Mars Needs Seth Green, Joan Cusack And Mindy Sterling

The motion-captured movie of Berkley Breathed's Mars Needs Moms is getting stacked up with cast and The Hollywood Reporter have named the three latest signings to join the mission: Seth Green, Joan Cusack and Mindy Sterling.

Taking advantage of the body-morphing facilities of the mo-cap process, Green's character will be little Milo, a mere lad (see above) . Joan Cusack will play his mom, who gets kidnapped by an Alien race that will have Mindy Sterling as their queen. The previously cast Dan Fogler has the obligatory best friend part.

Before now, it was fairly widely assumed (across a void as wide as my forehead, at least) that Robert Zemeckis was directing Mars Needs Moms but now we know he's only producing and I can't help but be disappointed. The truth is that Simon and Wendy Wells adapted the screenplay from the book and Simon will direct.

Last time Wells was in the canvas chair, for the Guy Pearce and Samantha Mumba rehash of The Time Machine, he was reputedly replaced – or at the very least, deputized – by an uncredited Gore Verbinski. Perversley, Verbinski is also working on his own Breathed movie too. Odd coincidence.

So, my interest needle has dropped sharply with the revelation of Moms' director. Wells previous films – especially the aforementioned Time Machine, The Prince of Egypt and Balto – are hardly awful but also not really the stuff of letters to home.

Wells apparently campaigned for some time to have Richard Williams' vision for the Thief and the Cobbler restored as much as possible and released, but sadly this seems to have been to no end. The only commercially available version of that film is still Arabian Knights, which heart breakingly mixes Williams' visionary work with some of the ugliest and laziest animation in the entire history of the medium – and sometimes in the same frame. This fighting of the good fight did endear Wells to me somewhat.

Expect the film to look incredibly like the book but considerably less static. Nice.