28/02/2007

The €6m animated feature film Quest for a Heart, produced by Finland’s Matila Röhr Productions (MRP) in co-production with Greenlight Media (Germany), F&ME (UK) and Contact Media Group (Russia), has found the voices for its lead characters.

Mackenzie Crook (Pirates of the Caribbean) will lend his voice to Rolli, a young troll, and Lisa Stansfield will be elf girl Millie as well as sing the film’s theme song.

Quest for a Heart is a story of trolls who have lived in the forest for hundreds of years. Young Rolli and his friends find themselves caught up in a quest to find a magic heart that will save his village and the world from turning to stone. Worse still, he finds he has to do this with the help of the beautiful Millie – an elf who stands for everything the trolls loathe.

Pekka Lehtosaari, who has a long history in Finland as an animation dubbing director for Disney, wrote and directed the film, the first ever animated feature made in Finland.

The film consists of over half a million individual drawings, created by a hundred Russian animators working in the Russian Solnetchy Dom studio, and the characters and the visual style of the film were designed by Finnish artist Janne Kopu. Rolli is Finland´s most popular fairytale character, to which MRP owns the film and license rights.

Quest for a Heart will be delivered in December 2007 and will be available in Finnish, English, Russian, German and Swedish.