EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-winning director Chris Landreth and Copperheart Entertainment founding head Steven Hoban will launch financing on Fifteen Dogs, an animated adaptation of André Alexis’ eponymous novel, at the European Film Market’s inaugural Animation Days in February.
It will be one of the first projects to participate in the EFM’s new animation strand, which will run from February 12 to 14 within the framework of the Berlinale’s market, with a program of project showcases and pitching sessions as well as talks, workshops and networking events.
Canadian film and TV company Copperheart Entertainment has recently optioned Alexis’ award-winning novel about a group of dogs who are granted the gifts of human intelligence and language in a wager between two Greek Gods.
Landreth and Hoban are in the early stages of developing an adult-oriented animated feature that explores the nature of human consciousness.
Copperheart Entertainment enjoyed success in 2025 with the animated family feature Night of the Zoopocalypse, and has boarded Fifteen Dogs as a deliberate creative shift toward prestige, dramatic animation aimed at teen and adult audiences.
The original story opens with a conversation between Hermes and Apollo over drinks in a Toronto bar on whether animals would be happier if they had the same cognitive and speech abilities as humans.
They decide to grant a group of ordinary dogs these powers as a test. Suddenly aware of time, love, power, and their own mortality, the dogs struggle to navigate a world that is no longer purely instinctual, and their once-unified pack fractures into competing visions of how to live, through domination, art, faith, manipulation, and love.
At the heart of the story is Majnoun, a black poodle whose emotional journey reveals the novel’s central truth: that what gives life meaning is not intelligence alone, but love, belonging, and the knowledge that life inevitably ends.
Hoban, who co-wrote Night of the Zoopocalypse, is writing the screenplay.
Award-winning animation director and producer Landreth will direct, making his feature-length directorial debut after Academy Award-winning animated short Ryan and the Oscar-nominated short The End.
He plans to use his trademark approach to animation, which has been described as “psychorealism,” in which CG imagery is used to visually express the inner emotional and psychological states of characters
“From the moment we read André Alexis’s masterpiece, we felt it demanded a cinematic treatment that was as bold, strange, and emotionally truthful as the book itself. Chris’s work has always lived at the intersection of psychology, humanity, and visual invention, and as we begin the financing stage, we’re excited to introduce Fifteen Dogs to international partners who share our belief in ambitious, adult-oriented animation,” said Hoban.
He and Landreth previously jointly produced Ryan and have collaborated on many of the director’s award-winning animated shorts.
“Fifteen Dogs is ultimately a deeply human story, about mortality, love, curiosity, and the terror that comes with that curiosity. Animation allows us to move fluidly between realism and abstraction in ways that make those ideas felt rather than explained. This is a project that challenges me creatively in the best possible way, and I believe it has the potential to resonate powerfully with audiences around the world,” said Landreth
The film is produced by Hoban and Mark Smith (Night of the Zoopocalypse, In the Tall Grass, A Christmas Horror Story).
Animation production is planned with Montreal-based L’Atelier Animation (Night of the Zoopocalypse, 10 Lives), with the project currently in the design stage. Fifteen Dogs is being developed with the support of Telefilm Canada and Ontario Creates.