Back to the Drawing Board: "My Peoples"

In this edition of Back to the Drawing Board, we're going to look at an installment in the Disney Animated Canon that wasn't. There are quite a few of these, but we'll look at films like Gigantic and King of the Elves another time.

A major point of contention for fans of Disney's animated movies is their abandoning of hand-drawn animation to do CGI films. I personally like both mediums and think that they can coexist. Alas, Disney seems to be convinced that people don't like hand-drawn animation anymore. At best, they might include a bit of hand-drawn animation in one of their CGI films (for example, Maui's tattoos in Moana are hand-drawn). But back before Disney became convinced that hand-drawn animated films just weren't profitable enough anymore, Barry Cook (one of Mulan's co-directors) began working on an animated film that would use both styles of animation - My Peoples.

This film was based on a story that Barry had written called The Ghost and His Gift, which in turn was a retelling of Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost. The Ghost and His Gift was set in Appalachia in the 1940s and focused on a ghost and three children helping to bring two people together. It was a project very close to home for Barry, as he was born in Nashville, Tennessee and as such was very familiar with the Appalachian music and folklore that the movie was to feature.

Barry pitched The Ghost and His Gift to Michael Eisner and Thomas Schumacher (then the president of Walt Disney Feature Animation). They felt that the idea showed promise, but they were iffy on actually starting production on it. Eisner thought the plot was too simple and needed additional conflict. Schumacher, meanwhile, thought the idea was "too human" - by which he meant that since the cast consists mainly of humans, it could've easily been done as a live action film. "You can agree or disagree, but that was sort of the thought of the studio - the characters probably shouldn't be able to be brought to the screen in a live action film," Barry said. Which is ironic, because so many of Disney's recent animated films are human-centric and, by that logic, probably could've been done in live action too (Strange World, for example, although you'd obviously need to have a lot of CGI for the environments and weird creatures - but then, what recent live action movie HASN'T had at least a bit of CGI in it?).

So Barry began to reconstruct his idea. He studied elements of Appalachian culture, and one part that especially fascinated him was folk art dolls. In the Appalachian Mountains, isolated artists and musicians would craft dolls out of wood carvings and random bits of trash. Even Barry's grandmother had tried her hand at making a few. "I was fascinated by the idea, 'What if these types of characters came to life?'," he said. "They were the key to unlocking potential for a story set in that region."

You'd think "it's basically Toy Story but set in the Appalachian mountains" would've been enough of a hook for the higher-ups at Disney, seeing as Toy Story was such a popular movie. But Barry did something bigger. He shipped an old wooden violin case to Los Angeles through FedEx and instructed an assistant to place it on a conference room table. Via teleconference, Mr. Schumacher showed up (Eisner was unable to attend), and Barry, who was in Florida at the moment, got the pitch going. He began to spin a yarn about a guy named Elgin Harper who made a folk art doll named Angel out of a flour scoop as a gift for a girl he likes named Rose McGee. Problem was, Elgin's family and Rose's family were feuding with each other. Yep, it was one of those Romeo and Juliet sort of romances. Regardless, Elgin delivered Angel to Rose. A backfiring spell from Rose's father brings Angel to life. But Angel, not interested in being an "olive branch" of sorts between the Harpers and the McGees, refuses to fulfill her purpose and leaves town. Schumacher was intrigued by the synopsis, and then Barry told him to open the violin case. He did. Inside was a Marquette of Angel.

Here's some concept art for the film's human characters.

"From that moment on, the enthusiasm was pretty high," said Barry. "People thought, 'This could be really special.'" But that's not all - Barry also suggested that the film be seventy-percent computer animation and thirty-percent hand-drawn animation. The folk art dolls would be CGI and the human characters would be hand-drawn. "I didn't want the latest plastic CG look, since at that time, computer animation had sort of a simple look. You couldn't get past certain things," Barry explained. "So, we created a hybrid look for the film." And as a bonus, while working on the film the animators at Walt Disney Feature Animation's Florida branch (remember when Disney had an animation studio at Disney's Hollywood Studios?) could do their usual traditional animation while also training to someday complete a fully-CGI feature. This meant that the film wouldn't need as high a budget as, for example, Treasure Planet.

My Peoples was greenlit with a budget of $45 million. Ian Southwood whipped up a screenplay, Ric Sluiter was named the film's art director, Dean Wellins was dubbed Head of Story, Hans Bacher signed on as the production designer, and Kendra Haaland acted as the producer. Andreas Deja was to be the supervising animator of Rose. A team of artists even traveled the Folk Art Center in Kentucky and the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia to study the work of Charles Kinney.

Barry got to work developing more folk art dolls to act as Angel's co-stars. Let's see... there was Ms. Spinster, who was carved from the wooden leg of Elgin's aunt. Then there was Crazy Ray, who was made from a tree stump and lived in a hole under a front porch. A busted mandolin was used to construct Blues Man, who played a steel guitar made from a sardine can. Cherokee Boy, who probably wouldn't be considered a "PC" character nowadays, was made from a worn work glove. Good O' Boy was a redneck made out of car parts. There was Preacher Man, a Southern Holiness sort of character who was cut because Disney was afraid he'd be seen as an offensive stereotype. And since folk art creators often modeled dolls after famous individuals, there was a caricature of Abraham Lincoln with a scrub brush for a body and spoons for ears, convinced that he was the actual Abraham Lincoln. Barry described the characters as "really quirky and very individualistic" and "a very divergent group of characters, having to get along on a unified mission to bring two lovers together."

Concept art for the dolls.

In March 2002, the general public heard about the film, and rumors about who would be voicing the characters began flying around. Apparently Dolly Parton would voice Angel, Lily Tomlin would voice Ms. Spinster, Hal Holbrook would voice Abraham Lincoln, Travis Tritt would voice Elgin, Ashley Judd would voice Rose, Charles Durning would voice Rose's father, Lou Rawls would voice Blues Man, James Carville would voice Crazy Ray, Mike Snider would voice Good O' Boy, and Jean Smart, Diedrich Bader, and Billy Connolly would voice characters as well. However, Disney would later deny James Carville's involvement, apparently due to executives being concerned about his lack of voice acting experience (like that's ever stopped Disney before) and the potential controversy that might stem from having Bill Clinton's lead strategist involved. The cast of big-name stars was to counter Eisner's concerns that the film "[felt] small".

Charles Dunning was really excited about his role in the film. When he was hired, he went on and on about how he'd always wanted to voice a character in a Disney animated movie. Hal Holbrook - who'd already played Lincoln once before in a 1974 miniseries called Sandburg's Lincoln - was also very enthusiastic about the project. "Before he got started, Hal said 'I gotta warm up as Abe.' So then - in his Lincoln voice, entirely from memory - Holbrook performed the Gettysburg Address," Barry recalled. "And to hear those words in that voice was just so moving."

Obviously a film set in Appalachia would need an Appalachia-inspired soundtrack. Barry is "sort of a bluegrass fanatic", but knew that the studio heads would be reluctant to approve a bluegrass soundtrack for a mainstream animated feature. But then O Brother, Where Art Thou? came out, and it was financially successful - not only that, but its soundtrack became certified eight times Platinum and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year around the same time that My Peoples entered production. "After it came out, at least the studio executives in Hollywood understood what bluegrass music was and the power and appeal of it, and how it can work in storytelling," said Barry. "In a way, that film opened the door to make the development of My Peoples possible. Otherwise, I think the executives would have still been scratching their heads and asking 'What is this?'"

Concept art of Angel and Ms. Spinster.

Barry enlisted the help of several Grammy-winning bluegrass and country artists for the soundtrack. Executive music producer and consultant Ricky Skaggs wrote three songs, including collaborations with Marty Stuart and Hank Williams III. Barry also hoped to ask fiddle player Mark O'Connor to compose the score.

And this is where the story of My Peoples collides with the story of an animated movie that actually DID get made. Do you remember Gnomeo and Juliet?

I actually plan on doing a review of this movie where I'll go into detail about the long, troubled history that it had. But for now, I'll tell you that at the same time that Disney's Florida animation studio was working on My Peoples, their Burbank animation studio began production on Gnomeo and Juliet... or, as it was called back in 2002, "Gnome Story". Also, apparently the plan for that film was to have the CGI characters interacting with a live action world (the finished movie is all CGI).

Some began to wonder if Disney needed TWO animated movies inspired by Romeo and Juliet that featured CGI usually-inanimate objects coming to life. But Barry didn't think the two films were that similar... actually, My Peoples was based more on the historical family feud of the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Concept art for Good O' Boy.

Eventually, Thomas Schumacher left Disney and his role as president of Feature Animation there was taken over by David Stainton of Walt Disney Television Animation. As a result, the future became uncertain for films that Schumacher had greenlit, with My Peoples being among them. It didn't help that Stainton was under orders to make more reductions in production costs and head count at Walt Disney Feature Animation.

First of all, the film's title. Barry had dubbed it "My Peoples" because that was a collective name that a folk artist had given his puppets. The phrase was also a welcoming reference to one's family. But a lot of people at Disney thought the name was a bit odd - apparently, somebody thought the film was about Moses because it sounded reminiscent of "let my people go".

So by January 2003, the film would be renamed Once in a Blue Moon. After Stainton and Eisner saw a story reel, the film was pulled back for retooling. Then it was renamed Elgin's People. Then it was renamed Angel and Her No-Good Sister. According to a recently-released book about Disney's Florida animation studio, some jokingly called it "Hillbilly Toy Story".

Mind you, this was all going on around the same time that Disney was laying off their hand-drawn animators and shutting down overseas animation studios - which, as you probably already know, was the result of Disney looking at Treasure Planet flopping and coming to the conclusion that people didn't like hand-drawn animation anymore... when in actuality, Treasure Planet flopped because it was put up against films like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and The Santa Clause 2 and barely advertised because the executives didn't think that it fit the company's image (it's also worth noting that Thomas Schumacher announced that Disney's animation studio in Burbank would only do CGI films in March 2002... BEFORE Treasure Planet was released in November that same year. Make of that what you will). Despite this, My Peoples was still in production, with test animation and some experimental frames to boot.

Reports indicated that Stainton didn't think the hand-drawn humans were meshing well with the CGI folk art dolls. "I don't think we had gone far enough down that road to prove it one way or the other," Barry said. "Whether Stainton thought the hybrid was poor or successful, I really can't say because I never got that specific feedback."

Concept art for Cherokee Boy.

At some point in 2003, Barry and his crew took an art direction trip to the Appalachians, where ghost stories were all over the place. "Almost every hotel we stayed in, or every person we visited, had ghost stories," he claimed. "'Room 203 is a haunted room! So, whichever one of you guys got that room, watch out tonight! You might hear a noise or something!' It felt like a part of the culture." So he came up with an idea - instead of having the folk art dolls in the film just be enchanted, what if they were inhabited by ancestral spirits? For example, Elgin's Uncle Ned would inhabit the folk art doll Abraham Lincoln. So the film was renamed again, this time to A Few Good Ghosts.

However, the addition of ghosts did result in the film becoming more of a Halloween tale than Barry had wanted it to be, and the fact that David Stainton made the story crew push the ghost aspect because he thought the studio had a potential Halloween release didn't help. He wanted to get the film back to more of the simplicity that My Peoples had - a story about a folk artist using his art to get the girl he loves. "As an artist, I have a connection with that story," he said, "A story about an artist and his artwork 'coming to life'. That was the core of the story, more than what made the characters come to life or that they were based on his ancestors."

One pivotal scene in the movie had the folk dolls sabotage Rose's date with another guy named Herbert Hollingshead. Originally, it was going to be set in an indoor theater. Then some studio executives suggested that the scene would play better if they set it outdoors at a drive-in theater. This allowed for Good O' Boy to tap into the speaker box hanging from the couple's car window so that he and the other folk art dolls could dub the voices in the movie to make it far less romantic. According to Barry, it was hilarious.

Here's some concept art for that scene.

Around November 2003, Michael Eisner sat down to watch a rough version of the film's first act. Afterwards, he told the crew, "You folks finally have a movie here!" And a week later, Stainton viewed the footage and liked it as well. It seemed as though everything was working out. The movie was finally gonna get off the ground.

And then came November 14th, 2003. David Stainton showed up at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida to have a meeting with its employees. He had an announcement: A Few Good Ghosts would be cancelled immediately, and more than one hundred people would be let go in two months. Why? In an email to employees at the Burbank headquarters, Stainton claimed that "the fundamental idea is not strong enough or universally appealing enough to support the kind of performance our movies must have today."

This, however, might have been a lie... at least partly. Eventually, Barry learned the REAL reason why his movie had been cancelled: "For us, it came down basically to Mark Dindal's Chicken Little or My Peoples. One was going to get made, but not both." And for whatever reason they couldn't just put one of the movies on hold until after the other one was released. Disney made Chicken Little for one reason (well, two reasons, the other one being that Michael Eisner wanted to prove that they didn't need PIXAR's help to make CGI movies) - they really, really wanted to cash in on the success of Shrek, and they believed that a zany, CGI-animated comedy movie with pop culture references that turned an iconic fairy tale on its head was far more likely to get them the same amount of money that film made than a partially hand-drawn movie with bluegrass music taking place in the 1940s. The whole "use of bluegrass music" factor played a part in the cancellation as well.

By the way, Barry made it clear that he doesn't resent Mark Dinal for what happened. "I have nothing against Mark," he said. "He's been a great friend for a long time, and he's a very talented director."

Just think, we could've had a giant inflatable Good O' Boy towering over Disney's Hollywood
Studios instead of this.

That would've been terrifying.

An artist who worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida blamed other factors for the film's cancellation. He said that they were never able to combine the 2D and 3D elements successfully - the CGI characters were "too well-rendered and volumetric" and contrasted too much with the hand-drawn characters.

In March 2004, Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida shut down altogether. Apparently, Eisner chose to do it because he was looking for ways to put all of Walt Disney Feature Animation's employees in one place under one roof so they could respond that much quicker to what he had to say. Some of its employees were offered jobs at the Burbank studio. Barry wasn't one of them. Since then, he's been the co-director of Aardman's 2011 release Arthur Christmas.

Disney still owns the rights to My Peoples, so occasionally Barry wonders if they'll ever put the film back into production even if he isn't involved. It's not exactly unheard of for Disney to revamp an animated movie while it's in development - Chris Sanders' American Dog turned into Byron Howard and Chris Williams' Bolt, Glen Keane's Rapunzel Unbraided became Nathan Greno and Byron Howard's Tangled, and Sam Levine and Jared Stern's Joe Jump became Rich Moore's Wreck-It Ralph (and you can expect editions of "Back to the Drawing Board" about American Dog, Rapunzel Unbraided, and Joe Jump later on). "It could definitely be a great film if somebody wanted to make it or at least some version of it; it could probably be pretty successful," Barry said. "But it wouldn't be the version I would make, certainly."

And indeed, it probably wouldn't... for one thing, it would be entirely CGI. Disney is still convinced that hand-drawn animated movies are dangerous. The voice cast would consist of celebrities chosen purely based on how popular they are, many of whom I doubt would even attempt an Appalachian accent. And there'd probably be some sort of hoofed animal that acts like a dog, too.

This character wouldn't be a dog. It would probably be a mule or something.

Regardless, Barry says, "If I ever get the call from Disney, saying, 'We're thinking about giving this thing another look,' I would be interested. If I now had the chance to make the movie myself, I think I could turn it into what I've always imagined it to be. Under the right studio leadership, it would make all the difference in the world, perhaps. I love the film more than any project I've ever worked on. I feel like I left a lot of myself behind in it."

Oh, and by the way - when the film was cancelled, Disney agreed to give Ricky Skaggs back two of the songs he'd written for it. Those songs were "Appalachian Joy" and "Monroe Dancin'", and they were included on Skaggs' 2004 album Brand New Strings. Just an interesting bit of trivia for you all to cap off this post.

Sources:
- https://thedisneyblog.com/2012/08/31/my-peoples-and-why-it-should-be-made-in-orlando/
- https://www.wattpad.com/286280748-the-world-of-forgotten-disney-my-peoples
- http://animuppetry.blogspot.com/2012/08/my-peoples-disney-movie-that-almost-was.html
- https://animatedviews.com/2012/director-barry-cook-remembers-the-peoples-of-walt-disney-feature-animation-florida/
- https://jimhillmedia.com/why-walt-disney-feature-animation-opted-not-to-make-my-peoples/
- https://jimhillmedia.com/why-for-returns-3/?amp=1
- https://jimhillmedia.com/6-days-and-counting-the-walt-disney-feature-animation-florida-countdown-clock-ticks-on/