May 16, 2024

"Blue & Malone," a Spanish short film series about a fictional friend, is transformed into a feature film

The Spanish short film series Blue & Malone is adapted for the feature film The Impossible Journey by production company El Viaje Impossible Producciones.

The hybrid production, titled "About Two Imaginary Friends and their human companions," will be co-written by Fabrice Ziolkowski (The Secret of Kells) and directed by Abraham López (animation director of the recently released Dragonkeeper). Filming is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2025, with a release in 2027.

Filmmakers recall projects like Neverending Story, Harry Potter, and ET, promising films that will be epic on scale. It combines Cg animation, live action and animatronics.

The Paramount Movie IF is also a hybrid production about imaginary friends, which will be released in the US tomorrow. The producers of "The Impossible Journey" revealed in a press release that the timing of the announcement was not accidental, taking multiple jabs at the new American film directed by John Krasinski, saying that their film was "not another film about an imaginary friend, but rather" about the film, the original, the pioneer. "I'm not going to let that happen," he said."

It's not yet clear how Paramount's film resembles Blue & Malone beyond the concept of imaginary friends, but the Blue & Malone filmmakers have certainly been at it for a while. They released the animated short Blue & Malone in 2014 and were nominated for the Goya Prize, Spain's top film award. They followed that with Blue & Malone: Impossible Cases in 2021, which won Goya with an animated short. Lopez also directed both of these films.

With the announcement of the feature film, producers today released the full Goya-winning Blue & Malone: The Impossible Case online. See it below and see if it's theater to see if they have a point: