Ron Howard is going to Netflix to make his first animated feature film

For a couple years, Ron Howard has been dancing around an adaptation of the 1971 children’s book The Shrinking Of Treehorn, and now Deadline says the project is not only moving forward, but that it’s been picked up by Netflix and that it will be Howard’s first feature-length animated film. Yes, despite having some experience adapting a children’s book into a live-action movie, Howard is going to reject the impulse to do the wrong thing and do the right thing instead. (Apologies to anyone who wanted to see Jim Carrey play a shrinking boy.)

The original book, written by Florence Parry Heide and featuring art by Edward Gorey, is about a boy named Treehorn who mysteriously starts shrinking one day. His parents don’t notice at first and don’t care when they do notice. Is it still a metaphor if it’s just the literal text? Either way, the book isn’t exactly an epic tome, so it will be interesting to see how Howard can possibly expand it into a feature film, but Deadline does say that it will be “a musical set in New York City during the holidays”—so the solution to expanding that story to fill a feature film is apparently “make it a musical set in New York City during the holidays.”

Rob Lieber, who previously wrote that (relatively) in-your-face Peter Rabbit movie with James Corden voicing the bunny, wrote the script for this adaptation of The Shrinking Of Treehorn. No word on when this might come out, but it had been sitting, unmade, on a shelf at Paramount for a long time before Netflix came on board. Interestingly, this comes as Netflix has killed off a ton of animated shows that were in the works, so maybe the trick all along was to make animated films instead of shows?