Brad Bird's The Spirit

I was looking over on the What Could Have Been page, and found that this was mentioned in one of the folders about animated films that didn't get produced. Turns out, the pencil test pitch trailer for Brad Bird's purposed animated feature of Will Eisner's comic character The Spirit has made its way online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqcJ2dFHNWM

Animation Age Ghetto is written all over this to those who rejected this. I'm not a fan of The Spirit, but I wished that this got produced. It has a bit of a bruce timm vibe before he did batman in this.

I was really considering starting this conversation first, but eh, I'll live.

Would you believe me if I told you that the producer tried shipping this around to the bigwigs and sourpusses of Hollywood, and they liked/loved it. The one thing that they questioned?

"Why would you want to have this animated?"

It didn't have anything that was selling at the market. No musical numbers, no talking, cutesy creatures, none of it. They thought it wouldn't sell, apparently.

So now we have to settle for Frank Miller's...interpretation.

Oy.

The executives' line of thought there was frankly common in film animation at the time. Remember that Milton Knight got told that cartoony animation wouldn't work out for feature films.

It seems as though all they wanted for feature animation at the time was nothing but stuff in the vein of Disney's efforts at the time. ...Now you see why most of the great works of animation then were done for TV.

Of course, this could have been a great idea. It really could have.

Hmmmm...

(Shifts his eyes left and right suspiciously.)

I wonder what's the likelihood of getting a Kickstarter for this...

Given the reputation Frank Miller's film has, and the fact that the Spirit isn't exactly a recognizable name otherwise... I don't think it has much of a chance.

x2 better question, does Brad Bird still have interest in doing The spirit after Frank Miller's mess that he unleashed?

He's probably moved on in any case. Maybe he just doesn't want to revive it.

Besides, serious cartoon movies are long dead. It's all about the Dreamworks Face now.

And fart jokes.

They still do those, right?

Have there ever been any really serious animated movies? That were popular successes?

Miyazaki's films are serious and are successful in japan. Btw, where did Milton knight say about that?

I dunno, How to Train Your Dragon 2 was, whatever its faults, pretty straight-faced and serious.

It had sheep soccer, Kirsten Wiig oogling over a guy's muscles in slow-mo, and the heroes saving the day on baby dragons. It was hardly completely serious.

Even Disney's pinnacle of the animation Renaissance, The Lion King, had a song about farting.

Depends on what bar you're setting for "serious". If you mean not including any silly elements at all, then serious animated films aren't dead — they never existed in the first place. Bonerfart's comment kind of smacks of Nostalgia Filter that way.

@11: But that's the Japanese.

It was a comment Lauren Faust made somewhere about Quest For Camelot - it's apparently been proven as a fraud, but the story about Milton Knight seems like it isn't fake.

Remember, too, that in the very early '80's it looked to the casual observer like even Disney feature animation was dying out.

The character animation in this is exquisite; it really captures the feel of Eisner's work. My biggest complaint about Miller's Spirit film was that it wasn't, as the name implies, Will Eisner's "The Spirit," it was Frank Millier's Will Eisner's "The Spirit." Completely subverted the tone of the work.

You never know; given that Bird is becoming more of a power player, he may get this film made yet. He does love the Spirit (and Superman too...it's be nice to see him involved in a Superman project).

It's a shame, really. The other three Great Men of Comic Books have had their work adapted to animation. Even Harvey Kurtzman (courtesy of Vincent Waller).

I know that Milton mentioned that he pitched a film about day of the dead, but nothing came out of it(although, makes you wonder if he'd return to it with Book of life being so justice to the source material). But let's try to get back on subject with this.

One of the comments from Cartoon Brew's topic on this had John Muskerthat John mentioned on a comment that he was one of the animators on this.

Really? Rock And Rule never happened? Heavy Metal never happened? Ralph Bakshi never made cartoons?

edited 17th Apr '15 11:55:53 AM by Bonerfart

Yeah, actually, thinking about the adult animation scene of the early 80s, it could have happened.

And there didn't need to be gratuitous sex, either.

edited 17th Apr '15 1:27:24 PM by Aldo930

If you consider movies about cars flying in space and demon-summoning rock stars to be "serious", then you and I have a very different understanding of the word.

edited 17th Apr '15 2:06:45 PM by DrDougsh

I'll be precise: They were relatively serious, in that they weren't played for laughs.

edited 17th Apr '15 2:11:37 PM by Aldo930

Let's be real here, though: Just being violent and sexually explicit is not the same thing as being "adult". Many objectively "kid-friendly" animated films are written with a far greater level of maturity than films like Heavy Metal. If anything, inappropriate or excessive use of these elements can result in a film coming off as even more childish than if they were completely absent.

We still have those kinds of films, just not generally in cinemas: Just look at the DC Universe Animated Original Movies.

I thought I already posted this. Weird.

But I have an example. The Prince Of Egypt. Utterly serious. Non-comedic. And it has various awesome sequences that could have only been pulled off in Animation. Too bad that Dreamworks never did anything like it ever again.

EDIT: Cars flying in Space could be achieved IRL someday. You never know. I still agree with you Heavy Metal is hardly Mature.

edited 17th Apr '15 6:10:38 PM by AegisP

Fuck all y'alls, Heavy Metal is badass.

edited 18th Apr '15 9:42:23 AM by Bonerfart