David Heyman has joined the French media company StudioCanal with plans to bring one of the bestselling children’s book series of all time to the screen

The film-makers behind the successful Paddington series are to embark on a feature film adaptation of another British family favourite, the Mr Men and Little Miss series of illustrated children’s books.

David Heyman, whose Heyday Films produced Paddington and Paddington 2 as well as the Harry Potter series, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and White Noise, is to join with the UK arm of French media company StudioCanal to make the film.

Follow-up to 2016 animation about talking animals living in a utopia is a soulless film-by-numbers affair filled with corporately approved jokes

Another day, another supremely competent, passably-but-not-overwhelmingly funny digitally animated family comedy featuring talking animals. It’s not AI, but it might as well be. This is Zootropolis 2, which is named Zootopia 2 on its home turf in the US. (Is the reference to lefty ideas such as “utopia” too dangerous for the all-important foreign territories?) If this is the second in what promises to be a continuing series, perhaps Z3 will be cautiously hailed as a return to the franchise’s “dark” roots.

We are back in the magical wonderland of Zootropolis, in which all animals live together, big and small, prey and predator; a place, in fact, where the comedy lion can lie down with the hilarious back-talking lamb, and all the animals provide undemanding voiceover work for comedy talent such as Alan Tudyk, who makes a minor vocal appearance. As before, our heroes are an odd couple of cops in the ZPD or Zootropolis Police Department: idealistic young rabbit Judy Hopps (geddit?), voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin, and sly fox Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman, a creature once on the wrong side of the law but now a supposedly reformed character who has joined the police.