Starburns Industries, the production house behind the stop-motion Charlie Kaufman psychological drama Anomalisais tackling a live-action/stop-motion adaptation of George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The project is being helmed by Duke Johnson, who co-directed the 2015 Oscar-nominated feature alongside Kaufman.
Tom Hanks (Toy Story franchise, The Phoenician Scheme, Here) has been tapped to play the live-action Lincoln. The story centers on the 16th U.S. President’s grief over the loss of his 11-year-old son, Willie, and the strange afterworld that awaits him. The original novel was a best-seller and won the 2017 Booker Prize.
Producers for the Lincoln in the Bardo film include Hanks, Gary Goetzman (Playtone), Johnson, Paul Young & Devon Young Rabinowitz (Starburns). Executive producers are Saunders, Steven Shareshian and Aaron Mitchell.
Johnson made his solo live-action feature directing debut with The Actor (2025), based on the novel Memory by Donald E. Westlake. His animation directing credits include Moral Orel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole and Cosmos: Possible Worlds (for episode “Vavilov”). He was also the animation producer for I’m Thinking of Ending Things and animated the “Lumon Is Listening” video for Severance episode “Hello, Ms. Cobel.”
In addition to Anomalisa, Starburns Industries is known as a producer on the animated series Rick and Morty (Adult Swim), Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole (Adult Swim) and Animals (HBO).
The book’s synopsis, from Random House:
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.
From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state — called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo — a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.
[Source: The Hollywood Reporter]