Fire up the Frozen reunion klaxon! Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff – AKA Anna and Kristoff – are reuniting for a new movie musical that is based on a true-life story experienced by one of its co-writers and directors. They'll star in Molly And The Moon.
The film is drawn from How I Met Your Mother sitcom co-creator Craig Thomas' experience, whose newborn son faced serious genetic heart issues, requiring open heart surgery at just two weeks old. What followed was months of scary times spent in hospitals, Thomas and his wife Rebecca unable to hold their child, who had to spend his time inside an incubator. The story has a happy ending, but a song that Rebecca came up with has inspired the new movie, which saw Thomas team back up with old friend and Mother partner Carter Bays.
"My wife made up a little simple lullaby about his name that she would sing to him that just sort of came to her there in the NICU, and that actual melody and lullaby is what we use in the movie,” Thomas tells Deadline. “The meter of Molly Moon is sort of the same as Elliot. Musicals are always about the first moments that prove why they are musicals. Kate, our lead character, the mother, is singing a lullaby to her pregnant belly and will sort of push in on that pregnant belly and go into this other world where we see a mysterious little girl in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean, looking up at the moon and hearing that song, hearing that lullaby come through the moon. It’s the moment you realize there’s this little soul, this life that wants to exist and be in the world and wants to reach the sound of that voice. She doesn’t know what it means or who it is. It just sounds like love, and she wants to reach it, and that’s sort of the moment that we connect the two worlds of our movie, the world of Molly and the real world that her parents are living in." Bell will play Kate, with Groff as Brian, Molly's dad. And the creators have a specific idea for how they want to bring the film to life.
“It’s all live action; we really wanted to make it feel like the classic live action fantasy movies of our childhood, things like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal," says Bays. "As we were building off of this metaphor, it became, how do we show this journey? How do we visualize a soul trying to make it into the world? For us, it felt like the journey of climbing a mountain. Molly is this little girl and the moon in the movie represents being alive and participating in the world. It’s her journey, trying to get to the moon. Around that we built this magical fantasy world that we cut back and forth from, that interacts with the real world in surprising ways. We see the fantasy journey and the friends she makes along the way. There’s a knight in shining armor. There’s a talking bunny that she meets in the forest. There’s a monster that she has to face. It’s a real hero’s journey for her." You can find more at Deadline's site.