27/03/2025 - The prolific German filmmaker is scheduled to begin production on his debut animation, based on his best-selling 2021 novel, in early 2026

Continuing his over 60-year cinematic career, Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo and Nosferatu the Vampyre director Werner Herzog is set to make his animation debut with The Twilight World. The film will be a screen adaptation of the German filmmaker’s best-selling novel of the same name, originally published in German in 2021 (with the title Das Dämmern der Welt) and translated into English in 2022.

The book is based on real events and tells the story of World War II Japanese intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda, who refused to believe that the war was over and stayed in the jungles of the Philippines to continue a guerrilla war for over 30 years in a personal, fictitious manner. The screenplay for the movie, described as “part-fictionalised history, part-drama and part-dream log”, will be penned by Herzog with Michael Arias (the US-born, Japanese-based director of Tekkonkinkreet) and Luca Vitale. The film will also be narrated by Herzog.

The project has been unveiled as a Franco-German effort, and production is scheduled to begin in early 2026. Animation outfit Sun Creature Studio, one of the producers of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Sundance-winning animated documentary Flee [+see also:
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interview: Jonas Poher Rasmussen
film profile], has boarded the project with Charlotte De La Gournerie as producer. The Copenhagen- and Bordeaux-based studio will create The Twilight World out of its French office in collaboration with French talent. On the German side, Andrew Linsk will serve as producer for US- and German-based production company Psyop.

The project was most recently presented as part of the line-up at Cartoon Movie 2025 (4-6 March), the European co-production and pitching event in Bordeaux, where some details were revealed (see the news and the report). Herzog is currently working on his self-penned Bucking Fastard, starring Kate and Rooney Mara, which is set to begin production in spring this year in Ireland and Slovenia.