Friday, June 13, 2008

Away with the fairies

The massive success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy led to the green-lighting of many fantasy movies, but what about those classics that have yet to be re-imagined?

THE BULL market for sword and sorcery that attended the success of The Lord of the Rings movies caused a great many prominent fantasy novels to be propelled into cinemas. Many of the subsequent films - Eragon , The Dark is Rising - failed. So which great fantasy series may remain unfilmed as a result?

Though some adaptations of his yarns have made it onto television, Terry Pratchett's comic tales of Discworld remain conspicuously absent from the world's cinema screens. Sam Raimi was alleged to have begun work on an adaptation of The Wee Free Men , but nothing came of his preliminary dithering.

TH White's The Once and Future King , an eccentric take on the King Arthur story, did provide the basis for Disney's The Sword and the Stone and the musical Camelot . But the novel sequence, which began in 1938, has yet to inspire a serious movie adaptation. There has, however, been chatter that Kenneth Lonergan, writer of Gangs of New York , might direct an adaptation next year.

Michael Moorcock, one of the most versatile of English writers, has been mysteriously ignored by the movie industry for his entire career. If a screenwriter could make sense of his brilliant Elric of Melniboné series, then a bonanza might result.

Where is the film version of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern ? Such a project was rumoured to be coming our way this year, but so far, no fire breathers have been spotted on the horizon.

Other popular fantasy authors yet to make it to the big screen include Stephen Donaldson, Raymond E Feist and David Eddings.

But the most mysteriously underserved author remains the mighty Ursula K Le Guin. In 2005, Goro Miyazaki, son of the more gifted Hayao, delivered Tales of Earthsea , a ho-hum animated telling of episodes from the third and fourth books in Le Guin's Earthsea sequence. There has, however, yet to be a formal adaptation of the most impressive achievement in post-Tolkien fantasy. If enough people go to see Prince Caspian , that might change.