Top 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2013: #94. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The Young and Prodigious Spivet

The Young and Prodigious Spivet

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Writer(s): Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant
Producer(s): Frédéric Brillion and Gilles Legrand
U.S. Distributor: Rights Available
Cast: Helena Bonham Carer (T.S.’s mom), Callum Keith Rennie as his dad, Judy Davis as the head of the Smithsonian, along with Rick Mercer, Niamh Wilson, Robert Maillet, Jakob Davies, and Dominique Pinon.

A cousin of sorts to Scorsese’s Hugo (same 3D team worked on both features), Jeunet appears to be the go-to guy for rich, fable-like worlds full of childlike wonder. After conquering adults that are still young at heart with Amelie (less so with A Very Long Engagement) Jeunet did an admirable job merging goofiness, surrealism and politics with Micmacs, and our thinking is Reif Larsen’s novel should play out well in a 3D scapes.

Gist: Based on the bestselling Reif Larsen novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet and it’s a tall tale about what happens after young T.S. receives a phone call from Smithsonian Institute telling him he’s won a prestigious prize for inventing this perpetual motion machine. The 12-year-old cartographer secretly leaves his family’s ranch in Montana where he lives with his cowboy father and scientist mother and travels across the country on board a freight train to receive the prize.

Release Date: Duel release in Belgium and France in October, this will surely interest programmers from, Sitges, the London BFI and TIFF film festivals. Sony Pictures Classics would once again be the ideal distributor for the U.S.