The 1963 Newbery Award winner, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle (Macmillan/FSG BYR) is set for a new adaptation. Disney just announced that Jennifer Lee who wrote and co-directed the animated mega-hit, Frozen, will write the adaptation.

The book was adapted previously as a TV movie, to middling success. In an interview with Newsweek, L’Engle was asked if the film “met her expectations.”

She replied, “Yes, I expected it to be bad, and it is.”

The interview was conducted when L’Engle was 85, and therefore felt she could “say what I want” and she did, letting loose on fundamentalists and saying of the Harry Potter series, “I read one of them. It’s a nice story but there’s nothing underneath it.”

Another children’s classic is getting a new look. Universal is adapting Clifford The Big Red Dog by Norman Bridwell (Scholastic, 1963) as a live-actio, 3D movie, scheduled for release on April 8, 2016. It was loosely adapted in 2004 as the animated Clifford’s Really Big Movie and as a PBS series.

Universal also announced that they have bought the rights to the best selling picture book, The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt, (Penguin/Philomel, 2013).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2014 at 11:35 am and is filed under Books & Movies, Childrens and YA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.