‘Blue & Malone,’ Spanish Short Film Series About Imaginary Friends, To Be Turned Into Feature Film

The Spanish short film series Blue & Malone is being adapted into the feature film The Impossible Journey by production company El Viaje Imposible Producciones.

The hybrid production titled about two imaginary friends and their human companion will be directed by Abraham López (animation director of the recently released Dragonkeeper) from a script co-written by Fabrice Ziolkowski (The Secret of Kells). It is scheduled to start filming in summer 2025, with an anticipated release date of 2027.

The filmmakers promise a film that will be epic in scale, recalling projects like The NeverEnding Story, Harry Potter, and ET. It will combine cg animation, live-action, and animatronics.

The Paramount family film IF, which is also a hybrid production about imaginary friends, opens in the U.S. tomorrow. The producers of The Impossible Journey make clear in their press release that the timing of their announcement is not coincidental, and take multiple jabs at the new American film directed by John Krasinski film, saying that their film “will not be another movie about imaginary friends,” but rather “will be ‘the movie,’ the original, the pioneer.”

It’s not clear yet how similar Paramount’s film is to Blue & Malone beyond the concept of imaginary friends, but the Blue & Malone filmmakers have certainly been at it for a while. They first released the animated short Blue & Malone, Imaginary Detectives in 2014, which went on to be nominated for the Goya Award, Spain’s top film award. They followed that up with Blue & Malone: Impossible Cases in 2021, which went on to win the Goya for animated short. López also directed both of those films.

Along with the feature film announcement, the producers also released online today the full Goya-winning Blue & Malone: Impossible Cases. Watch it below and then watch IF in theaters to see if they have a point: