Fox Animation has acquired rights to Kelly Barnhill’s widely acclaimed children’s fantasy novel The Girl Who Drank the Moon, and has tapped Kubo and the Two Strings co-writer Marc Haimes for the script adaptation, Deadline reports.
Carlos Saldanha, director of Fox/Blue Sky’s Rio, will produce with Maresa Pullman through their company, BottleCap Productions. Fox Animation VP of Production Darlene Caamano Loquet and President Vanessa Morrison are overseeing the project, which is speculated to be a live-action/animation hybrid.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon is the fourth book by Barnhill (The Witch’s Boy), and was published in August by Algonquin Young Readers and named Amazon’s Best Book of the Month.
The epic coming-of-age tale begins with a place called the Protectorate, where each year the citizens leave a baby as a placative offering to the witch who lives in the forest. But this fearsome creature is actually a kindly witch named Xan, who delivers the children to welcoming families on the other side of the forest. One year, Xan accidentally feeds a baby moonlight instead of starlight, granting the girl extraordinary magic. Xan raises the child, but as Luna approaches her 13th birthday, the magic within her begins to surface — with dangerous consequences.
Haimes has also been tapped to pen Neil Marshall’s remake of the breakout Norwegian hit Troll Hunter and Fox Animation’s adaptation of Noelle Stevenson’s best-selling graphic novel Nimona, which is being directed by Patrick Osborne (Feast).
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