LAIKA Adapting Susanna Clarke’s ‘Piranesi’, Directed by Travis Knight

LAIKA has acquired rights to adapt the international best-selling fantasy novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. The studio’s President & CEO Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings, Bumblebee) will direct the animated feature film. A New York Times and Sunday
Times best-seller with over four million copies sold, Piranesi was awarded the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Penned by English author Clarke, who also created the Hugo Award-winning Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell as well as several short stories and novellas such as The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Hose and Mr. Simonelli or The Fairy Widower, Piranesi is described as ‘an intoxicating, hypnotic novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.’

“Piranesi is a treasure, and very dear to me,” said Knight. “As a filmmaker, I can scarcely imagine a more joyful experience than wandering through the worlds Susanna dreamed into being. She’s one of my all-time favorite authors, and with Piranesi, Susanna has created a beautiful, devastating and ultimately life-affirming work of art. I’m humbled that she chose LAIKA as her home.”

“Animation is one of my favorite things,” said Clarke. “I’ve been inspired by so many animated movies; and LAIKA has produced such extraordinary work — movies like Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, full of beauty and wonder and weirdness. I’m thrilled that Piranesi has found a home with them and I can’t wait to see what they do.”

Synopsis: Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house ― a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.