Animated Films that went through Difficult Productions Part 1

    Animated films take along time to make, but some of them, took to long, lets take a look at some of those films.

Sleepy Beauty

    Now there wouldn't be a list of animated films that went through difficult productions without talking about Sleepy Beauty. Sleepy Beauty took 8 years to make! It had the most expensive budget of any Disney film at the time with a budget of $1 million which today, that would equal to $68 million dollars! Back then, $1 million was very expensive to make a movie. Know, animated movies cost up to 100 million to 200 million! Because of the massive budget, Disney layed off tons of his animation employees. The animation personnel went from 551 to 75! Disney was also very busy with the parks and TV shows at the time so he was barely there to help like he used to.  It was announced in 1950, it began production in 1951 and then it was finally finished in 1959 to poor reviews and was a bomb at the box office and wasn't able to recoup its budget! Walt once said that the production took "too long". Hmm, I wonder why Walt.

The Simpsons Movie

    Oh boy this is a big one. It was obvious that  The Simpsons where extremely popular. So a movie only made sense. Because of this popularity, 20th Century Fox greenlit the project in 1997, they finished the film 10 years later in 2007! They got the actors to sign on in 2001. The script took the longest however. They started writing in 2003 and wrote (this is insane) around 160 drafts of a script!!! Pretty much all of the jokes from that first draft didn't make it to the final movie except a fishing scene with Homer and Bart. That's insane! Different versions of the movie where repurposed as episodes of the show. So if you watch an episode of the show from 2003 through 2007, the plot might just have been one of the original plots for the movie. Russ Cargill (the villain of the movie) also went through 2 redesigns. In fact, Burger King started making toys with the rejected character design right when they changed it! So yeah! This movie had some production. But it was all worth it when it was a huge success and was nominated for a Golden Globe! So sometimes, a difficult production can be rewarding.

Astro Boy  

    Astro Boy is one of the most popular anime characters ever. Sony Pictures had this movie in development in 1999 and wanted it to be a live action film using cg and animatronics that would be made by the Jim Henson Company with director Eric Leighton who directed the Disney move Dinosaur. It was supposed to be released in 2000. However, in 2004, they replaced him with one of my favorite animators, Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter's Laboratory, Hotel Transylvania, Samurai Jack, Primal) to direct his first live action film with a scheduled 2007 release. However, Genndy Tartakovsky left shortly after to direct The Power of the Dark Crystal, the sequel to one of my favorite films the Dark Crystal, which was also done by Jim Henson and was the first movie where every single character was a puppet. However, that project didn't go any where either.  At one point, Brad Bird, one of my favorite animators and filmmakers ever who directed The Incredibles, The Iron Giant, and Ratatouille, was interested in directing the film at one time. I don't  know if he wanted to direct it when it was a live action movie since he has done live action films or when it was going to be animated, but him and Genndy Tartakovsky would've done something really special with this movie. After being in production for so long, Sony was done with it. So a small independent animation studio company called Imagi Animation Studios, decided to take it on as an animated feature. This was apart of there three picture deal with Warner Brothers. The other film they made during the three picture deal was an animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie called TMNT. The film was set to be directed by a guy named Colin Brady who directed the animation baseball movie Everyone's Hero. But then a studio called Summit Entertainment picked up the distribution rights for the film and replaced Colin with director David Bowers who directed Flushed Away and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies. What I mean by Distributing is when a studio releases the film to the public. So, I don't know how it works but, I don't know if they still had the 3 picture deal with Warner Brothers or because a different studio picked up the rights, the deal was cut short. Even so they wouldn't be able to do the rest of there deal anyway and you'll find out why.  Astro Boy was finally released and was a huge flop critically and at the box office.  It was such a flop, that the studio shut down and wasn't even able to make the other 2 movies in that 3 movie deal with Warner Bros! However, when it was released on DVD, it was successful and got a cult following. People loved that it stayed true the comics and I'm happy that it got the attention it deserves after a production like that! Now I want to watch this movie.

Toy Story 2

       Get ready guys cause this one is the most difficult production I'm talking about.  So Toy Story 2 started out as a straight to DVD movie just like some of the Disney straight to DVD sequels at the time. Jesse wasn't in this version and Bullseye could talk!!! A straight to DVD movie means that the movie would release on DVD instead of theaters.  But the Disney execs where really impressed with the movie. So they decided to make it a movie that would come out in theaters and upped its running time to 90 minutes instead of 60 minutes. John Lasseter, the co founder of Pixar and the creator and director of Toy Story and Cars, came to check on Toy Story 2 after he wrapped production on A Bug's Life. And he was not impressed. John Lasseter begged Disney for them to restart production, but the release was only less then a year a way! They would only have 9 months to complete the film!! And guess what, they did!! They redid the entire story of the movie in 1 weekend!! John Lasseter replaced Ash Brannon as the director, but Ash was still able to co-direct.  The team really needed to buckle down now!! For the next 9 months, Pixar employees had to work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week too complete the movie. A lot of the staff where so stressed with the intensive workload that some of them couldn't work in animation ever again!!! And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it did!!! More worse then anyone could ever imagine!!! Someone accidentally typed the code rm* that computer that would delete the entire movie!!!!!!!! As a result, 90% of the film was deleted. Think about that for a second. 9 months, 9 MONTHS!!!! Of intense labor would've all been for nothing!!! However. a lady had a copy of the film at her house so she could work and keep and eye on her baby. Because of this, the movie was saved!!! All of this chaos was all worth it however when it came out on its release date to phenomenal reviews and tons of money at the box office. And it even won best picture musical or comedy at the Golden Globes!! Know I actually found the original straight to DVD script of the film online. As I am writing this, I have not yet read it so you guys will be ahead of me!!  Here its is!

http://web.archive.org/web/20121213100913/http://www.raindance.org/site/picture/upload//image/general/movies/toy_story_2.pdf