Gruffalo 2009

The Gruffalo is a 2009 short computer animated television film based on the 1999 picture book written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. The cast includes Helena Bonham Carter, Rob Brydon, Robbie Coltrane, James Corden, John Hurt and Tom Wilkinson. The Gruffalo book was first published in 1999 in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Children’s Books. It is about 700 words long and is written in rhyming couplets featuring repetitive verse. It is an example of a trickster story and was inspired by a Chinese folk tale called “The Fox that Borrows the Terror of a Tiger“. A mouse walks through a wood and encounters three predators—first a fox, then an owl, and finally a snake. Each of these animals invites the mouse into their home for a meal, the implication being that they intend to eat the mouse. The mouse declines each offer, telling the predators that it plans to dine with a “gruffalo“. The mouse tells each predator that they are the gruffalo’s favourite food. Frightened that the gruffalo might eat them, each animal flees. After getting rid of the last animal, the mouse is shocked to encounter a real Gruffalo, which has all the features the mouse thought that it was inventing.