Eoin Colfer got to deliver the news himself. Onstage at New York Comic Con’s “25 Years of Artemis Fowl” panel, the author announced that Disney has greenlit an Artemis Fowl animated series for Disney Channel and Disney+, six years after the studio’s live-action version crashed and burned. Colfer is an executive producer, and he sounded thrilled, saying he is “proud and delighted” to be part of the team bringing it to screen.
Disney’s logline follows Artemis, a 13-year-old genius who discovers a hidden underground world of armed, high-tech fairies and plots to capture one and steal its magic to heal his dying mother and save his family. Colfer is joined as executive producer by Ben Juwono, whose credits include Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and Big Hero 6: The Series, and Colleen Evanson, who has worked on DuckTales and Prep and Landing: The Snowball Protocol. Disney has not named a showrunner, voice cast, animation studio or premiere window.
Ayo Davis, president of Disney Kids and Family, framed the show as a chance to “introduce a new generation” to the books while honoring readers who grew up on them. That is a lot of readers. Since the first novel hit shelves in 2001, the series has sold more than 35 million copies and been translated into 48 languages.
Why Animation Is the Right Second Swing
This is the format the books always wanted. Colfer’s world runs on armed, high-tech fairies hiding beneath our feet, and that kind of world is cheaper, stranger and more fun drawn than rendered on a blockbuster budget. Animation also frees the show from the problem that sinks so many YA adaptations, which is casting kid actors who age out between seasons.
The producers make sense too. Juwono and Evanson both come out of Disney’s own TV animation bench, and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur in particular proved Disney Channel could do a smart, stylish genius-kid action series. An Artemis Fowl animated series built by that team, with Colfer in the room, has a far better shot than a feature trying to cram an entire book into one movie.
My one real concern is in the logline. Leading with the dying mother makes Artemis sympathetic from frame one. The Artemis readers met in 2001 was a criminal mastermind, and that edge is the whole appeal. If the Artemis Fowl animated series sands that down for a younger audience, it risks losing the very thing that made readers fall for him.
The ‘Artemis Fowl’ Movie Disney Would Rather You Forget
Kenneth Branagh’s film, starring Ferdia Shaw alongside Colin Farrell, Josh Gad and Judi Dench, was first set for August 2019, then pushed to May 29, 2020. When the pandemic shut theaters, Disney pulled it from the big screen, and we reported on the Disney+ pivot back in April 2020. It premiered on the streamer that June.
Critics were brutal. The film sat at 8% on Rotten Tomatoes when Disney quietly removed it from Disney+ in a May 2023 cost-cutting purge, alongside more than 30 other titles. A studio does not usually go back to a property it scrubbed from its own platform, so the fact that this Artemis Fowl animated series exists at all tells you how much faith Disney still has in Colfer’s books. Now it just has to remember that the boy at the center of them was never supposed to be nice.
