Tom Hanks is playing Abraham Lincoln. Again. But this time, he's doing it in a movie that's half live-action, half stop-motion animation.
Yes, really.
Lincoln in the Bardo, based on George Saunders' 2017 novel, is one of those projects that sounds either visionary or disastrous depending on your tolerance for artistic ambition. Hanks will portray Lincoln in the live-action sequences, while Starburns Industries—the animation studio behind Community's claymation episodes and Anomalisa—handles the stop-motion afterlife sequences.
For those unfamiliar with Saunders' novel, it's a meditation on grief set in a liminal space between life and death. Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie has just died, and the President visits his crypt while ghosts congregate in the cemetery, debating existence and loss. It's experimental, fragmented, and deeply moving—the kind of book people call "unfilmable" until someone films it.
The format makes sense, actually. The novel shifts between historical accounts and spectral monologues. Live-action grounds us in Lincoln's tangible anguish; stop-motion captures the uncanny unreality of the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the space between death and rebirth.
Hanks has played historical figures before—Walt Disney, Fred Rogers, Captain Phillips (okay, that one's real but feels mythological). But this is different. This is Hanks taking a genuine artistic risk in an era when A-listers mostly play it safe.
Will it work? The novel won the Man Booker Prize, so the source material has been vetted. Starburns Industries knows how to blend mediums. And Hanks, for all his mainstream success, has always been game for weird choices when directors earn his trust.
