Second coming ... the late Graham Chapman, pictured in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, is set to have his 1980 memoir adapted to the screen.

YOU can kill him, cremate him and (ostensibly) kick his ashes around the stage at a comedy festival in Aspen, Colorado. But you can't keep a funny guy down.

Graham Chapman, whose death from cancer in 1989 forever closed the door on a full reunion of the Monty Python comedy troupe, will soon be back in what might be the next best thing: he will star in a 3D animated version of his absurdist memoir, A Liar's Autobiography: Volume VI, with most of the surviving Python members performing roles cut together with Chapman's voice from a taped reading made not long before he died.

Produced and directed by Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and Jeff Simpson, who are based in London, the project continues a chaotic afterlife for the creators of Monty Python's Flying Circus, a BBC comedy series whose run ended in 1974. They have resurfaced in films, on Broadway and in a 1998 appearance at the Aspen Comedy Arts Festival, during which one of the Pythons, Terry Gilliam, kicked over what appeared to be an urn containing Chapman's ashes. (In fact, those were scattered elsewhere.)

In keeping with the scrambled nature of all things Python, the new film has 15 animation companies working on chapters that will range from three to 12 minutes in length, each in a different style.

''Creatively, the different styles reflect the stages in Graham's life,'' Simpson says.

The film is expected to run about 85 minutes and is expected to be released next year the filmmakers say.

First published in 1980, A Liar's Autobiography was a deliberately fanciful account. And precisely what it says about Chapman remains open to debate.

''Nothing,'' says Terry Jones, one of the six original Pythons and the father of producer Bill, when asked what was true in the book's description of Chapman's progress through medical school, alcoholism, acknowledgment of his gay identity and the toils of surreal comedy. ''It's all a downright, absolute, blackguardly lie,'' he says - perhaps joking, as Pythons will.

In the new film, John Cleese, a Python member who worked closely with Chapman after the two met at Cambridge University, and who will headline the inaugural Just for Laughs comedy festival at the Sydney Opera House in September, engages in a long conversation while bicycling with his former partner. Chapman's voice, captured long ago, is matched with Cleese's newly recorded dialogue.

Michael Palin will appear as Chapman's father. Gilliam plays various roles. So far, among the original Python group, only Eric Idle has not become involved, though Timlett said the filmmakers are ''working'' on him.

Bill Jones says he is particularly struck by the promotional potential of a project whose home video boxes might say: ''Graham Chapman - Dead in 3D.''

The New York Times