Animation and All Things Related

Welcome to the first edition of something that I like to call Back to the Drawing Board, where we look at things from the development process of something animated that ended up being cut - or cancelled entirely. And stuff like that. It's gonna be much more interesting (I hope) than I'm describing it here, trust me. So, what's our first topic?

"I've been sitting on this moon since the 1990s and I STILL haven't caught anything! What the heck?!"

Ah, DreamWorks Animation. You've always been a bit of a mixed bag of an animation studio. When you made a good film (Kung Fu Panda, the first two Shrek movies), you made a good film. When you made a lousy film (Shark Tale, for instance), boy did you make a lousy movie.

One thing I will say about DreamWorks is that they certainly been able to make the most out of some rather strange premises. For instance, a snail wants to race in the Indy 500. Who would've thunk that they could actually make a good movie out of that? However, this didn't always work out in their favor. I don't think there's any way that they could've made a movie about a bee falling in love with a human woman and then suing the entire human race work.

Which leads me into the story of the first film idea we'll be talking about today - in 2005, DreamWorks announced a film called Route 66.
Route 66 What, exactly, was Route 66 supposed to be about?

Well, if you're like me and you haven't been to Route 66, there are all these neat things to see as you're driving down the road. Teepees and dinosaurs and a large blue whale (pictured below).

Insert some sort of Pinocchio-related joke here, I've got nothing.

DreamWorks' film about Route 66 was apparently supposed to be about a giant golf ball statue located on Route 66 named Mulligan voiced by Harland Williams. Would DreamWorks have been able to make audiences care about a giant golf ball the same way it made audiences care about a panda with the voice of Jack Black? Well, Route 66 for whatever reason didn't get made (maybe they thought it would've been too similar to PIXAR's Cars?), so we'll never know. But hey, maybe.

Concept art from the film.

It Came From Earth! When DreamWorks announced Route 66 in 2005, they also announced a film called It Came From Earth!. This film was described as "a reverse alien invasion story told from the perspective of martians when human astronauts arrive". This, in my opinion, sounds like it would've been a lot more interesting than the DreamWorks movie about aliens that we DID eventually get, Home (seriously, WHY did they cast Rihanna as a character who is supposed to be a little girl?).

Actually, come to think of it, isn't that essentially the plot of Planet 51? Except there's just the one astronaut rather than a whole bunch of them?

I couldn't find any concept art for It Came From Earth!, so here's the DVD cover for Planet 51. I have not seen this movie, but it looked pretty lousy. I like the astronaut's expression and pose, though.

Shrek Goes Fourth Remember when Shrek was a film beloved by audiences and considered a hilarious spoof of classic fairy tales? Well, it was indeed both of those things... until 2007, when Shrek the Third came out. When everyone saw how awful that movie was, Shrek quickly became a mockery. Nowadays, this franchise is mainly just liked for the multiple memes that it spawned.

Blah blah blah, check yourself before you Shrek yourself, yadda-yadda-yadda...

Well, before Shrek the Third came out, DreamWorks planned on having FIVE Shrek movies. FIVE. The plot for the actual fourth movie starring the Mike Myers-voiced ogre, Shrek Forever After*, was originally going to be the plot of Shrek Five, and Shrek 4 - or Shrek Goes Fourth** - was to be a prequel of sorts about Shrek telling his kids the story of how he found that swamp that they call home in the first place. Or maybe Shrek Forever After always had the plot it was released with and the "Shrek's backstory" thing was to be the plot of Shrek 5, I'm not one hundred percent sure which.

Either way, here's some concept art of a teenaged Shrek. It's very strange seeing Shrek so thin...

And then Shrek the Third came out and got negative reviews. I've seen multiple people refer to it as "Shrek the Turd". DreamWorks got the hint and decided that maybe they were better off just making ONE more Shrek movie as opposed to two (well, technically they DID make two more Shrek movies if we're counting the Puss in Boots spin-off film, but still...).

Thus, Shrek Forever After was released in 2010, didn't get very good reviews either (though its Rotten Tomatoes score is higher than that of Shrek the Third) and Shrek has since then only shown up in television specials and YouTube videos. Then a few years after the fourth film was released it was announced that they were actually making a fifth Shrek movie... or maybe it's going to be a reboot of the whole franchise, once again I'm not sure one hundred percent sure which. If it is indeed a fifth movie, this article is going to be pretty outdated.

Hopefully this at least means that all those Shrek food tie-ins that were everywhere when Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third were in theaters will be back. You know, the Shrek Twinkies, the Shrek M&Ms, the Shrek sundaes at Baskin-Robbins... all that stuff. I probably won't eat any of it, but still, I kind of hope that it'll all back for no other reason than to see people react to it.
Larrikins Larrikins sounds like it would've been pretty interesting. The film was meant to be released in 2018 and focus on an uptight bilby named Perry (an Australian animal named Perry... where have I seen that before?) who gets kicked out of his burrow and finds himself in the middle of a musical adventure in the Australian outback. Other characters included a hard-edged authority-hating kangaroo named Red and a crocodile named Howard who believes that he is in charge of preventing 'non-native species' from spreading. Peter de Seve, who's done a lot of character designs for the Ice Age franchise, did some concept art for the film, which I have posted below.

Hugh Jackman, Margot Robbie, Ben Mendelsohn, Josh Lawson, and Rose Byrne were just some of the celebrities chosen to voice the film's characters. Alas, in 2017 it was revealed that Larrikins had been cancelled. Tim Minchin, one of the film's directors, was understandably not too thrilled about this.

On a positive note, elements and characters from the film wound up in a recent DreamWorks short called Bilby.
Tortoise vs. Hare You know the story of "The Tortoise and the Hare", right? If you don't, here's a summary: a hare won't stop bragging about how fast he is, a tortoise says that he can beat him in a race, so they race, the hare takes the lead and then thinks that he can take a nap and the tortoise still won't be able to beat him, but the tortoise takes the lead while the hare is sleeping and wins the race, and the moral is apparently supposed to be that "slow and steady wins the race" but it comes across more as "don't be a cocky idiot and take a nap during a footrace."

"I can beat him... he might be fast, but he's also a lazy idiot!"

Well, in 1999, Aardman announced that they were planning an adaptation of the story with DreamWorks (this was just a year before their first DreamWorks-distributed film, Chicken Run, was released). The project ended up being postponed in 2001 so they could rework the script.

Why didn't we see this film? Well, DreamWorks had a habit of meddling with production of Aardman's third film distributed by them, Flushed Away (which I personally think is a hilarious film and definitely recommend watching). For one thing, it was originally supposed to be about pirates, but DreamWorks claimed that pirate films weren't marketable (this is before the first Pirates of the Caribbean film came out, but I bet they felt pretty stupid when they saw how much money THOSE films were making) and asked them to modernize the idea. They also insisted on more of the film's comic relief slugs.

The entire process was such a migraine for Aardman that they decided to stop letting DreamWorks distribute their films. They went over to Sony Pictures Animation after that, and eventually did indeed make a movie about pirates (which I haven't seen but I've heard great things about). Who knows, maybe someday they'll take another crack at "The Tortoise and the Hare". And by "they" I mean either Aardman or DreamWorks.

Here is a tortoise from an episode of Aardman's Creature Comforts. I don't know why he's wearing a sweatband. Maybe he just completed a race against a hare?

Tusker After Antz was released, DreamWorks announced in the December of 1998 that their next film would be Tusker. It would've been directed by the same directors that helmed Antz and focused on a herd of elephants trekking across Southeast Asia. I gotta say, going from a film about bugs to a film about elephants is a pretty big (pun intended) leap.

I love elephants, so I'm obviously pretty disappointing that this didn't get made. I'm not sure why it didn't get made - maybe the CGI department was too busy working on Shrek or something? But if that were the case, why not just make it traditionally-animated?

Here are some storyboards for the film posted by Frans Vischer on his blog:

I don't even have a funny comment here. I just REALLY WISH that this film got made!

While nothing ever came out of the project at DreamWorks, in 2008 it was revealed that the film was now under production at an animation company called Imagi (who also worked with DreamWorks on that Father of the Pride show). But then Imagi closed in 2011, and at no point in-between 2008 and 2011 did they actually release Tusker. In fact, I'm not even sure if they started working on it before the studio closed (they had quite a few other projects going at the time, mind you).

And speaking of cancelled films from DreamWorks' early days...
The Wanderer This film was to be directed by Paul and Gaetan Brizzi (brothers who worked on a number of projects at Disney, including Tarzan, A Goofy Movie, and Fantasia 2000) and Simon Wells (who also directed We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story and The Time Machine and acted as a story artist on many of DreamWorks' other films). All we know about this one is that it was going to be about a stray bear who joins a group of circus bears and changes their lives. In 2012, Devin Crane uploaded some concept art for the film on his blog.

The project ended up being cancelled after Simon Wells went off to direct The Time Machine and some studio changes. We wouldn't get to see DreamWorks' take on a circus bear until ten years later when Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted came out.

Obviously the bears in The Wanderer were to be much more anthropomorphic than this one.

Truckers I've never read the 1989 book Truckers or its sequels. When I first heard the name I thought "Is it about trucks? Or truck-drivers? Or something related to trucks at all?" Well, it's not about any of those things. It's about nomes (I didn't misspell that, in the book they're called "nomes" - just look at the book cover that I've posted below), tiny people who live hidden among humans. DreamWorks acquired the film rights in 2001 and began planning a film that combined all three books into one story. Initially, the film was to be directed by Andrew Adamson.

And apparently they have pet rats too.

Then in 2008, Danny Boyle (yes, the director of Slumdog Millionaire) was announced as the film's director, but the project ended up falling apart. Then in 2009 it was announced that Simon Beaufoy (who coincidentally enough ALSO worked on Slumdog Millionaire as the film's screenwriter) had been hired to work on the project, and in 2010 it was announced that the film was to be written by John Orloff (who also wrote Legend of the Guardians) and directed by Anand Tucker.

Long story short, I'm writing this article in 2019 and we still haven't gotten Truckers. I don't even know if DreamWorks still has the film rights.

Okay, now, this is just SOME of the films that DreamWorks planned on doing but didn't get around to completing. I limited this article to only talk about eight films because otherwise we'd have an extremely long article.

Actually, maybe I'm just being lazy by suggesting you look these films up yourselves instead of talking about them in this article, but again, if I actually DID talk about all of them we would have an extremely long article that you probably wouldn't find very fun to read.

And by the way, I didn't talk about Me and My Shadow because I'm honestly not sure if that's still in production or not. Same with that B.O.O. film that was gonna star Bill Murray and Seth Rogen, Madagascar 4, and Puss in Boots 2.

* I didn't realize this until I was writing this article, but... Shrek Forever After is intended to be a reference to the fact that it's the fourth Shrek movie. No, really. Shrek Forever After. Say it out loud if you don't believe me.

** I also just realized that Shrek Goes Fourth was intended to be a pun on Shrek Goes Forth. What do you think they were planning on calling the hypothetical SIXTH movie? Shrek Sics Puss in Boots on Some Hooligans That Won't Stay Out of His Swamp?