I’ve been trying to reach the filmmakers behind this project – one that we first alerted you to at least 3 years ago, and haven’t heard anything about since then – but I haven’t been able to get in touch with the director nor the producer, so I’m hoping that this post might actually get somebody’s attention; somebody connected to the production, assuming it’s still alive, which is uncertain at this point.
Long-time readers will remember it, but it’ll likely be new to those who weren’t reading S&A before 2012.
A quick recap…
It’s safe to say that many of you were just as excited as I was, with the 1-minute teaser trailer for what was a proposed animated feature called "Soul Man," which I posted on the old S&A site 3 years ago.
Little info was available at the time of that entry, but, thankfully, a producer of the film (Emilien Dessons) emailed me a day or so after my initial post, to fill in holes, which I shared with readers at the time.
Budgeted at about 35 Million Euros or ($48.5 million), and expected to be in 3D, it creator is Frenchman Guillaume Ivernel, and his Paris-based production house, Blacklight Movies. Billed as "’Blade Runner’ meets Blaxploitation," about 6 minutes of it was screened at Cartoon Movie, the European Cartoon Symposium, in 2011, and the response was said to be very good. Further, the Monsieur Dessons, the producer, said that an 8-minute preview trailer would be screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, and I was told that the same 8-minute trailer would be made available on the production company’s website a few days after its Cannes showing. As fart as I can determine, neither of those 2 things actually happened.
The official synopsis for the film read: “Set in an alternate world built on two levels, “Soul Man” turns on a former Polish detective entangled in a shady multi-billion-dollar biotech deal — the key to which is a baby girl the detective is asked to look after.”
As of 2011, it was still very much in development, as the filmmakers hoped to used the preview trailer they shot to produce the feature-length version, with a 2014 release date planned! 3 years later, it’s 2014, but not film, and no word of what its status is, and very little information is available about it online, and, finally, as I said, I can’t get in touch with either the producer or filmmaker, and I’m hoping that this post will get the attention of someone associated with the project (or who was associated with it, assuming it’s no longer alive), or with the production company, Blacklight Movies.
Even the website for Blacklight Movies is no longer active, as are affiliate pages I previously had bookmarked.
There is a Blacklight Movies Vimeo page, which is where I first discovered the project, as I recall, but all the videos have now been either deleted, or set to private, because there are videos listed on the account.
So I’m stomped!
All I was able to dig up was the just over 1-minute-long teaser embedded below (it’s actually not the same teaser we shared in 2011, although it shares some similar sequences). This was uploaded in May of this year, but not by the filmmakers.
If this post leads to any further information on the project, I’ll certainly share here. My guess is that the project is dead, or in limbo. They probably weren’t able to raise the funds. After all, $48.5 million is a lot of cash for what financiers would probably consider a "risk" investment.
In the meantime, watch the teaser below:
