Forget Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man, it’s time to bless the rains with an animated movie musical about Toto, Dorothy’s adorable little dog from The Wizard Of Oz. Deadline says the project—which has not officially been announced, for the record—will be directed by Mozart In The Jungle co-creator Alex Timbers and “loosely based” on the book Toto: The Dog-Gone Amazing Story Of The Wizard of Oz by Michael Morpurgo and Emma Chichester Clark. If we had to guess, that means it’ll have nothing to do with the book beyond the idea of re-telling The Wizard Of Oz from the dog’s perspective, but we’ll have to wait for Warner Bros. to make some announcements before we know for sure.
For those who aren’t familiar, The Wizard Of Oz is about girl living in Kansas who gets transported to Oz, a magical land that is ruled by a cruel and indifferent wizard whose excessively green city is being besieged by some wicked witches. The dog… doesn’t do a whole lot. It’s not really the dog’s story, at least traditionally. Maybe this will be one of those things where we find out that Dorothy didn’t actually do a whole lot and Toto was manipulating things the whole time. Either way, a new musical based on The Wizard Of Oz seems kind of bold, considering that there are already some famous musicals based on the original book.
That being said, we do know one way that Warner Bros. could take this to another level. Three words: Toto. The. Band. It might require some rewrites of the basic plot, but you could get “Hold The Line” and “Rosanna” in there somehow. Rewriting “Africa” so it’s about an Emerald City couldn’t be too hard.