Golden Globe-winning actor Hugh Laurie (House) and Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) are lending their voices to the animated adaptation of the late Terry Pratchett’s 2001 best-selling novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. David Thewlis (Wonder Woman), Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey), Himesh Patel (Yesterday), and Gemma Arterton (Vita & Virginia) will also star.
The movie will have Florian Westermann (Little Dodo) as the co-director with Toby Genkel (Two by Two: Overboard!).
The novel is about the famous folk tale of Pied Piper of Hamelin. It received the Carnegie Award, which honors the best children’s book in the UK. The plot follows a street-wise ginger cat with a perfect money-making scam. He meets a kid who plays a pipe, and he is also a friend of his very own gang of talking rats. When they enter the stricken town of Bad Blintz, their con-game goes amiss.
The film is being produced by Sky Cinema, Ulysses Filmproduktion in Germany and Studio Rakete in Hamburg, and Cantilever Media in the UK, and Red Star Animation, an animation company in Sheffield. It is developed with the Pratchett estate sponsorship and is produced in collaboration with the Narrativia development company of Pratchett.
Producers include Julia Stuart for Sky, Emely Christians for Ulysses, Andrew Baker, and Robert Chandler for Cantilever Media and Rob Wilkins for Narrativia.
Pratchett passed away in 2015, but before then, he penned 41 books in the Discworld franchise. About 90 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide in 37 languages. He was knighted in 2009 and was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010.
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