Home Entertainment CHEW animated feature film adaptation lands Steven Yuen and Felicia Day!

CHEW animated feature film adaptation lands Steven Yuen and Felicia Day!

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And now here’s some rather superb casting news for you to… chew (oof!) on! Way back when, I remarked that Chew, writer John Layman and artist Rob Gullory’s hilariously kooky, Eisner Award winning Image Comics series would be perfect for a feature film adaptation, and it appears that somebody was listening. Maybe not to me specifically, but to somebody, as talk surfaced over a possible animated feature film adaptation early last year. Since then though, it’s been all quiet on the chewy front.

But now THR is reporting that not only is the Chew animated film definitely going ahead, but it’s already landed its two lead voice actors. The Walking Dead‘s Steven Yuen will be providing the voice of Asian-American protagonist Tony Chu, while geek girl extraordinaire Felicia Day (The Guild, Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) will be voicing Chu’s love interest Amelia Mintz. Both Yuen and Day are apparently huge fans of the comic, so they will more than likely be bringing their A-Game.

In Chew, Tony Chu is a rookie detective in a world where a virulent strain of bird flu has killed off almost all fowl, outlawing the remaining few. When Chu eats some black market chicken soup though, he discovers that he’s a “cibopath”, somebody able to get a psychic impression from whatever he eats. This is much to the delight of his sadistic police chief who sends him and his veteran partner out on the streets to take a bite out of crime. Literally.

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Chu’s extrasensory psycho-culinary abilities (a term I just totally made up right now) is also not unique, as he soon runs into several other, just as crazy characters imbued with similar powers. One being the aforementioned Amelia Mintz, a “saboscrivner” aka a person who can write about food so descriptively that the reader will feel as if they’re actually eating it. Like I said, kooky.

There’s a lot more crazy to Chu’s story, including an extraterrestrial mystery, alien fruit, and the most badass chicken to ever walk the face of the Earth, but it’s Chu’s first case, solving the disappearance of a food critic after his finger turns up in some hamburger meat, that could probably serve a feature film screenplay best.

The film is being written by c0-creator Layman himself, while Jeff Krelitz, who helmed the motion comics for Torchwood: Web of Lies and Peter Panzerfaust, will direct, while Guillory, Scott Boxenbaum and former BBC Exec Dan Tischler will produce along with Layman.

Originally, Layman and Guillory had pitched a live-action TV series adaptation of Chew to Showtime, and although things looked promising at the start, the network soon passed on it, allowing Krelitz to pick up the rights. At the time it was rumoured that if the animated film proved successful enough, a new live-action TV pitch would be attempted, but there’s currently no word on that. According to THR, the current plan is just for the film to receive a digital and home video release.

Last Updated: April 25, 2014

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