Katherine Rundell Novel Neverfear Getting Film Adaptation Inspired by Steven Spielberg and The Odyssey

Disney announced in 2025 that it had acquired the rights to make live-action films based on Impossible Creatures, Katherine Rundell’s hit children’s fantasy book series set in a realm inspired by The Odyssey. The third book in the series, The Neverfear, released on Sept. 1. Katherine Rundell tells Polygon in a virtual interview that she will take two years off before writing the next book so she can develop her first screenplay.

“We have dozens of touchstones of movies,” Katherine Rundell says. “Some of them are obvious delights, the ones that we grew up adoring, like the BBC adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia. There’s work that has such warmth and wit that we learn from like the great Pixar movies, the great Spielberg movies.”

Katherine Rundell says the script has already gone through several iterations. “It has been such a pleasure, one of the most thrilling creative experiences in my life, turning a novel into a film with all the potential that has. I love the way novels give you access to someone’s inner monologue. But I also love that film can create the visual delight of battle scenes and dance scenes.”

The sheer variety of creatures in the books makes the series dependent on the quality of special effects, but Katherine Rundell remains confident.

“We are just going to make the story as emotionally true, powerful, and funny as possible,” Katherine Rundell says. “The practicalities are something Disney has 100 years of experience imagining into being, so I am very much trusting them to be able to bring them to life.”

High concepts, low humor

New creatures are introduced in every book, and Katherine Rundell has been collecting options since 2016 by jotting down ideas on her laptop, phone, and notebooks. Some ideas include the bonnacon, a bull with inward-curving horns described in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia as defending itself with noxious gas and burning excrement. Ancient Roman potty humor helps the author attract readers of all ages.

“The thing I love about writing for young people is that you can talk about quite serious things like power, dread, evil, and a lust for control and wealth that will be followed by some individuals at all costs,” Katherine Rundell says. “You can also have comedy. When you write for children, you owe them jokes. It’s a way of meeting a child eye to eye and saying ‘You and I are in this together.’”

Humor helps Katherine Rundell balance her academic inspirations. She admits that children would avoid her books if they knew that her core idea of a reincarnating immortal who safeguards human knowledge originated from an unfinished 17th-century John Donne poem about the transmigration of the soul. Her second book, The Poisoned King, draws heavy influence from Hamlet, much like Disney’s The Lion King. Her latest book, The Neverfear, takes inspiration from the Labors of Hercules.

“I loved Hercules as a child,” she says. “I loved the strangeness of those stories, the trickiness of them, his quality of not being unambiguously heroic. I wanted to have the same vividness and excitement.”

Katherine Rundell initially signed a publishing deal for an Impossible Creatures trilogy, but she now plans for five books to complete the story. She has already written the ending and a dozen crucial scenes, intending to release the fourth and fifth books about a year apart. The plot will continue building on the protagonist Christopher and his affinity with animals as he becomes a bridge between worlds.

“It really is bound up with the desires of my own childhood and the desires of so many children I know,” Katherine Rundell says. “When my niece plays Dungeons & Dragons, she’s always an elf druid who can talk to animals. Those books are already in my head, but for me it’s quite important that they’re not all mapped out. There’s still places in which I don’t know exactly how I’m going to get from A to B, because the process of discovery and surprise in the act of writing is quite important in keeping me at my desk.”

Source: Polygon