Jay Ahn, who served as an executive producer on the 2014 animated comedy The Nut Job, has secured the film rights to children’s book Nullaboo Hullabaloo by Fleur Ferris. Co-founder of Toronto’s ToonBox Entertainment and founding partner of Burbank-based family animation label Astro-Nomical Entertainment, Ahn has picked up the rights to adapt children’s fairy-land tale.
Ahn’s animation credits include The Nut Job, Spark: A Space Tail (exec producer), The Nut Job 2 (associate producer) and series Bolts & Blip (associate EP) and The Beet Party (co-EP).
Published in 2019, the book is set in the tiny country community of Nullaboo, where a young girl named Gemma accidentally captures a fairy when hunting bugs for a school project. It turns out, the fairies need the human’s help to rescue their colony from the silver spiders. But once the secret of the fairies’ existence gets out, they face an even greater threat — luckily, Gemma and her small town are always ready to help a neighbour.
Ahn, through MBL Media (Korea), brokered the book deal with Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown on behalf of the author. Astro-Nomical will closely work together as a sister company of MBL Korea with the development and production of the IP.
