StudioCanal is developing a Pippi Longstocking animated TV series with David Heyman’s Heyday Films, Submarine and The Astrid Lindgren Company.

Screenwriter Sara Daddy is at work on a script for the series based on Pippi Longstocking, the famously super-strong, energetic and kind girl with the red pigtails from the classic Astrid Lindgren book series. StudioCanal and Heyday Films, which together produced the hugely successful features Paddington and Paddington 2, first considered a movie based on the iconic red-headed children’s figure, before settling on the current modern retelling of the Longstocking character for TV.

First seen in print in 1945 and based on bedside stories Swedish author Lindgren would tell her daughter, the Pippi Longstocking books have since been translated into 80 languages with more than 90 million copies sold worldwide. There have already been several TV and film adaptations. 

StudioCanal will handle worldwide distribution for the TV series, with production set to begin this October. The producer credits are shared by David Heyman, Rosie Alison, Rob Silva, Simon Quinn and Karen Davidsen, and with Ron Halpern is overseeing for StudioCanal.

“Pippi Longstocking is a beloved icon, with her uniquely unpredictable way of seeing the world. Joyful, free-spirited, playful, contrary, kind, fiercely resilient, she questions all the rules of the game, and her originality remains as fresh as ever. We could not be more excited about unleashing Pippi once again in her own new animated series, collaborating with a kindred spirit writer Sara Daddy, the brilliantly inventive animating team at Submarine, the Astrid Lindgren Company, and StudioCanal,” Heyman, Alison and Silva at Heyday said in a statement.

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