Spielberg had wanted Harry Potter Animated Franchise

In the L.A Times, Alan Horn, the President of Warner Bros, has revealed that Steven Spielberg had wanted to make Harry Potter an animated franchise.  Horn states that Warner Bros was interested with working with Spielberg's Dreamworks, at the time when Warner Bros had secured the rights for Harry Potter.

I did think it would be worthwhile for Steven Spielberg to direct.  We offered it to him. But one of the notions of Dreamworks’ and Steven’s was, ‘Let’s combine a couple of the books, let’s make it animated,’ and that was because of the [visual effects and] Pixar had demonstrated that animated movies could be extremely successful. Because of the wizardry involved, they were very effects-laden. So I don’t blame them.

However, Warner Bros rejected the notion of an animated Harry Potter film which combined the books, as proposed by Spielberg.

But I did not want to combine the movies, and I wanted it to be live action.