Mr Toad is once again revving the engine on a flashy new motor car, while stern old Badger prepares to "take him in hand" and the Mole and the Rat mess about in boats: The Wind in the Willows** is returning to the screen, courtesy of Ray Griggs and the WETA workshop.
Kenneth Grahame's 1908 children's classic has been filmed before, not least as a 1949 Disney cartoon; a beautiful stop-motion animated TV series by Cosgrove-Hall in the 1980s; and a live-action version directed by Terry Jones in 1996, starring Steve Coogan, Eric Idle, and Jones himself. The plan this time is a mixture of live-action and puppetry. The dialogue will be recorded first, and WETA (Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings FX company) will then provide the actors with "animal costumes with state-of-the-art animatronics for the facial expressions." The project will film in WETA's home of Wellington, New Zealand.
By no means an extravaganza, the projected budget is a weasely $30m, which Griggs, who also heads production company RG Entertainment, has raised himself through private investors. Griggs' is an odd CV. His political documentary I Want Your Money is due later this year, and his sole other feature-length outing as director is last year's comic-book spoof Super Capers (starring Lois & Clark's Justin Whalin) which currently boasts an impressive 0% at Rotten Tomatoes.
Also adding to the project's strangeness is its screenwriter Bill Marsilil, who wrote Deja Vu for Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer, and just sold "Speed Racer in space" Lightspeed to Bruckheimer for $3.5m.
Do either of these guys have an affinity for oddly proportioned animals in Edwardian England? Griggs expects to start announcing his cast shortly, so we shouldn't have to wait long to find out.