Back in the 90s, David Lynch went on Late Night with David Letterman, with an appeal to write to the chairman of ABC – the network that aired Twin Peaks – to protest the impending cancellation of the show. Now, he’s campaigning for a similarly worthy cause: to find a home for his Snoots.

“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots,” the Blue Velvet filmmaker says in a new interview with Deadline. “But I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge.” What is a Snoot? We’re not sure. But around 20 years ago Lynch was intent enough on bringing them to the big screen that he got together with Tim Burton collaborator Caroline Thompson (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands) to pen a script, titled Snootworld.

More recently, he’s been trying to bring this animated “fairytale” project to life, quietly seeking out financiers including Netflix (which previously hosted his monkey-starring short film What Would Jack Do?). “I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this,” he explains in the interview, “so I presented it... but they rejected it.”

The rejection of Snootworld is a hard pill to swallow for Lynch fans young and old, because, as the director says, the story is “something that children and adults can both appreciate”. However, he attributes the rejection to changing tastes in animated movies. “Snootworld is a kind of an old fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes,” he says. “Old fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”

The Snoots continue to search for a home, but in the meantime Thompson has shared a few meagre details on the secretive – and “wackadoo” – project. “It takes my breath away how wacky it is,” she says. “The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world.”

Lynch is yet to confirm whether he’d be in the director’s seat for Snootworld, but says that it’s an ongoing possibility. His own daughter, American Horror Story director Jennifer Lynch, turned it down because she has “so many things in the pipeline”. How can these things take precedence over the Snoots? Your guess is as good as ours.

Lynch has directed no full-length projects since the return of Twin Peaks, though a long-rumoured project tentatively-titled Wisteria is supposedly responsible for a long hiatus on his namesake YouTube channel. Asked by Deadline what project might see the light of day next, he says: “I can’t talk about those things right now.” As for Snootworld, Dazed does not explicitly condone fans picketing the Netflix offices until they relent and give the animation the budget it deserves, but if you’re in the area... Won’t somebody think of the Snoots?!