The film adaptation of Jeff Smith’s Bone gets a director

Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda, The Little Prince)is set to direct Warner Bros.’s animated adaptation of Bone, the Eisner-winning comic series from Jeff Smith. Adam Kline will co-write the script with Osborne.

This makes me so happy as I loved the original comic. Such a huge, beautiful story.

The series centers on the Bone cousins, white, bald cartoon caricatures. In the opening pages of “Out from Boneville” the three Bone cousins, an avaricious and greedy Phoncible P. “Phoney” Bone, a goofy cigar-smoking Smiley Bone, and an everyman character Fone Bone, have been run out of their hometown of Boneville after Phoney’s campaign for mayor went awry. After crossing a desert, the cousins are separated by a sea of locusts and individually ending up in the mysterious Valley and must make their way across the fantasy landscape pursued by rat creatures (Fone Bone uses a mysterious hand-drawn map that Smiley had found). They joyously reunite at a local tavern called Barrelhaven, where they are taken in by a mysterious girl named Thorn and her even more enigmatic grandmother. Fone Bone instantly develops a crush on Thorn when he meets her, and repeatedly attempts to express his love through poetry. As they stay longer in the valley, they encounter humans and other creatures who are threatened by a dark entity, the Lord of the Locusts. The Bones, trying to escape to Boneville, are quickly drawn into the events around them, compelling them on a hero’s journey to help free the Valley.

“Bone is very special and unconventional because it blends elements together that you don’t necessarily expect — soft, little comic characters and epic high stakes fantasy adventure,” said Osborne. “To carry this into the cinematic realm presents both an opportunity to represent what readers of all ages have loved about the series, while pushing animated storytelling into exciting and different areas.”

Osborne will act as an exec producer as will Lin Pictures’ Mark Bauch.

Via THR