Back to the Drawing Board: "Gigantic"

You might recall that in my previous edition of Back to the Drawing Board about the scrapped Disney film My Peoples, I mentioned that I would do posts about other scrapped Disney films called Gigantic and King of the Elves another time. Well, you'll still have to wait a while for King of the Elves - I'm not one hundred percent sure how much information about it there is online - but I'm going to talk about Gigantic today. Huzzah!

In the 2010s, Disney figured out the secret to making financially-successful, critically-acclaimed animated movies. Tangled was a huge success, so all they had to do was make films very, very similar to Tangled and keep repeating the formula over and over again: have a female main character, preferably a princess, who's optimistic, quirky, and at least a bit awkward. Maybe they're sheltered, maybe they've been stuck in one place all their lives and desperately want to go somewhere else. Eventually, she meets a snarky, morally-ambigous male and makes some sort of deal with him. They go on their little adventure, butting heads all the way, but eventually warm up to each other and fall in love, or at least become best buddies. Rapunzel was the optimistic quirky female and Flynn was the snarky morally-ambigious female. In Frozen, Anna was the optimistic quirky female and Kristoff was the snarky morally-ambigious male. In Zootopia, Judy was the optimistic quirky female and Nick was the snarky morally-ambigious male. In Moana, Moana was the optimistic quirky female (although less blatant in this case than Anna and Judy were) and Maui was the snarky morally-ambigious male. And it worked - the money was pouring in, the critics were applauding, nobody cared that they were basically just recycling the same character types over and over again. It wasn't until they ditched the snarky moral-ambigious male and just had the optimistic quirky female (Mirabel in Encanto and more recently Asha in Wish) that people figured out the formula and became bored of it. But that wasn't until the 2020s. In the 2010s, Disney was once again the king of the theatrical animation game.

The year was 2015. Disney was still milking the heck out of Frozen, and they had also recently released Big Hero 6, which was also pretty successful (but wound up getting ignored by Disney for a while because it was released after Frozen and followed by the also much more popular Zootopia). PIXAR had also released Inside Out, which was a huge hit and briefly got people to start liking PIXAR again. And it was this year, at the 2015 D23 Expo, that John Lasseter announced Gigantic.

Actually, Gigantic was kinda sorta revealed to the world in July 2013, before Frozen was released. One of Tangled's directors, Nathan Greno, said, "Trust me, we are hard at work on the new film! I wish I could say more - I'm REALLY excited to tell everyone what it is! If you enjoyed Tangled, I believe you'll love the new project." Then on July 10th, a blog by the name of Blue Sky Disney revealed that Nathan Greno's film would be called "Giants" and be released near the end of 2016. Considering how successful Tangled was and how obsessed Disney was with repeating its success, it makes sense that they'd want to get a new film from the same director out there ASAP (the other co-director of Tangled, Bryon Howard, was working on Zootopia at the time for those unaware).

Before this, however, I'd like to bring something up. At some point in the 2000s (before 2009, I'm pretty sure), I found a list online of Disney films that were in production - both theatrical and direct-to-video. I have no idea what site I found it on, or if it was even accurate, but among the multiple sequels that I know were indeed in production beofre John Lasseter ordered them to stop with the sequels (The Jungle Book 3, Chicken Little 2, Meet the Robinsons 2: First Date), I distinctively remember seeing a film called You Don't Know Jack and the Beanstalk being listed. I couldn't find anything about a Disney film called this online right now. Judging from the title, I'm guessing it was going to be another one of those "fractured fairy tale" type of movies greenlit to cash in on the success of Shrek. Y'know, sorta like Disney's Rapunzel Unbraided movie that eventually evolved into Tangled... but we'll talk about that one some other time.

The film's logo, after they decided to call it Gigantic instead, was going to look
like this.

In August, bleedingcool.com posted some information about "Giants" - this post has since been removed, but posts on various discussion forums have repeated the information, preventing all of this neat behind the scenes stuff from being lost and this post you're reading right now from being very short. Among the things they said...

- "Animated films have very long development times, and sometimes they go a long way into that process before going no further. Perhaps the most famous example of this would be PIXAR's Newt, and it happened with Disney, most recently, with King of the Elves. It's possible that a similar fate might befall Giants. The film hasn't been official announced, and it could disappear from the schedule even after it is. But for now, work on the film continues, and I understand that director Nathan Greno has had a couple of table reads and is getting the basic shape of the film into good order. I think this one's going to go all the way." Oh, the irony.

- "The look of this film - at least for now - is very much in the Tangled and Frozen vein, and the plan is to realize the film with the same sort of CG processes and styling - though I'm sure it will be pushed even further to allow for better textures, more expressive animation, advances in the tech all around. That's what happens at Disney, film by film."

- "A few years from now, we'll be some distance away from Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Slayer, a film with which Giants shares more than a few specifics. For one thing, they both have a hero named Jack, and Giants named for the Fee Fi Fo Fum rhymes. In this story, these names are abbreviations of Feebus, Fifen, Fogel and Fobert, a family of giants at the heart of the tale. There's another brother too, Faustus, their leader. Like all good villains, he's got a relatable point of view, he's just not quite joining the dots correctly."

- "Also like Singer's film, we see the introduction of a love interest from a class above Jack. In this case, Angelica isn't royalty, but just from a merchant family, though her parents do see him as being 'below' her."

- "The real money is manifest in Marco, born to nobility and the third corner of a love triangle between Jack and Angelina. He's a good guy, though, and the only reason he and Jack can't be fast friends from the off is that they're both drawn to Angelina. And, yes, he's called Marco because, like Polo, he wants to travel - and to open up trade routes."

- "The fourth human lead is Inma, a scrappy tomboy type - and something of a class warrior, I understand. She's the one I'm rooting for in this story, the tireless fighter against injustice, taken less seriously because she happens to be a pre-teen girl. Of course, there is that story about David and Goliath..."

- "But, okay, it's not the humans that get the title billing here. It's the giants. The Storm Giants. Huge, thunderous figures. In this story, the Storm Giants have made a pact with the humans. If the humans work for them and give them a percentage of their harvest and livestock, hey'll return the favour by keeping danger and threats at bay. At first, it must have been appealing to have a Giant agree to fight your corner, but the people are't getting enough for themselves now. Faustus' name is seeming a touch ironic."

- "And this is where we find ourselves at the beginning. As you might expect, there's then a journey up to where the Giants live and some terrible conflict between the humans and the Storm Giants. There's a lot of sneaking about and gruesome recipes and all that good stuff you're used to from fairy tales about ogres and their ilk. But what you may not expect is how Jack ends up befriending one of the Storm Giants - and this is what sews the beans, if you will, for the adventure."

Now, I'm sure you're wondering "How do you know the guy who posted this to bleedingcool.com didn't just make it all up?". Well, Blue Sky Disney posted again and confirmed that most of what they claimed is true - and that apparently, Nathan Greno pitched the idea to John Lasseter around the same time he was working on Zootopia, which he was going to co-direct with Byron Howard again. However, a comment from somebody simply called "Anonymous" on the post said that they knew Nathan and Byron personally and that what they said was false.

Visual development by Michael Giaimo.

Rumors started flying around in 2014 that Robert and Kristin Anderson-Lopez would be writing songs for the film and that Dasiy Ridley was brought in to audition for a character. There were also claims that the film was going to be pushed back to 2018, with others insisting that it was still going to be released in 2016. In August 2015, Bobby Pontillas was revealed to be working on the film as a character designer. Then came the D23 Expo, when - as mentioned earlier - the film was finally announced, now called Gigantic as opposed to "Giants", and it was confirmed that the Lopezes were writing the songs.

The film was described as being set in Spain during the Age of Exploration. Inma was now a sixty-foot-tall eleven-year-old girl with a "super-sized personality" and the secondary protagonist. Apparently, she was based on an actual kid the filmmakers met in Spain. She had a song in which she plays with Jack as though he were a doll, with lyrics like "You can toss him in the air / you can comb his tiny hair" and "You can make him do this, you can make him do that, and he even makes a pretty good bookmark!".

The film's presentation at the D23 Expo.

Apparently, Angelina and Marco had both been removed, or maybe Angelina had been turned into Jack's pregnant wife? From what I've read on the DVDizzy forums, Inma's father was the evil king of the Storm Giants and the film's Maximus equivalent - the hoofed animal that doesn't talk but acts like a dog - was to be a cow. There was also going to be at least one goose - Nathan Greno and Paul Briggs both posted (on Instagram and Tumblr respectively) about studying real geese for the film. Most versions of Jack in the Beanstalk have a goose that lays golden eggs, so presumably this goose character was going to fill the same role.

Now, I suppose there's an elephant in the room that I should address: Disney already did an adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk back in the 1940s. That was the "Mickey and the Beanstalk" segment of Fun and Fancy Free (it was originally going to be a full movie, but then the war started up and, combined with some other reasons, led to it winding up as a segment of a "package film"). Despite the film's general lack of popularity, it did spawn one thing that's kept it more or less out of obscurity online - the character of Willie the Giant, who's since popped up in other Mickey Mouse productions like Mickey's Christmas Carol and House of Mouse. Would that have made things complicated for Gigantic? Probably not. Disney also made two adaptations of Chicken Little after all.

It seems that even the folks working on Gigantic knew about "Mickey and the Beanstalk". I have a copy of the book They Drew as They Pleased: The Hidden Art of Disney's New Golden Age, which features four pieces of concept art for Gigantic. One of them features a giant who looks very much like Willie. I doubt it's just a coincidence.

This fella, right here.

In 2016, it was announced that Inside Out writer Meg LeFauve was going to be the film's co-director. As far as the voice cast goes, we know that Ava Della Pietra, then only ten and a half years old, auditioned for Inma. No idea who was considered to voice Jack.

The film wound up getting delayed AGAIN in 2017, this time to November 2020. Nothing about Gigantic was talked about at the 2017 D23 Expo, not a particularly good sign. However, animator Malcon Pierce did say on Instagram that he was working on the film. That was in October. A few days later, it was announced that Gigantic had been shelved.

Concept art by Dan Cooper.

Ed Catmull explained that it was just one of those projects where, even though they loved the idea and a lot of heart went into it, it just wasn't working (and yet nobody said that at any point during production of Wreck-It Ralph 2. Go figure). Instead, they'd be focusing their energies on another project in the works, also set for release in November 2020. Disney didn't release any animated films, be it in theaters or for streaming, in November 2020, so I have no idea what that project was (maybe it became Encanto or Raya and the Last Dragon or something?). As for Nathan Greno, he wound up leaving Disney in 2018 - he's now working at Skydance Animation.

Animator Andrew Chesworth stated in 2019 that, when he was working at Disney, he got to see some early screenings of Gigantic. "I loved this version," he said. "Fantastic mix of modern Tangled and 1940s Sleepy Hollow-era Disney influencing the artistic conversations."

What went wrong with Gigantic? A few folks on the aforementioned DVDizzy forums suggested that an adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk should be a "huge and epic adventure" a la Aladdin - sneaking around the castle, facing off against giants, climbing a beanstalk. Disney was basically turning the story into, as somebody put it, "Tangled meets Wreck-It Ralph"... basically just recycling the "optimistic quirky female and exasperated morally-ambigious male team up" formula, except in this case instead of another pretty princess the female was a little girl. They were playing it safe once again.

Even Inma's character model, as seen here, just looks like they
gave Rapunzel a haircut.

And I think that's more or less why Disney's output as a whole is in a rut. They're still playing it safe by attempting to recapture previous successes. Every time a live action remake is super-successful, they greenlight five more, and they generally suck. Frozen was successful, make four sequels to it. Even with PIXAR, they're basically sabotaging their original films like Elemental and Elio (though the internet's turning on PIXAR after 2010 is definitely not helping with that) and demanding they make more sequels. Did we need a Toy Story 5? I know, I know. Disney is a business, it's all about making money, but they became such a huge deal because they used to give people things we didn't know we wanted, not just what we knew we already liked.

So is that it for Gigantic? Maybe not. Remember how I said that Nathan Greno is now working at Skydance Animation? Well, in 2023, it was announced that Skydance was working on an adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk, to be directed by... Rich Moore, not Nathan Greno. Did Nathan, Rich, and John Lasseter take the ideas for Gigantic with them when they left Disney?

Oh, one more fun fact for you guys - Robert Lopez revealed in a podcast that one of the songs he and his wife wrote for Gigantic was reused for an episode of WandaVision. Another song was reused for a Netflix show called We the People. I've never seen either of those shows, but somehow I doubt the songs still had lyrics about using somebody as a bookmark.