5 Books That Would Make Great Animated Movies

Dune, by Frank Herbert
This classic science fiction novel has proved notoriously difficult to adapt to the big screen. Alejandro Jodorowsky made a famously failed (and insane) attempt that never made it past the storyboard stage, as chronicled in the sublime Jodorowsky’s Dune. This was followed a few years later by David Lynch’s 1984 version, starring a beautiful Kyle MacLachlan, which famously failed in a different way: it made back little more than three-quarters of its budget, and Roger Ebert called it “one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.” The book still deserves a worthy movie, and animation is a great way to capture the beautiful visuals it calls for. Even Jodorowsky agrees.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, writing by Ryan North, art by Erica Henderson
In a movie landscape filled with serious superhero drama, Squirrel Girl (aka Doreen Green) is the comic book heroine we need. Smart, peppy, and absolutely unbeatable, Doreen balances a busy schedule of computer science classes, Twitter fights with Tony Stark, and side trips to the moon with Galactus. Animation would allow her movie to keep the fun artistic style Henderson developed for the comics, filled with bright colors and full page Twitter feeds.

The Chrestomanci series, by Diana Wynne Jones
The Chrestomanci series, written over three decades by one of fantasy’s most charming authors, is set in a multiverse of similar worlds that have branched out from each other. Most of the series’ action takes place on world 12A, a world similar to our own, but where magic is as common as music is on our world, and that’s governed by the magical administrator Chrestomanci. Thanks to Miyazaki’s delightful adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle, we already know Jones’s work is perfectly suited to animation, and it would introduce a whole new generation to her wildly imaginative worlds.

Just Kids, by Patti Smith
Art is so much the point of Smith’s beautifully written memoir about her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her own artistic beginnings that it seems natural to adapt it using animation. I’m thinking wispy drawings interacting with Mapplethorpe’s photographs, all backed by Smith’s rough, insistent Horses. Smith’s love of creativity and her portrait of a New York City that no longer exists make for fascinating, heartbreaking, and inspiring reading, and would translate into a brilliant animated film.

Hild, by Nicola Griffith
This earthy, magical tale about a young girl in seventh-century Britain who will eventually become Saint Hilda of Whitby is by turns enchanting and disturbing, which is a great blend for animation (even Disney walks this line—I point you again toward The Hunchback of Notre Dame...or heck, even Snow White). Griffith’s prose is full of color and vivid imagery—language is “otter-swift” or like “rounded apple thumps”—and the right animation style could transform that style into beautiful, dreamy visuals.