By Travis Johnson
The Jim Henson Company will bring the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s novel, The Wee Free Men, to the big screen. The project will be undertaken in partnership with Narrativia, the company which controls all multimedia rights to Pratchett’s impressive body of work.
Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna Pratchett, herself a noted video game writer, will adapt the book, which sees a young would-be witch, Tiffany Aching, contend with faerie monsters with the help of the Nac Mac Feegle, a tribe of pugnacious, six-inch-tall creatures who tend to conduct themselves like Braveheart on a weekend bender. Brian Henson will act as executive producer.
This isn’t the first time an adaptation of The Wee Free Men has been attempted – Sam Raimi was attached at one point, many years ago – and it’s only the latest of a number of Pratchett’s works to be translated into another medium. Pratchett’s most famous creation is the Discworld, a flat planet carried through space on the back of a gigantic turtle, which serves as the setting for the majority of his comedic fantasy adventures. Several Discworld novels, including Hogfather, Going Postal, Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters have been adapted to television, to varying degrees of success. Terry Gilliam was attached to helm a version of Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens for a long time, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside, and a long-gestating TV series based on the City Watch books – basically police procedurals in a fantasy world – seems to have gone dormant. Still, we live in hope – just don’t hold your breath until a trailer surfaces.
Image (c) Paul Kidby
Some of Pratchett’s most inspired and enjoyable work is the Tiffany Aching/Nac Mac Feagle series. It will be great to see how they bring this to life.
Please can you credit the artwork: (c) Paul Kidby
done, sorry about that Paul