Steven Spielberg and The Odyssey Inspired The Fantasy Blockbuster Event of the Decade

"We are just going to make the story as emotionally true, powerful, and funny as possible"

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, and Rundell tells Polygon in a virtual interview that she’ll be taking two years off before writing the next one so she can work on developing her first screenplay.

“We have dozens of touchstones of truly great movies,” 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.”

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 Rundell’s books will make the series very dependent on the quality of special effects, but the author isn’t worried.

“We are just going to make the story as emotionally true, powerful, and funny as possible,” 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 Rundell said she’s been collecting options since 2016, jotting down ideas on her laptop, phone, and notebooks. Some are truly bizarre, like 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. The ancient Roman potty humor is a perfect example of how Rundell has managed to 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,” 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.’”

That humor helps Rundell balance her more academic inspirations. Rundell admits that kids would never want to read her books if they knew that one of her core ideas – a reincarnating immortal who safeguards all of human knowledge – came from an unfinished 17th-century John Donne poem about the transmigration of the soul. Her second book, The Poisoned King, is heavily influenced by Hamlet, much like Disney’s The Lion King. Her latest book, The Neverfear, is inspired by 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.”

While Rundell’s first publishing deal was for an Impossible Creatures trilogy, she’s since decided she needs five books to complete the story. She’s already written the ending and a dozen crucial scenes along the way, and plans to release the fourth and fifth books about a year apart. The story will continue building on her protagonist Christopher’s affinity with animals as he becomes a true bridge between worlds.

“It really is bound up with the desires of my own childhood and the desires of so many children I know,” 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.”