Bringing Mog to life! Daughter of legendary late children’s author Judith Kerr opens up about ’emotional’ experience of joining star-studded voice cast to bring her mother’s beloved Christmas story to the screen

A hectic family Christmas. A stressed out tabby cat. And amid the chaos, noise and celebrations, a heartwarming message that will fill you with festive cheer.

At this nostalgic time of year, there are few things more pleasurable than indulging in familiar, comforting classics that transport us back to childhood.

And there can be few characters who do that more universally than Mog.

The trouble-prone puss, conjured up by the brilliant mind of late author Judith Kerr, has been a treasured fixture on children’s bookshelves for almost 50 years.

The first book, Mog the Forgetful Cat, inspired 17 more warm-hearted, funny picture stories, which have since sold over four million copies worldwide and been translated into 21 languages.

I remember being read Mog’s Christmas by my own grandmother – and now, 30-odd years later, delight in seeing the rapt looks on my sons’ faces as we sit down to read it together at bedtime.

Timeless, honest and uplifting: it’s the true meaning of Christmas, told through the eyes of a cat.

So it seems about time that the festive tale of the nation’s favourite moggy is being turned into a family-friendly cartoon – with an all-star voice cast to boot.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Mariam Margolyes and Adjoa Andoh have all provided voiceovers for the one-off special, which also features an exclusive theme song performed by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and will be broadcast tomorrow night.

Millions of us, both young and old, will be tuning in, but bringing her favourite childhood story to life this Christmas means more to one viewer than most: Tacy Kneale, Judith Kerr’s daughter.

For Mog wasn’t only the product of her mother’s wonderful imagination, but her real-life family cat.

‘We got her when I was four,’ remembers Tacy, now 65, who lives in north London and works as an artist and creature effects illustrator on films such as the Harry Potter franchise.

‘She was wonderful but she was eccentric – just like you see in the books.

‘She would forget her cat flap, get tangled up in all sorts of things and sit in front of the telly with us like another member of the family.’

Quite wonderfully, Tacy was asked to provide the voice for Mog herself in the animation – a task she took very seriously indeed.

‘It was a lot of pressure but an amazing privilege,’ she admits. ‘I practised an awful lot, and when my cats reacted to the noises I was making, I knew I must have got it right.

‘Robin [Shaw, the director] would say something like, “Well, she’s up on the roof and she’s cold, so that purr should be sadder than the last one.”

‘I’d stand in front of the microphone and do a little sad miaow, thinking, “This is madness. I’m 65 years old and I’m playing the part of a cat.”‘

Seeing her pet brought to life on screen for the first time is particularly magical for Tacy because the world Mog lived in was her world, too.

Judith, who died in 2019, named the children in the stories, Nicky and Debbie, after her own: Tacy’s middle name is Deborah, while her brother Matthew’s is Nicholas.

‘It’s my childhood, come alive,’ she says. ‘The toys the children play with, the kitchen cupboards, the shops on the High Street – that’s where I lived. It’s fantastic.’

Animating a children’s picture book, however, especially one as well-known and well-loved as Mog’s Christmas, is not straightforward.

Sixty-three artists worked on the 24-minute film, which comprises 206 hand-painted backgrounds and 16,574 animated frames – every single one of them drawn by hand.

Tacy and her brother put their faith in Lupus Films, the production team behind the nostalgic TV versions of The Snowman and The Snowdog, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, and The Tiger Who Came to Tea, an adaptation of Judith’s 1968 book, which won an Emmy and was the third highest-rated programme on Channel 4 in 2019.

‘We had to keep asking ourselves at every stage: “Would Mum like this?” Tacy explains.

‘I don’t think she ever particularly wanted to see her books on screen, but then Lupus did such a good job with Tiger – she didn’t see the finished thing but she’d seen the animatic [a film version of the storyboard] and loved it – that she opened up to it.’

The process started over a year ago, when the writers, directors and producers approached Tacy and Matthew with the idea and started working on a script, including a few new sequences – such as a cat-themed Christmas dream – which don’t appear in the book.

Next came the storyboard, comprising rough drawings for each shot, which is turn was made into a film, including the characters’ voices, music and effects.

Having such prestigious actors voicing her mother’s creations was a ‘real joy’, says Tacy – who didn’t meet the A-listers involved (they all recorded separately), but adored hearing what Mog meant to each one and their families.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who sings the theme song ‘As Long As I Belong’, has been reading the books to her three children for almost two decades.

‘All our kids love Mog,’ she says. ‘It just shows Judith Kerr’s talent as a writer, and her tone is so consistent: you really get a good sense of the character of this cat and all the adventures she gets up to.’

Meanwhile, Miriam Margolyes describes Judith as having ‘the Dickens touch’.

‘She invents a whole world and invites you to share it. The characters feel real and the animals are people.’

To bring Mog to life, the producers next created a layout, with finely-detailed drawings of each storyboard panel, and started animating the characters back in February.

Certain parts of the picture, including Mog’s stripes and the clothes worn by the Thomas family, had to be animated by hand, frame by frame.

So huge was the task that the film required an entire team of specialist assistant animators focusing solely on these intricate details.

Judith, a graduate of London’s Central School of Art and Design, was unique in that she illustrated her books as well as writing them; something remarkably few authors do today.

To make the movements on screen look authentic, the art team had to develop special brushes to mimic her original artwork, as well as bespoke tools to speed up the process of animating tinsel, paper chains and the branches of the Christmas tree.

Finally, they added special touches, such as texture overlays to match the look of the drawing paper Judith used, before adding the background music.

Seeing the film complete for the first time was like stepping back 50 years, says Tacy.

Not only does she remember reading Mog as a child, but it takes her back to a time when stories and imagination were everywhere she looked.

‘The whole family were storytellers,’ she says. ‘My Dad, Nigel, wrote Quartermass [a sci-fi series on the BBC and Thames Television in the Fifties] and made up all sorts of stories: I remember one about a child with a golden belly.

‘My brother used to tell me stories, too. We’d sit in a cupboard with glow-in-the-dark stars, and Matt would make up adventures about travelling to the edge of space.’

She remembers her mother writing in a studio at the top of their ‘ancient, bedraggled Victorian house’, disappearing up there to immerse herself in her work.

‘I remember coming home from school and rushing upstairs to see what she’d drawn. Was it finished yet? It was always a magical moment.’

But young Tacy had a bigger role in her mother’s books than she realised at the time.

For The Tiger Who Came to Tea, which went on to sell over five million copies, was based on a bedtime story her mother told her as a three-year-old, after the pair visited a zoo together.

‘She told me that story many times before turning it into a book, and then only the best parts made the final cut,’ she says.

‘In a way, it was edited by me as I would wander off in the so-called boring bits.’

Growing up surrounded by stories was, she says, as wonderful as it sounds. ‘Mum was deeply interested in people, even when she was an old lady.

‘She always looked outwards, not inwards. She wanted to hear what people were doing, and the artist’s side of her loved looking at how people moved.’

But behind her mother’s jovial demeanour – and perhaps the motivation for her cheery children’s tales – Judith hid a dark and painful past.

In the Thirties, she and her family were forced to flee Germany when her father, Alfred, a renowned Jewish writer, became a marked man for mocking Hitler and the increasingly-powerful Nazis.

Alfred received a tip-off from a policeman that the family’s passports were about to be seized, and he disappeared overnight, leaving instructions for his wife, Julia, and their two children, Michael, 12, and Judith, nine, to follow him clandestinely to Switzerland by milk train.

From there, they moved to Paris, eventually settling in London in 1936.

It was a strange and unfamiliar world, and though Judith’s parents kept up a brave front, their lives began to fall apart: Alfred’s writing payments were stopped, his books were publicly burned and the Nazis put a price on his head.

Judith, who never spoke much about those years, eventually turned her experiences into a semi-autobiographical book, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, published in 1971.

‘Mum never wanted to tell us too much detail,’ Tacy says. ‘We didn’t really know exactly what it was like, or what it felt like.

‘Then we went to see The Sound of Music, and afterwards my brother said, “Oh, so now we know what it was like for Mummy.”

‘That was the moment, I think, when she was galvanised into writing her book.’

Tacy recorded the audiobook of the novel a year after her mother died, and says doing so made her feel even closer to her.

‘I could hear her voice as I was doing it; the rhythms in it, the turns of phrase.

‘I even felt like she was looking over my shoulder at times. It was amazing, and quite emotional.’

Though Mog’s miaows haven’t provided quite the same connection, it has brought back memories of happy family Christmases from years gone by.

‘Our Christmases were small: just the four of us and the cat,’ recalls Tacy.

‘Mum would have decorated the tree with ancient pieces of paper we’d coloured in or cut out when we were small, all carefully-preserved.

‘We’d rush downstairs to open the presents in our stockings, carols would be on all day, and after lunch we’d go for a walk wearing the new mittens or scarf we’d unwrapped.’

These days, she says, Christmas will be even more minimal: just Tacy, her long-term partner – and their cats, Motley and Posset.

‘I don’t know how I’d cope without cats in the house,’ she says.

‘Mog lived until she was 22, and then as she became more elderly and didn’t do much except sit around, we got others, who did excellent and mad things, all of which contributed to Mum’s books.

‘The next one was Wienitz, who inspired Mog’s Bad Thing – Dad locked her in the house for some reason and so she did a bad thing on the chair.

‘Then there was Posy, a lovely tabby cat, and she had a toy called bunny which she used to carry about, place by her bowl and take out into the garden. She inspired Mog and Bunny.

‘And then there was Felix: he was the one who played with the foxes in Mog on Fox Night.’

It seems astonishing that it’s taken almost five decades for Mog to be given life beyond the page, so tightly-woven is the beloved moggy into our culture.

She did pop up – alongside Kerr herself – in a Christmas advert for Sainsbury’s in 2015, and appeared on stage in a musical production at The Old Vic in London this summer.

Tacy hopes the cat’s festive debut will introduce a whole new generation to her mother’s cherished stories, which never fail to captivate and charm – even after all these years.

‘It’s crazy that there will be people watching whose grandparents read it to them when they were little – and now they’re grandparents, too,’ she says.

‘It’s going to take me right back to my childhood: memories of my family, of Mum, and, of course, of mad, wonderful Mog.’

Mog’s Christmas will air on Christmas Eve at 7.45pm on Channel 4