AMOG’S LIFE

MOG’S CHRISTMAS Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy star in an adaptation of Judith Kerr’s classic.

FELINE GROOVY

Feeling neglected and skittish, Mog dozes off on the roof. Her dreams are soundtracked by a toe-tapping paean to community and acceptance from David Arnold and Don Black, who first collaborated on The World is Not Enough. ‘As soon as David sent the song over, I pictured this little cat curled up on the roof, looking at all the little windows and people wrapping their Christmas presents,’ smiles Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who sings it and whose five children know the books by heart. ‘The essence of Christmas is being where you feel you belong, with the people you love. It’s been a dream project.’

Judith Kerr’s series of Mog picture books began in 1970 and has sold more than four million copies around the world. Now Lupus Films, who drew David Oyelowo, Benedict Cumberbatch and David Walliams to voice the characters in Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea, which aired on C4 in December 2019, have brought their hand-drawn animation skills to Mog’s Christmas, in which the grumpy cat must reluctantly contend with the Thomas family’s baffling festive preparations.

BASKET CASES

Although the author died in 2019, her children Tacy and Matthew Kneale were keen to collaborate with Lupus once again. ‘We’d always wanted to do the Mog books,’ says producer Camilla Deakin. ‘Judith’s got an incredible eye for detail and a great sense of humour, and the family scenarios are so relatable for anyone now or back when she first wrote the books. They’re so warm and joyous, and we’ve always felt that hand-drawn animation, even if it’s on computer screens, can have a particular effect on audiences if you’re telling an emotional story.’

REACHING FOR CLARITY

Bridgerton’s Lady Danbury herself, Adjoa Andoh leads the project as the narrator and de facto voice of Mog. ‘Very simple, direct and unambiguous,’ she says of the cat. ‘She sees a tree that walks, it gets in her way, things become confusing and she doesn’t like it. She wants a nice, unconflicted clarity –that’s the delight, isn’t it, in things being confusing for Mog and her trying to make sense of it? And children relate to that, because often children feel like they’re in the Mog position of being pushed hither and thither by grown-ups.’

DRAWING INSPIRATION

The show includes nods to both the Tiger animation and the south-west London high street where Kerr lived. ‘We talked about bringing it up to date,’ says Mog’s Christmas screenwriter Joanna Harrison. ‘It is so much better leaving it as it was in the book, because then it becomes timeless. I’ve worked on so many weepies, from The Snowman (1982) through to We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (2016)… To be honest, I’d much rather make people laugh. You could explore Mog’s anxiety and insecurity, but the last thing you want to watch at Christmas is a cat going through some sort of personal crisis!’

CASTING AROUND

Cumberbatch plays Mr. Thomas alongside Claire Foy as Mrs. Thomas, with Zawe Ashton as neighbour Mrs. Gaynor and Miriam Margolyes as an aunt (‘She did some nice ad-libbing, but we had to use the bleeper!’ laughs Deakin). ‘Once we’d decided who we wanted to approach, we were banking on them knowing the books and having that nostalgic love of Judith Kerr,’ recalls producer Ruth Fielding. ‘Claire and her daughter love the books. Benedict wants to do work his kids can watch… You’ve got to aim high and hope that they go for it.’

BEST PAW FORWARD

‘There’s many a video of Robin Shaw on the table on all-fours with his bum in the air,’ laughs animator Ed Smith of the show’s director, who admits to cutting no corners in depicting detailed feline behaviour. The animation also honours Kerr’s use of white space, while Shaw’s insistence on a roving camera had his team cursing. ‘I think maybe we just annoyed Robin somewhere,’ says Smith ruefully. ‘There are a lot of shots where the camera is chasing Mog around, which meant we had to redraw the backgrounds all the time,’ adds Shaw. ‘At 20 to 25 frames a second, that’s a lot of drawing.’

MOG’S CHRISTMAS AIRS ON C4 THIS CHRISTMAS.