson’s life from the perspective of Bubbles, the chimpanzee who lived with the entertainer from the early 1980s until 2003, at which point Bubbles had grown too aggressive. Bubbles now lives at the Center for Great Apes in Florida, where he was visited by Michael Jackson’s sister Latoya Jackson after the singer’s death in 2009.

Also: Netflix Announces ‘The Dark Crystal’ Original TV Series

The screenplay for Bubbles was written by Isaac Adamson, and topped the Hollywood Black List – which highlights the industry’s best unproduced screenplays – in 2015. The film will be produced in an animation style similar to the Oscar-nominated Anomalisa, a disturbing drama co-directed by Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York) and Duke Johnson, who directed the stop-motion animated Christmas episode of the cult series Community.

As near as we can tell, this is the first animated biopic told from the perspective of the subject’s pet chimpanzee, but if you can think of any exceptions we’d sure as hell love to hear about it!

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Top Photo: Jim Smeal/WireImage

William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.

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