When you Wish Upon a Frog (Book II of the Jim Henson at Disney saga)

[Plateosaurus]

Sounds like interesting fun and a CG blast.

I do hope Nemo's brothers got their comeuppance for bullying him, though.

 

[jpj1421]

Honestly, sounds like it might be better than the IOTL version of Finding Nemo which has never been my favorite Pixar movie.

 

[Shiny_Agumon]

Alas, while The Brave Little Toaster was a technical achievement, as a Disney animated film it underperformed.

Which is so weird given the smash hit that was Toy Story!

“On the surface Toaster was perfect for us,” said 3D head Joe Ranft. “Animating living beings back then was challenging to accomplish without them looking like plastic anyway, so why not pursue a story involving actually plastic things? In hindsight, we could have found plastic things that were more relatable than lamps and toasters, which we later did, of course.”

Speaking of Toy Story, this sounds like that concept isn't completely buried yet.
Maybe this time they get the permission to use Barbie sooner.

It would come to them thanks not to a brainstorming session[2], but from an internal company contest launched in late 1992. CCO Jim Henson was calling for ideas for films and shorts and shows based on the seas and sea life. Port Disney Phase 3, the long-awaited DisneySea resort, was scheduled to open at Long Beach in the spring of 1995 and appeared to be on track to get there. With aquariums and oceanic conservation at the core of the central Oceana attraction, the parks-tie-in potential for an oceanic animation was obvious.

Now that's a park synergy I can get behind!

“Now, today you could possibly play with tropes like that and get away with it. Back in the early 1990s you could kind of get away with it in coy, indirect ways, like the genderless Delenn transforming into a semi-human woman in Babylon 5. But I realized quickly that one of my early plans for raising the stakes and increasing the father’s agoraphobia by having Nemo’s mom killed by a shark was going to be a non-starter if we were also going to meet Jim’s goal to keep things as scientifically accurate as possible in support of the DisneySea tie-in.”

Thankfully! That bit always felt a bit shoehorned into the story imo.

“What if Nemo is the picked-on runt?” asked Docter. “His dad is a bit of a jock trying to impress both his ‘boys’ and his wife the ‘Mommy’, and Nemo, the frustrated runt with a stunted fin who gets the least support from his demanding jock dad, feels ignored and acts out. This leads him to rebel and swim off to see the scuba diver, who then captures him.”

Our ‘son’ fish, who by this point we’d named ‘Nemo’ as a good nautical name with a Classic Disney connection that was also part of the word “anemone”

The name also works thematically since "Nemo" means nobody and Nemo is himself kind of a nobody and outsider in his own family.

Also a far cry from the coddling parents dynamic of the OTL film. This Nemo wishes he got this much attention from his dad!

Thus, the opening dynamic evolved into a Clownfish colony among “the anemones” led by the mother figure and her husband the father figure with “The Boys” (sibling figures) being the various juvenile males, with Nemo the youngest and weakest. Nemo has no outlet for his emotions and needs inside the anemones, where he’s largely ignored or picked on by The Boys, with the father-figure in particular subtly judgmental about him needing to “toughen up” and “stand up” for himself

His father is irate to find him outside of the anemones and berates him, still half-hidden in the tangled tentacles of the anemones himself, but Nemo talks back and ignores his father’s increasingly desperate and fearful orders to return, even when a real danger, the looming Scuba Man, appears. In an ill-considered rebellion, Nemo decides to show daddy up and swims towardsthe Scuba Man, hoping to find “a new friend”, where naturally he’s netted and bagged and carried off."
With Nemo captured, the matriarch, by this point named Coral, wants the patriarch, by this point named Fin, to go out and find him. But as has been amply revealed by this point, for all of his macho bluster, Fin is a bit of a coward. He’s a Big Fish in the anemones, but rather terrified about the out there

Now that might actually be a bit too relatable for some viewers. Haha😅

I also like that Fin is both the "big Macho Man" and the angora phobic weakling hiding behind his wife and inside the Anemone. Really showcases his hypocrisy in wanting his son to "toughen up" to the abuse by his brothers when Nemo is probably the bravest of them all.

Nemo, leaving the safety of the anemones, learns from his new friends (a seahorse, a squid, a parrotfish, and a young flounder named Pablo)

Btw what happened to his friends?
Do they just get sidelined after the first act? I understand why the rest of the school kids are sidelined in OTLs Nemo, but these are actual characters who I through would be more important.

Buffett and Wilson and their bands would team up on the music, creating a gulf/calypso-themed all-instrumental score plus an “Oscar Bait” duet “Where’s Nemo?” that was nominated but did not win, yet still sold platinum and got video and airplay.

We might have lost the Caribbean flair in TLM, but at least we have this.

And for the critical role of Nemo, they brought in the up-and-coming child actor Johnathan Taylor Thomas, who was by that time increasingly famous in the public eye from his starring role on the hit NBC Sitcom Internal Combustion.

I hope that's the first step towards a big film career!
I mean this is one of the only timelines where becoming a Disney Child Star is a good thing.

Every take had a slight little improv or change in inflection. She’d take whatever situational or social cue she was given and find about three or four jokes that our writing team and I never thought of! Admittedly not all of it was appropriate!

I hope they release this as a VCD bonus feature in the future.

“in school, of course.” Just your basic bad preschool fish pun. John and Amy decided to take the line and run with it.

“By around take four, you had John as Fin saying, ‘Wait, what? You read the Human language?’

“…and Amy as Marla would say ‘you have a problem with that, Orange Julius?’

“…and he’s like ‘What? No! I mean, that’s an amazingly helpful skill right now! I’m just…really wondering where you learned to read Human!’ And she’d open her mouth to talk and he’d cut her off saying, ‘and don’t you dare say “in school!”’

“…and then she gasps and says, ‘Well, I was going to say “at the university,” you overgrown sardine, sheesh!’ and the whole crew is falling out of their chairs at this point just at the way they said it.

😂

But the Incredible Journey, and hilarious interactions, of Fin and Marla became the heart of the film, with Marla proving to be the force of change that wears down Fin’s façade of tough masculinity to reveal the trauma that defined his flaws: a barracuda attack as a child that left his own mother dead and forced him to grow up too fast.

They had their fish and ate it too, didn't they?
Instead of Nemo losing his Mom it's Fin.

Also this gets really awkward if you remember that "growing up too fast" for a clown fish meant starting a sexual relationship with his father turned mother and having a bunch of kids.😬

All of this happens in stages along the way to Sydney Harbor[8], following the address Marla read from the Scuba Man’s dropped mask. On the way, they faced various help and hindrances such as the trio of “12-step Sharks” led by a great white voiced by Australian comedy legend Barry Humphries, a group of California “surfer” Turtles led by Crush (voiced by Stanton himself in a case of a working dub becoming so popular that it became permanent), a friendly and talkative Grey Whale named Limpet (Edie McClurg) and her precocious calf Squirt (Judith Barsi), and even a shape-forming school of direction-giving fish all voiced by “friend of the team” John Ratzenberger

I like that we have both familiar characters and new ones mixed together.

They kept looking stiff and didn’t have that hypnotic slow flowing quality that we wanted, so we saved the set piece for Loggerheads.

Loggerheads was born simply out of the desire for a redo with properly mature CG animation technology.”

Now I'm curious what Loggerheads is!
I guess another "fish feature" but not a sequel to Finding Nemo.

But for 3D’s next film, the film that many felt could “make or break” CG animation, taking a lead from Ranft’s and Lassiter’s guidance, they found their “happy medium between a hammer and a hammerhead” for the next picture by going back to a long-forgotten John Lasseter CG Short and its accompanying Muppets production, originally developed in the mid-1980s for Disney’s World of Magic.

I'm so curious what this could be!

Best of Luck 3D.

While she will not suffer from acute short term memory loss like Dory, avoiding the unfortunate “funny handicap” trope, Marla may as well suffer from it for as utterly unfocused and directionless as she is. Marla will ultimately be claimed by the Autism Spectrum community for her “ADHD proclivities”, though the creators never intended her to be actually ADHD, just “easily distracted”.

So Marla is less of a manic dream girl and more of an easily distracted snarker. Nice

[10] Hat tip to @Shiny_Agumon for the suggestion that “…Nemo wakes up in the aquarium and all the humans outside looking kinda off and unsettling could convey the sense of unease that he's experiencing himself.”

I'm always glad to help!

Great chapter @Geekhis Khan

 

[Daibhid C]

Now I'm curious what Loggerheads is!
I guess another "fish feature" but not a sequel to Finding Nemo.

I'm guessing sea turtles, given the title.

 

[Clorox23]

Speaking of Toy Story, this sounds like that concept isn't completely buried yet.

I'm so curious what this could be!

TFW you already answered your question:

But for 3D’s next film, the film that many felt could “make or break” CG animation, taking a lead from Ranft’s and Lassiter’s guidance, they found their “happy medium between a hammer and a hammerhead” for the next picture by going back to a long-forgotten John Lasseter CG Short and its accompanying Muppets production, originally developed in the mid-1980s for Disney’s World of Magic.

 

[Denliner]

Finding Nemo was an unusual movie for Disney 3D to work on after The Brave Little Toaster, but given the overall context behind it, it does make some sense, and I'm a bit relieved that the story has largely remained the same. Not to mention it got a huge boost from being associated with DisneySea. Makes me think that a possible Finding Nemo ride will be coming soon at DisneySea or EPCOT.

Toy Story is shaping up to be the movie that will fully kick-start Disney 3D's rise to fame, but I find it interesting that it will be the result of a natural progression of many failures and successes instead of a very lucky home-run ITTL. Can't wait to see how the movie will turn out once it hits theaters.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Thanks, all, I knew that with DisneySea opening that skipping ahead to Nemo was the strategic business decision, and it also gave me some opportunity to try and reverse-engineer how 3D/Pixar would or even could do it earlier.

Which is so weird given the smash hit that was Toy Story!

Well, TBH it's significantly easier for audiences to relate to toys on an emotional level than toasters. We all remember that one toy that we carried everywhere, but it's probably less likely that you have fond childhood memories of your vacuum. The fact that it did as well as it did is a testament to the skills of the 3D team, not just as technicians but as artists. Most people who saw The Brave Little Toaster iTTL liked it, but it just didn't catch many people on a visceral level the way that Toy Story did.

Btw what happened to his friends?
Do they just get sidelined after the first act? I understand why the rest of the school kids are sidelined in OTLs Nemo, but these are actual characters who I through would be more important.

They are important. They're symbolic of how outgoing and open-minded Nemo is compared to his siblings. Nemo is reunited with them in the end.

I do hope Nemo's brothers got their comeuppance for bullying him, though.

Let's say there's a credits scene where Nemo's friends are trying to help the Boys deal with their obvious terror at being asked to leave the anemones.

Anchor: Oh! I can't do it I can't do it I can't do it!!!

Li'l Octopus (who we've seen "ink himself" several times by now): Oh, come on. Don't be such a scaredy-catfish.

Also this gets really awkward if you remember that "growing up too fast" for a clown fish meant starting a sexual relationship with his father turned mother and having a bunch of kids.😬

Yep. No way to avoid awkwardness when anthropomorphizing nature!

Now I'm curious what Loggerheads is!

I'm guessing sea turtles, given the title.

Turtles all the way.

 

[LelouchOfTheBarBrawl]

While I feel I'd like OTL's one better, this Nemo is cool. Though I think that makes this more real. No change is going to please everyone.

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

At this point, I’m half expecting Balto to be live-action CGI, just to screw with our expectations even more.

 

[Igeo654]

At this point, I’m half expecting Balto to be live-action CGI, just to screw with our expectations even more.

It should be Togo's movie.

 

[Deleted member 165942]

Huh my notifications for this thread keeps breaking. So I missed the last update, time to read it.

 

[Shiny_Agumon]

Well, TBH it's significantly easier for audiences to relate to toys on an emotional level than toasters. We all remember that one toy that we carried everywhere, but it's probably less likely that you have fond childhood memories of your vacuum. The fact that it did as well as it did is a testament to the skills of the 3D team, not just as technicians but as artists. Most people who saw The Brave Little Toaster iTTL liked it, but it just didn't catch many people on a visceral level the way that Toy Story did

Definitely!

Especially the Sequels like Toy Story 2 who pulled on your heartstrings and established Pixar's reputation of "the studio that makes you cry ugly tears about the weirdest stories", even if that means that films that aren't as emotional get a bad rep from the fans.

Well can't wait for Loggerheads and the alt Toy Story.

 

[Pesterfield]

How will aquariums fare, will Nemo get people wanting them or turn them off?

It might be a nice idea to have Nemo the face of a little educational thing about what kinds of fish are happy in aquariums and which ones need to stay in their natural homes.

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

Also, how to give them a properly-sized tank with enrichment instead of the cliche bowl & castle.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 17: Spiders and Swans, Part I
From the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little

In 1995 I directed my first animated feature film, only I did so using Stop Motion, working with Tim Burton’s Skeleton Crew. Years of drawing cells and digitally coloring, and I’d end up partnering with Henry Selick to bring things to life in plasticine and wire. And I must say it was a new and enjoyable experience. There’s a physicality to working with stop motion that’s not there with celluloid, and definitely not there with digital. You have to physically build, pose, and manipulate the characters incrementally for each photographed frame. It’s about as hands-on as you can get!

I’d already learned a bit about camera angles and lenses while working on Lost in La Mancha, where we had to “blur” our animation in keeping with the live action lens used, so I was able, with Henry’s help and the skill of cinematographer Pete Kozachik, to manage that aspect. My understanding of light and light sources directly translated, so learning that aspect was simple application partnered with the lighting team. Once the initial learning curve was completed, the reels began to fill, one click at a time. My main job became translating the storyboards to physical set pieces and working with the animators to pace and frame them. Sometimes we enacted a scene with people just to figure out how the flow and camera angles and lighting would work.

As always, much of the hardest and most critical work was on the front end. Concept art, storyboarding, casting, voice recording…you know the drill by now if you’ve been reading this Tlog. I worked with Neil Gaiman, who drafted the story treatment with my input, and we worked with Carole Holliday, Steve Hulett, and the Skeleton Crew to put together a great story of two young fraternal twins in South Philly who find out that their real papa is none other than Anansi the Spider God (originally, we had it set in Chicago, but it moved thanks to casting). It would revolve around them getting pulled into a crazy caper by their spider-daddy that helps them find the magic in themselves in a coming-of-age narrative.

Neil called it “Anansi Boys”, play on the British slang “Nancy boys” for weak or effeminate men[1].

Kind of this about a decade early as a Burton-style stop-motion animation

The very first casting was Whoopie Goldberg, reprising Aunt Nancy yet again. But for the two critical central roles of the brothers, we pulled in “DJ Jazzy” Jeff Townes and the “Fresh Prince” Will Smith[2], who’d been doing lots of work with Disney where their combination of hip-hop street cred and inoffensive lyrics made them a great fit for 1990s Disney (they’re the reason we moved the setting to Philly from Chi-Town). They worked with Danny Elfman to develop a more hip-hop urban score and soundtrack, Disney’s first hip-hop musical, and probably the first mainstream musical to have a hip-hop soundtrack unless you count that one song in The Music Man (for the record: I don’t). They play, respectively, Amos “Mos” Nance and Andrew “Roo” Nance, two teens-turning-adults who have never met their absentee father and whose mother passed on when they were kids, leaving their Aunt Nancy Nance to raise them. Mos is the serious and melancholic one who wants to keep a low profile (blue Oni) and Roo is the jocular and outgoing one always getting into trouble (red Oni). Given his natural charisma, Will’s Roo became the main point of view character. Let me explain:

Neil had originally written the two characters in the opposite way, where Mos had gotten all the “magic” and was outgoing and universally loved while Roo was a struggling misfit. He’d given Roo a dark, brooding, and melancholic personality; a somber romantic. All that went out the door when Will and Jeff signed on. Will immediately latched on to the Roo character, who was the main focus of the story, despite us imagining him playing the smooth and outgoing Mos. Will wanted rewrites for Roo and tended to ad lib anyway, which upset Neil quite a bit. But this anecdote serves as a great example of how casting can change everything as the Onis of the two characters flipped.

But as for Mos and Roo the characters, their life gets turned upside down when Aunt Nancy passes shortly after their 18th birthday. At her wake, which they alone attend, she sits up(!!!) and lets them know how proud that she is of them and lets them in “on a little secret” by stepping out of the casket and transforming into a tall, handsome man dressed like a Harlem Renaissance hep cat.

“Hey boys, I’m your daddy,” says the newly revealed Anansi N’Anci, voiced by Eddie Murphy.

Concept Art (Actually from Harpy Marx on Deviant Art)

Well, needless to say, this is where the fun begins as “Daddy Nance”, who is needless to say the West African Spider God Anansi, introduces his kids to the larger world outside of their “Hood”. He tells them how they’ve been a part of “My Greatest Story Yet” (which is, needless to say, related in song). And things don’t start happy, with Mos and Roo asking him why he’d be such a jerk and name them “Amos and Andy” instead of something less “messed up”, noting how much grief they got at school.

“Y’all ever hear that Johnny Cash song, ‘A Boy Named Sue’? Learned real quick to stick up for yourselves and each other, now, didn’t y’all?”

“That’s real messed up, Dad.”

And yea, Anansi’s a bit of a dick, and yea, the movie’s pretty politically incorrect at times, but in that “power to the powerless” Mel Brooks[3] way. We were able to use the ironic potential of the medium to subtly address some pretty weighty material, from racial profiling, to street violence, to systemic poverty and racism, to political corruption, to (in a very abstract way) the war on drugs.

As mentioned, Daddy Nance pulls Mos and Roo into his “Song” and “Story”, a mad caper where he tricks them into unwittingly participating all kinds of petty small-time cons and heists, all the while making it look like he’s about to set them up for the fall. They manage to irritate some powerful men like the local drug gang head Bigg Puma, the thoroughly corrupt local District Councilman Barry Bengal Jones, and the self-serving Assistant DA Vance “The Tiger” D’Angelo (all three voiced by Eddie and all working both with and against each other, with the implication that all three are avatars of Anansi’s foil Tiger). And all the while, Roo pines for a young activist named Letitia James (Tempestt Bledsoe) who has been trying to uncover and expose the massive corruption in their city district.

A South Philly street scene with Young Mos (Image source IMDB)

Soon Mos and Roo start to manifest supernatural powers, learning the truth of their literally Heroic origins as the children of a literal God, and start to “Sing our own Song”. We had real fun with the animation with some creepy-cool transformations and wicked set design.

“Hey look: I’m Spider-Man, bro!”

“You and me both!”

“Look out, Philly: y’all got some Sick Southside Spider-Brothers comin’ your way!”

“Spider, please!”

As the hilarity ensues and Anansi’s schemes all pile on top of one another and crash into the schemes of the three powerful men, or “The Songs run together”, Mos and Roo must learn to rely on themselves and each other, set aside their childish desires and fears, and take responsibility for themselves. They also, in the midst of the gambit pileup, manage to give Letitia all the evidence that she needs to expose the truth of the massive corruption of the three powerful men, and see them all arrested by the FBI. This sees Mos and Roo made heroes, with even the street gang cool with them since they showed how Bigg Puma was cheating all of them, and it ends (naturally) with Roo and Letitia sharing a kiss.

More Concept Art: Anansi N’Ansi (he doesn’t smoke in the PG-rated animation; image actually from our timeline’s American Gods series, I believe; Image source Pinterest)

“Y’all really think I’d leave my boys hanging?” Anansi asks the fourth wall.

Now, the story was built upon the theme of The Song, as you may have noticed, specifically the song of the world and the song of creation and Stories as extension of The Song, going back to the Promethean story of how Anasi claimed all of the stories from Tiger, symbolically representing how intelligence and cleverness replaced brute strength and raw power as the driving force in humanity. The theme of The Song let us play with the diegesis of the soundtrack. And the whole thing had that sick original soundtrack by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince with a fresh Old Skool hi-hop sound that also caught the usual musical story-through-song beats: an “I Want” in “Can’t Catch a Break (in South Philly)”; a villain “I am Becoming” in the trio off the three powerful men singing “A Shake of the Hand”; a “Conditional Love Song” with Roo and Letitia in “Steal Away (my Heart)”; and even a “Comedy List Song” by Eddie in “It’s all in the Game”, which like all of Anansi’s songs was much more swinging big band jazz with a hip-hop spin to reinforce Anansi’s “really damned old school” nature.

And the musical Score by Danny with Jeff and Will was just insane! The best I can describe it is Danny’s usual “Beetlejuice” style bounce, but with a hip-hop remix, with a back beat and the occasional record scratch. I still don’t know how they pulled it off.

Now I’ll be honest: we had no idea how this would play when we released for the inevitably spotty Labor Day weekend. We were breaking a lot of conventions and crossing a lot of barriers. We’d always joked that Skeleton Crew characters were “so white they was ghosts” and no one was doing anything like a hip-hop musical back then except maybe some arthouse way the hell off Broadway. Thankfully we played huge in the cities and with suburban white kids, who were ironically becoming one of the core audiences for hip-hop music at the time. Overseas weren’t the best (except Japan who loves this type of weird cross-genre stuff) but in the end we broke $90 million against our $22 million budget (frankly better than Treasure Planet!) and had a great home video run. Not anywhere near Lion King numbers I’ll grant you, but solid.

Having Eddie and Will and Jeff on the billet helped a lot. Will in particular was spinning up his own acting career as more than just “the poor man’s Jamie Foxx” and would soon be an A-Lister on his own merits[4]. JJ & FP were selling platinum as it was, and the soundtrack to Anansi Boys would sell platinum and even get a Grammy and Golden Globe nod (but no win). The feature itself won several Annies and a Nebula, got a GG nom for Best Musical or Comedy and for the soundtrack, and won several Image awards (including one for me as Director) and even a GLAAD Award, who saw the whole “Anansi-Aunt Nancy” spin as a transgender narrative (not exactly what we were overtly going for, but I’m glad, no pun intended, that some folks found personal meaning there), not to mention the way that Mos and Roo are picked on for being “Nancy Boys” at one point due to their love of art and music.

Yet more Concept Art (via Patti Cmak on Tumbler)

You know, while I may have missed a chance at a Big Big Picture by passing on The Lion King, I’m proud of the work that I did on Anansi Boys. That one was from the heart. I hear that Miyazaki-san was “greatly honored” to learn that I’d turned down The Lion King to fulfill my promise to him on Treasure Planet and even sent me some artwork he made of Anansi in his style as a gift. I was honored to receive it and have it framed on my wall.

But tomorrow, I’ll hand things off to Andreas again as he talks about his work with Richard Rich on 1996’s The Swan Princess in Part II of this post. While I and my team would form a Tigger Team to help out on some of the old-school inking and painting after finishing Anansi Boys before going on to my next big project, that one was mostly Andreas.

Instead, for my next post I’ll talk about the first major traditional animated film that I ever directed, a little film set in New Orleans that y’all may have heard of.

---

[1] Yes, this is very much like his 2005 novel, but a decade earlier. I figured the pun would come to him either way. There will be notable differences due to different experiences, of course.

[2] Oversized Lime Green Zoot Suit Fedora tip to @Plateosaurus for suggesting that Will Smith + Anansi = Gold.

[3] Some people say “you can’t make a Mel Brooks movie anymore”. Bullshit. Spike Lee has done a “Mel Brooks” movie twice by my reckoning: Bamboozled and Black KKKlansman. Three times if you count CSA (produced by Lee; and yes, it’s ASB as a Steampunk Sealion, but focusing on its plausibility is completely missing the point). And let’s not forget JoJo Rabbit! What the people who say this generally mean is “I can’t say racist shit and not be called out for being a racist”. What they miss is that Mel Brooks films, though massively Politically Incorrect, also inevitably side with the oppressed rather than the oppressors (“punching up”, never “down”). The heroes of Blazing Saddles were the oppressed people of color and the villains the white racists dropping the cluster N-bombs. It was an empowerment story, not an excuse for racist jokes. It’s funny to me how offended racists get by Blazing Saddles (a racist friend of mine in the service walked out in disgust when we watched it one day) and how of all the ironic fictional Fascist anthems from anti-Fascist works that have been coopted by White Nationalists, “Springtime for Hitler” was never one of them.

[4] No butterfly is a match for Will Smith’s natural screen presence.

 

[tornadobusdriver]

Been keeping up with the TL. Happy to see an earlier Finding Nemo, hoping to see some take on Monsters Inc since it's my favorite Pixar. There's been too many cool developments to comment on but I must say I'm loving how animated films are developing here.

 

[Deleted member 165942]

Let's all hope that Will Smith will have a happier life TTL, while his life OTL is complicated, I think we can all agree it isn't a happy life.

 

[Bbone91]

This sounds like such an interesting movie.

 

[Plateosaurus]

Thanks for taking up Will Smith as Anansi, more or less, @Geekhis Khan .

 

[Shiny_Agumon]

In 1995 I directed my first animated feature film, only I did so using Stop Motion, working with Tim Burton’s Skeleton Crew. Years of drawing cells and digitally coloring, and I’d end up partnering with Henry Selick to bring things to life in plasticine and wire. And I must say it was a new and enjoyable experience. There’s a physicality to working with stop motion that’s not there with celluloid, and definitely not there with digital. You have to physically build, pose, and manipulate the characters incrementally for each photographed frame. It’s about as hands-on as you can get!

Terry's resume is astonishing, man has basically worked with every visual medium.

The very first casting was Whoopie Goldberg, reprising Aunt Nancy yet again. But for the two critical central roles of the brothers, we pulled in “DJ Jazzy” Jeff Townes and the “Fresh Prince” Will Smith[2], who’d been doing lots of work with Disney where their combination of hip-hop street cred and inoffensive lyrics made them a great fit for 1990s Disney (they’re the reason we moved the setting to Philly from Chi-Town).

I'm more surprised by Jazz going into acting aswell since he was more of a cameo character in OTLs Fresh Prince, Will just has too much natural charisma to not crossover into acting at one point or another.
However if I recall most of his acting roles have been animated so far or am I wrong?

Also the Whoopie Goldberg Anansi casting is becoming a running gag at this point. I wonder how this will be integrated into the plot with Anansi being explicitly male.

They play, respectively, Amos “Mos” Nance and Andrew “Roo” Nance, two teens-turning-adults who have never met their absentee father and whose mother passed on when they were kids, leaving their Aunt Nancy Nance to raise them. Mos is the serious and melancholic one who wants to keep a low profile (blue Oni) and Roo is the jocular and outgoing one always getting into trouble (red Oni).

Jazz playing the melancholy counter character is so funny to imagine. Totally playing against type.

Neil had originally written the two characters in the opposite way, where Mos had gotten all the “magic” and was outgoing and universally loved while Roo was a struggling misfit. He’d given Roo a dark, brooding, and melancholic personality; a somber romantic. All that went out the door when Will and Jeff signed on. Will immediately latched on to the Roo character, who was the main focus of the story, despite us imagining him playing the smooth and outgoing Mos. Will wanted rewrites for Roo and tended to ad lib anyway, which upset Neil quite a bit. But this anecdote serves as a great example of how casting can change everything as the Onis of the two characters flipped.

Sorry Neil, I hope this doesn't ruins his relationship with Disney.

But as for Mos and Roo the characters, their life gets turned upside down when Aunt Nancy passes shortly after their 18th birthday. At her wake, which they alone attend, she sits up(!!!) and lets them know how proud that she is of them and lets them in “on a little secret” by stepping out of the casket and transforming into a tall, handsome man dressed like a Harlem Renaissance hep cat.

“Hey boys, I’m your daddy,” says the newly

WTF
This answers my earlier question, but raises soooooo many more. Most importantly: Why?

However Eddie Murphy, excellent choice.

As mentioned, Daddy Nance pulls Mos and Roo into his “Song” and “Story”, a mad caper where he tricks them into unwittingly participating all kinds of petty small-time cons and heists, all the while making it look like he’s about to set them up for the fall. They manage to irritate some powerful men like the local drug gang head Bigg Puma, the thoroughly corrupt local District Councilman Barry Bengal Jones, and the self-serving Assistant DA Vance “The Tiger” D’Angelo (all three voiced by Eddie and all working both with and against each other, with the implication that all three are avatars of Anansi’s foil Tiger). And all the while, Roo pines for a young activist named Letitia James (Tempestt Bledsoe) who has been trying to uncover and expose the massive corruption in their city district.

This really sounds like this movie could be TTLs The Mask which is zany humour and crazy transformation, only difference is the inherently different culture and the medium of storytelling of course.
Hell both Anansi and Jim Carrey's Mask even wear zoot suits!

Soon Mos and Roo start to manifest supernatural powers, learning the truth of their literally Heroic origins as the children of a literal God, and start to “Sing our own Song”. We had real fun with the animation with some creepy-cool transformations and wicked set design.

“Hey look: I’m Spider-Man, bro!”

“You and me both!”

“Look out, Philly: y’all got some Sick Southside Spider-Brothers comin’ your way!”

“Spider, please!

"Dad hit him with your web blast!"

"I'm not that kind of Spider."

Now I’ll be honest: we had no idea how this would play when we released for the inevitably spotty Labor Day weekend. We were breaking a lot of conventions and crossing a lot of barriers. We’d always joked that Skeleton Crew characters were “so white they was ghosts” and no one was doing anything like a hip-hop musical back then except maybe some arthouse way the hell off Broadway. Thankfully we played huge in the cities and with suburban white kids, who were ironically becoming one of the core audiences for hip-hop music at the time. Overseas weren’t the best (except Japan who loves this type of weird cross-genre stuff) but in the end we broke $90 million against our $22 million budget (frankly better than Treasure Planet!) and had a great home video run. Not anywhere near Lion King numbers I’ll grant you, but solid.

Everyone is making more money than Treasure Planet.😅

No seriously good for them, just adds a bit more salt into the wound for TP.

You know, while I may have missed a chance at a Big Big Picture by passing on The Lion King, I’m proud of the work that I did on Anansi Boys. That one was from the heart. I hear that Miyazaki-san was “greatly honored” to learn that I’d turned down The Lion King to fulfill my promise to him on Treasure Planet and even sent me some artwork he made of Anansi in his style as a gift. I was honored to receive it and have it framed on my wall.

This is a way better gift than some useless trophy that you put away and let it collect dust, this comes from the heart.

But tomorrow, I’ll hand things off to Andreas again as he talks about his work with Richard Rich on 1996’s The Swan Princess in Part II of this post. While I and my team would form a Tigger Team to help out on some of the old-school inking and painting after finishing Anansi Boys before going on to my next big project, that one was mostly Andreas.

Already excited!
It's going to be a stark contrast to today's zany adventure for sure .

Instead, for my next post I’ll talk about the first major traditional animated film that I ever directed, a little film set in New Orleans that y’all may have heard of.

Does it involve frogs or Friends from other sides than ours?

3] Some people say “you can’t make a Mel Brooks movie anymore”. Bullshit. Spike Lee has done a “Mel Brooks” movie twice by my reckoning: Bamboozled and Black KKKlansman. Three times if you count CSA (produced by Lee; and yes, it’s ASB as a Steampunk Sealion, but focusing on its plausibility is completely missing the point). And let’s not forget JoJo Rabbit! What the people who say this generally mean is “I can’t say racist shit and not be called out for being a racist”. What they miss is that Mel Brooks films, though massively Politically Incorrect, also inevitably side with the oppressed rather than the oppressors (“punching up”, never “down”). The heroes of Blazing Saddles were the oppressed people of color and the villains the white racists dropping the cluster N-bombs. It was an empowerment story, not an excuse for racist jokes. It’s funny to me how offended racists get by Blazing Saddles (a racist friend of mine in the service walked out in disgust when we watched it one day) and how of all the ironic fictional Fascist anthems from anti-Fascist works that have been coopted by White Nationalists, “Springtime for Hitler” was never one of them.

👏👏👏 I would like this post for this paragraph alone. Perfectly encapsulated my feelings about people whinning about Political Correctness too.

I know I say that every time but this a really magnificent chapter @Geekhis Khan.