Oh help, oh no, I don’t want a film of Gruffalo!
THE creator of much-loved children’s book The Gruffalo has said she turned down a Hollywood offer for the tale.
Julia Donaldson told how she feared movie bosses would ‘take the Gruffalo and the mouse and just make up some ludicrous story’ to expand it to feature length.
The writer has already seen a string of her books successfully adapted for television and in 2009 a computer-animated TV film was released, voiced by Helena Bonham Carter, Rob Brydon, Robbie Coltrane, James Corden, John Hurt and Tom Wilkinson.
However, she would not agree to a full-length Hollywood movie, despite The Gruffalo having sold more than 13million copies.
Donaldson’s tale The Highway Rat pulled in six million viewers last Christmas on the BBC while Zog has been announced as this year’s festive feast. The 69-yearold said: ‘I think it’s going to be really good, I’ve seen the storyboard for it. They’re very good at consulting me – they were going to have a lot of stuff that wasn’t in The Highway Rat book. I didn’t like it and they did listen.
‘It’s amazing that my stories have become a Christmas tradition. I was brought up not to watch TV on Christmas Day but I have to admit I do sit down now with the family and watch the animations of my books.’
It is 25 years since her first book, A Squash And A Squeeze, came out. Originally it was one of many songs she wrote for BBC children’s TV and was spotted by a publisher who asked to turn into a book.
Now one of Britain’s biggestselling authors, the writer, who lived with husband Malcolm and their children in Bearsden, near Glasgow, for 25 years, remembers the life-changing phone call well.
She said: ‘I pretended to be very cool and casual. I said I would have to look at the small print but I thought it would be permissible.
‘Then I put the phone down and leapt around the room because I was so excited.’
Now, she has a remarkable 200plus books to her name, some multi-million bestsellers, others written for schools.
‘My dad gave me The Book Of 1,000 Poems, with the words “To Julia on her fifth birthday”, and I’ve still got it,’ she recalled. ‘I learned them off by heart.
‘It’s a lovely thought that I was inspired to rhyme and scan and that perhaps some of my readers might end up writing in verse like I did.’