The fantastical kids series is part of Netflix's expanded deal with DreamWorks Animation.
Guillermo del Toro revealed the new trailer, release date, and first footage from his animated Netflix TV series this past weekend at New York Comic Con.
The Dreamworks Animation project starring Anton Yelchin, Kelsey Grammar, Ron Perlman, Steven Yeun, and Charlie Saxton looks great. I won't give too much away, but the footage we saw at NYCC opened with two trolls fighting under a surban bridge, one of whom is voiced by Tom Hiddleston.
From there, del Toro and executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Rodrigo Blaas open up a whole world and mythology. We don't get to see much of the troll world in the first episode — aside from a truly spectacular glimpse at Troll Market — but the visual style is beautiful and cinematically-minded, even in the suburban California parts that make up much of the first episode.
Trollhunters Trailer
Check out the trailer...
Trollhunters Release Date
Trollhunters will premiere on Netflix on December 23rd.
Trollhunters Synopsis
Trollhunters tells the story of one family's legacy as child trollhunters and the magical, hidden world affecting the residents of the fictional suburb of Arcadia. According to Netflix, it “will unleash a new, fantastical world wrapped around two best friends who make a startling discovery beneath their hometown.”
Trollhunters will be a TV series based on del Toro's children's novel of the same name, co-written with Daniel Kraus, and it just landed itself some impressive voice cast members. According to Variety, Anton Yelchin (Star Trek) as Jim, Kelsey Grammar (X-Men: The Last Stand) as a kindly troll who helps Jim, and Ron Perlman (Hellboy) as “a sinister troll who targets Jim and his friends for battle" are joining the Trollhunters team.
"I wanted something clean, crisp, very humanistic, very emotionally pure,” said Del Toro at the NYCC oanel. "A family series that you could watch with your parents or your kids, very much the same spirit that made us make The Book of Life.”
Trollhunters Images
Trollhunters Book
This book series on which the program will be based is a cross between kid-friendly horror and fantastical adventure with excerpts like so...
“You are food. Those muscles you flex to walk, lift, and talk? They’re patties of meat topped with chewy tendon. That skin you’ve paid so much attention to in mirrors? It’s delicious to the right tongues, a casserole of succulent tissue. And those bones that give you the strength to make your way in the world? They rattle between teeth as the marrow is sucked down slobbering throats. These facts are unpleasant but useful. There are things out there, you see, that don’t cower in holes to be captured by us and cooked over our fires. These things have their own ways of trapping their kills, their own fires, their own appetites.”
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter about the Trollhunters animated project (which was then set to be a film) back in 2010, del Toro said: “I wanted very much to develop a story that could be written for kids but dealt with a genre that was scary. It essentially combines fairy tales with modern times and is about how difficult it is to be kid. Normally, kids are idealized in animated films. But the growing pains, married with the notion that there is a world right next to us that is completely plagued by creatures of ancient lore, it’s thematically fitting with the rest of my stuff.”
Dreamworks Animation's Deal with Netflix
Netflix is expanding its original programming presence in all directions this year, but fantastical family programming seems to be part of the mission. This could pair well with Netflix's other upcoming foray into book series adaptations: the much-anticipated A Series of Unfortunate Events. If the series both launch in 2016 (neither has started filming yet), then they will be only two of more than a dozen new series Netflix is bringing to streaming television in the new year.
Netflix's deal with DreamWorks Animation includes streaming rights to DreamWorks' feature film library, and extends the rights to original series like The Adventures of Puss and Boots, Dinotrux, and Dragons: Race to the Edge — which are all awesome-sounding shows apparently currently in existence.
Back in January, Netflix and DreamWorks Animation announced an expansion of their existing mutli-year distribution deal, giving Netflix the global rights (outside of China) to many of DreamWorks' original series. This included Trollhunters, a new project from Oscar-nominated director Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy), set to launch this year.