Scary Godmother - Film Adaptations

Film Adaptations

Two films have been produced based on the series. The first, Scary Godmother Halloween Spooktacular, premiered on television in Europe, Latin America, and Canada in 2003. Later, it premiered in the United States on Cartoon Network in 2004. The film was the first one Mainframe Entertainment used its new software/animation pipeline for. Jill Thompson co-wrote the script, and had some creative control over the project. When she was shown early character designs for the film which resembled the watercolor illustrations in her books, she requested that the characters instead be fully computer-generated. (In an interview, Thompson stated that she wanted them to go with CGI because "I'm doing 2D. Nobody else should be doing 2D, just me.") However, the mostly static backgrounds used in the film more closely resemble traditional cel animation or the illustrations in Thompson's books. Because of that, the 3D characters often appear to "pop out" from their backgrounds. The visual style of the film has been described as resembling that of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas rather than that of computer-animated films such as Finding Nemo. A review of the film in School Library Journal, however, described the film as "Toy Story meets Tim Burton", and thought that the animation closely resembles Thompson's watercolor illustrations.

The second, Scary Godmother 2: The Revenge of Jimmy (based on the second book), premiered in 2005.