‘WondLa’ Official Trailer

Nearly fourteen years ago, I fell in love with a book: The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi. A girl named Eva Nine, raised in an underground bunker by a robot Muthr, makes her way to the surface and finds a completely different world than the one she has been training for.

The book is targeted at middle grade readers, and it’s one that I read to my kids at the time (and given that the whole trilogy totals around 1,500 pages, it was a lot of reading!). It’s full of adventure and mystery (and plenty of fantastic flora and fauna) as Eva tries to figure out where she is and why there don’t appear to be any humans anywhere. DiTerlizzi also did all of the amazing illustrations.

I wrote extensively about the series: you can read my write-ups of Book 1, Book 2, and Book 3, as well as two interviews with DiTerlizzi after the release of Book 2 and Book 3. As you can imagine, I’ve been very excited ever since it was announced in early 2021 that they were working on an animated series based on the books. This week, an official trailer was released, and the series is set to premiere on Apple TV+ on June 28, 2024.

Here’s a look at the trailer:

Although the trailer offers just a little peek at the series, some changes are immediately evident. Eva and Muthr look quite different from their illustrated counterparts, though a few of the other beings like Rovender Kitt and Besteel have kept their appearances. I’m glad to see Otto, the giant waterbear, makes an appearance—he looks like he’s a little cuter than before. One of the biggest contrasts is simply due to the medium itself: although DiTerlizzi used a combination of hand-drawn illustrations and digital coloring, he was inspired by old fairy tale books. The result is that even things like Muthr and Eva’s underground pod have a sort of warm, earthy feel to them, whereas 3D animation gives everything a sort of slick, sterile look. The trailer also gives away something that was revealed a little more slowly in the books—namely, that Eva eventually discovers that she is still in fact on Earth, but that it has changed drastically.

It’s been a while since the last time I’ve read through the trilogy so I’ve forgotten some of the specific details of the plot, but I’m looking forward to watching this at the end of the month!

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