Travis Knight To Direct Animated Adaptation Of Susanna Clarke’s Bestseller ‘Piranesi’ For Laika
20.06.2024 - 15:03
/ deadline.com
Laika, the renowned Oregon animation studio founded by Travis Knight, has acquired the internationally bestselling fantasy novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, enlisting Knight to direct an animated feature adaptation.
The film will be the third Knight directs for the studio, on the heels of 2016’s Oscar-nominated Kubo and the Two Strings and the upcoming Wildwood, based on the fantasy novels by Colin Meloy, which features the voices of Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Mahershala Ali and more.
Awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021, Piranesi is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller with over four million copies sold. Set in a dreamlike alternative reality, the book tells the story of Piranesi, whose house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls, an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house — a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
Stated Knight, “Piranesi is a treasure, and very dear to me. As a filmmaker, I can scarcely imagine a more joyful experience than wandering through the worlds Susanna dreamed into being. She’s one of my all-time favorite authors, and with Piranesi, Susanna