Artemis Fowl film trailer released
Disney has released its first trailer for the Artemis Fowl film based on the Wexford author Eoin Colfer’s best-selling children’s fantasy book series of the same name about a 12-year old criminal mastermind who battles against a powerful race of fairies suspected of being behind his father’s disappearance.
The family adventure movie is directed by Kenneth Branagh while the screenplay was written by the award-winning playwright Conor McPherson. It stars young Kilkenny actor Ferdia Shaw in the title role with Lara McDonnell (Love and Rosie) playing the feisty elf Captain Holly Short who is kidnapped by Artemis for a ransom of fairy gold.
The first teaser trailer featuring impressive cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos gives a much-anticipated flavour of what is to come in the film which is scheduled to be released in American cinemas in August 2019.
Filming is taking place in England, Northern Ireland and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Colfer visited the studio set on an old army base south of London last Spring after the filming of principal parts began.
He is looking forward to attending the premiere but otherwise has been not involved in the making of the film. He posted a link to the trailer when it came out last Tuesday.
The Academy Award-winning actress Dame Judi Dench plays Commander Root, the leader of the reconnaisance division of the fairy police force LEPrecon in the underground fairy world of Haven City, while Josh Gad (Beauty and the Beast, Murder on the Orient Express) is Mulch Diggums, a kleptomaniac dwarf who attempts to rescue Holly.
Above ground, Nonso Anozie (Game of Thrones, Cinderella) is the Fowl family bodyguard called Butler and Tamara Smart (The Worst Witch) plays Butler’s niece Juliet with Miranda Raison (Murder on the Orient Express) as Artemis’s mother Angeline.
Several members of the creative team including the director of photography Zambarloukos; the production designer Jim Clay; composer Patrick Doyle and hair and make-up designer Carol Hemming previously worked on Branagh’s well-received ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ which was released last year following his earlier success with Disney’s Cinderella.
A film based on Colfer’s bestselling series of books has been on the cards since 2000 when the movie rights were bought by Disney before the first Artemis Fowl book was even published. but it wasn’t until Disney and the Weinstein Company got involved in 2013 - before Disney parted company with Weinstein in the wake of his sexual assault scandal last year - that the project finally began to get off the ground.