Hotel For Dogs director Thor Freudenthal is in talks to develop a screenplay based on Ian Ogilvy's oddly-named Measle and the Wrathmonk.
Measle Stubbs is a little boy who, following his parents' disappearance, is sent to live with his crazy uncle Basil - who just happens to be a wizard, or more precisely, a wrathmonk. To add insult to injury, he is caught by his eccentric guardian playing with a train set in the house, and is punished by being shrunk to the size of the tiny toy villagers he was playing with. He must then learn to live in his new - and surprisingly hostile - surroundings, learning that all is not as it seems with the other "toy" inhabitants.
The adaptation is being produced at Warner Bros. by Robert Zemeckis, who's planning to use the sort of performance-capture technology he's been tinkering with on The Polar Express and Beowulf, which should be right up Freudenthal's street, considering his work on Stuart Little and Disney's The Haunted Mansion.
In the meantime, Freudenthal, whose Hotel For Dogs is out in January, is also developing more family friendly fodder in the shape of the graphic novel adaptation Agnes Quill. That one's about a teenage detective who lives in a quasi-Victorian world and can communicate with dead people, so sounds rather promising. Let's hope that Measle and The Wrathmonk turns out to be the next-gen Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, and that Thor turns out to be as super-powered as his Norse god namesake.