Chris Wedge, the creator of ‘Ice Age,’ is getting ready to take on the children’s book ‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret.’ The live-action film will be written by John Logan, responsible for ‘The Aviator,’ ‘The Last Samurai’ and ‘Sweeney Todd.’ The last one might have made the connection between him and producer Infinitum Nihil, Johnny Depp’s company.

‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’ is a fairly new book, first released in January 2007. It centers around an orphaned boy that secretly lives between the walls of a train station in Paris. The bestseller was praised by its original combination of text and pictures. With about 300 illustrations it depends equally on words as it does on pictures.

Infinitum Nihil is targeting the Fall to start production.

Since seeing ‘Horton Hears a Who!,’ Blue Sky Studios has proven me they are allowed to compare themselves to Pixar. But little did I know the company, owned by Fox, was never meant to take this road and was struggling to make any money in the nineties.

At that moment, Fox was investing in 2-D animations and Blue Sky Studios was meant to do CGI for other movies. Not even the ‘hero’ of the team, Eugene Troubetzkoy, was thinking about a film like ‘Ice Age.’ “The goal of the artistic people was always to make movies. Personally, I couldn’t have cared less,” he said. But then ‘Toy Story’ came around and made animation bankable. “Most of us were working for negative salaries. Every time things were looking down, we always wondered, where’s our Steve Jobs?“

And even with their Oscar winning short ‘Bunny,’ by Chris Wedge, Fox was getting ready to sell Blue Sky Studios because of the crashing special effects market. But that’s when their savior ‘Ice Age’ came around. “It was our one opportunity to do what we always wanted to do and prove to Fox that they shouldn’t sell us,” Chris Wedge says.

Four successful features later, Blue Sky Studios is hard at work at what might be their biggest hit yet, ‘Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.’

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