Toronto: The way Vincenzo Natali remembers it, even at age 11, he knew that the animation in 1978’s Watership Down was ‘totally wrong.’

‘It was very Disney,’ he recalls. Disney with rabbit blood, to be sure, but still out of step with the distinctly harsh mood of the Richard Adams book. He hopes that a new version – in early development at Capri Films with him as director – will make things right.

Capri, together with Toronto’s CORE Digital Pictures and the U.K.’s Alltime Entertainment, is hoping CTV and a U.K. outfit will sign up for a four-hour Watership miniseries and is producing a demo tape that, says Natali, will show off a unique, dark and more appropriate style of 3D animation.

It’s an ‘illustrative, painterly look,’ he says, similar to the work of noted illustrator Dave McKean. ‘It’s by and large 3D but it doesn’t look 3D. It’s quite an unusual style that nobody’s seen before.’

If the project goes, it would be the third adaptation of Adams’ novel, which – if you haven’t had the pleasure – follows the struggles of a small gang of rabbits who are turned out of their home into the dangers of the wild. The 1978 movie was also a U.K./Canada copro as was the lesser-known 1999 TV version. Malcolm MacRury (Lives of the Saints) is writing the outline.

Capri also has Natali at work on a TV doc about director and former Monty Pythoner Terry Gilliam and an adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel High-Rise, to be copro’d with Recorded Picture Company in the U.K. He hopes to direct High-Rise sometime next year, working from his own script. (The story, about war among the residents of a skyscraper, echoes elements of his breakout film Cube.) The Gilliam project, for CBC and The Movie Network/Movie Central, covers the oddball director’s recent shoot of the Capri feature Tideland.

Tideland shot last year in the Prairies and is now in post; no word yet on a release. Capri’s next project will shoot closer to home when You Can’t Come In – a thriller by first-timer Miguel Sapochnik, this one a copro with Little Bird Film – shoots in Toronto this fall. It’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby meets The Shining,’ says Capri boss Gabriella Martinelli.

Natali and Copperheart Entertainment, meanwhile, are also in talks with Japanese animators for his feature Uberman, an inside-out take on superheroes. Again, the picture sounds dark.

‘It’s edgy and quite violent. Definitely not for kids,’ he says. Natali hopes to start work by late 2006 – going for a more traditional 2D look with elements of anime.

Natali is, as they say, big in Japan, and a homemade feature is likely to go down well with his fans on the far side of the Pacific. He’s also optimistic that his 2003 feature Nothing, which fizzled in Canada, will play well when it opens there in the fall.

‘If any society is insane enough to like that movie, it’s them,’ he says.