The Manchester-based stop-motion animation studio will produce the animated musical, inspired by Aesop’s fables and based on the Off Broadway and Off West End musical ‘The Mouse Queen.’
Stop-motion masters Mackinnon & Saunders has partnered with LRG Media on SMALL: A Musical Fable, a new cinematic animated musical feature.
The project is inspired by Aesop’s fables and based on the Off Broadway and Off West End musical “The Mouse Queen,” which Emma Thompson described as “the best piece of theatre for children I’ve ever seen.”
SMALL: A Musical Fable follows a lion who loses his roar and a mouse who finds hers. In an artful re-working of several Aesop’s fables, a country mouse and a jungle lion are catapulted onto wild and colorful quests within the Big City of cunning and mysterious humans. Chasing selfish dreams of greatness, the mouse and lion discover that true power lies in compassion and working together.
Chris Bowden and Simon Partington of Mackinnon & Saunders are collaborating and developing the feature with LRG Media, its producers, and writers. Stage musical creators Ben Glasstone and Tim Kane are adapting the project for the screen with LRG Media executive producer David Wachs.
Magdalena Osinska, an award-winning director and senior creative at Aardman, is attached as co-director. Osinska directed the Star Wars: Visions short I Am Your Mother for Lucasfilm and Disney+, which received a Venice TV Award and an Annie Award nomination, and was longlisted for an Academy Award.
Wachs, an Emmy, Cannes Un Certain Regard, and BAFTA veteran, has worked in the film and television industry for more than four decades. His credits include creating and producing for Sir John Boorman and Norman Jewison, serving as the main film director for the original Teletubbies series, working as development associate on Blue Zoo’s Digby Dragon for Nickelodeon, and productions for PBS, CBeebies, Disney+, and Nick Jr. in the U.K.
Mackinnon & Saunders also recently boarded Nihil Declarandum’s Heads, an 80-minute stop-motion animated feature in development in Greater Manchester, U.K., with a projected delivery date of 2029. The teen-and-adult gothic fantasy adventure imagines a retro-futuristic society where the poor sell their severed heads to the wealthy.
Source: LRG Media
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
