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 male. 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 Daisy 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.

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/

Back to the Drawing Board: "Finding Nemo 2"

Like many, I was skeptical when it was announced that PIXAR was making a sequel to Finding Nemo. Knowing Disney's track record with sequels, combined with Cars 2 being... well, Cars 2, there was a very good chance that it could turn out lousy. What if they had the film be a rehash of the first one, with Nemo searching for his daughter or Marlin searching for Nemo AGAIN or some crap like that?

Then, in 2016, the sequel was released. And y'know what? It was actually quite good. It focused on Dory, Marlin and Nemo going in search of Dory's family, featured Ed O'Neil as an octopus, and culminated in Dory hijacking a truck. How can you go wrong with Dory hijacking a truck?

Despite receiving positive reviews from critics and making mucho moolah at the box office, nowadays Finding Dory seems to be considered one of PIXAR's weaker films. You usually see it lumped in with Cars 2 and Monsters University (which I personally liked as well) when people are talking about how much PIXAR's post-Toy Story 3 films suck. But I have something to say to those people - we could've had a far, far worse sequel to Finding Nemo. And I can sum up why in one word and one number: Circle 7.

I've talked about Circle 7 before on this blog. Here's the "Too Long, Didn't Read" version of what I said - Disney set up an animation studio to produce awful direct-to-video sequels to PIXAR's movies that they'd distributed, but then they bought PIXAR in 2006 and cancelled said awful direct-to-video sequels. I've already looked at what their version of Toy Story 3 was going to be like, but they were also planning on making sequels to Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc.

And what luck - at one point the script for their Finding Nemo 2 was posted online, allowing me to read it and see how lucky we were to get Finding Dory instead. Unfortunately, the script has since been taken down, but you can still find it on a site that requires you to download something called "ePaper" to read it. Good thing I write these posts months in advance, huh?

I would do one of these posts for Monsters Inc. 2 as well, but the script for that hasn't wound up online yet. The good news is, somebody online managed to find the script and did a video detailing its plot (it honestly doesn't sound like it would've been too bad).

Now that that's out of the way, let's look at the script for what would have been Circle 7's Finding Nemo 2. A main plot point is that this time MARLIN gets captured and NEMO has to find him. Y'know, since in the first film NEMO was captured and MARLIN had to find him, so inverting it is automatically clever?

Actually, no. No, it isn't. That's literally just as lazy and trite a sequel idea as having Nemo searching for his daughter or something. But, on with the script itself...

NOTE: To my knowledge, there is no concept art for this film online, so I had to create drawings of certain scenes from the script to prevent this post from being really, really boring to look at. I'll also include some random Finding Nemo-related memes I find online for the same reason.

Finding Nemo 2 begins... exactly the same way as the first movie did. With Marlin and Coral looking over their eggs. Then a ferocious barracuda comes along and gobbles up Coral and the eggs... except for one, containing Nemo. But what's this? There's ANOTHER egg that survived the attack. It's sent drifting with the current through a vast landscape of coral and nooks and crannies before landing in a soft nest of yellow fish eggs. Didn't Dinosaur open in a similar way?

Cut to present day. Nemo's classmates consider him the fish equivalent of Chuck Norris after his little adventure being taken to Sydney Harbor. It helps that he did a bit of exaggerating and told them that he beat the crap out of humans with one fin tied behind his back. I don't remember a scene like that in Finding Nemo. Marlin, who's watching this all go down with the other students' parents, is concerned - Nemo's been acting like this ever since they got back from Sydney. Dory and the parents are all, "Chill out, Marlin, wasn't that your entire character arc in the first movie?"

It should be obvious that I'm not very good at drawing fish...

After that, Dory goes for a little swim and encounters Percy, a bottlenose dolphin with one of those tracking device things that scientists put on sea life when they want to study them. "Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I feel like I'm being followed," he claims. Dory then proceeds to spout a bunch of information about bottlenose dolphins, then proceeds to forget everything that she just said. Dory's shtick in this movie seems to be that she's trying to improve her memory but is failing at it.

Later, Nemo is swimming along minding his own business before he encounters another clownfish that looks exactly like him. I know what you're thinking - does this result in the cliched Mirror Routine gag? The answer to that is YES. Yes, it does. The other clownfish, according to the script, is named Remy. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Remy is also the name of an actual PIXAR character.

And this was written before Ratatouille was released. Ironic, isn't it?

Remy looks similar to Nemo, but his cheeks are leaner, his face is "a little more handsome" (what does that mean? How could a fish's face look "handsome"? What, were they gonna slap Brad Pitt's face on the character model or something?), and he has more "swagger" and "attitude" (I don't like the sound of that) than Nemo. Also, he doesn't have a "lucky fin" like Nemo does. When Nemo mentions that his father's name is Marlin, the clownfish says that he thinks he's Nemo's brother!

I doubt they were actually going to give Remy sunglasses, but I figured putting them
on him would help convey how he has more "swagger" and "attitude" than Nemo.

Marlin is extremely shocked, but also overjoyed, when Nemo introduces him to Remy. He can't believe that he has another son. It took forever for Remy to find them (he found out about them because of how Marlin's story about how he was looking for Nemo got passed around the ocean in the first film - you remember that scene, right?). Remy also says that he was raised by a clan of "Fighting Fire Fish". But, what's this? Marlin is so preoccupied with Remy that he's starting to ignore Nemo. And all the other kids... er, fish... at school are thinking that Remy is awesome while ignoring Nemo, too. This, predictably, makes Nemo feel left out.

Surprisingly, Marlin doesn't do much to help with the situation. He tries to cheer Nemo up by saying, "We can't all be athletic. You're a great student." And then when Nemo asks if they can really be sure that this new clownfish is his brother, Marlin says, "Are you kidding? Look at him! He could be your twin. Well... except for the fin." Wow, way to put your foot, which you don't even have, in your mouth, Marlin.

As if Nemo wasn't feeling crummy enough, he also has to share his birthday celebration with Remy. So, what I'm getting from this script is that they're trying to tell the kids at home that being a twin stinks. Marlin continues to play favorites, then Nemo storms off. Remy swims after him, leaving Marlin to complain to Dory about how can't handle this situation. "I feel like I need a drink. Do fish drink?" he asks. Oh, good, our first example of out of place "edgy" humor! I was wondering when that would show up. It's scary how close we were to having Marlin say that he needs a drink and Buzz looking up a doll's dress.

That's supposed to be Marlin in a bar with a can of beer.

Nemo and Remy start arguing. "I see what you're doing. You're trying to make everybody think you're so cool," Nemo says. "But just showing up here doesn't make you my brother. You don't belong here. There's millions of clownfish in the sea! Your father could have been any one of them. So leave mine alone!" Then Remy tells him to shut up and charges at him. Marlin has to stop their fight. Then Remy turns on Marlin, demanding to know why Marlin "left [him]" before swimming away.

Then a gigantic drag net shows up out of nowhere and heads Remy's way. "Not again!" Marlin moans, because even HE knows that this script is rehashing the first movie. He bats Remy out of the way, only to get swallowed up by the net himself. Oh, and remember Percy? He gets caught by the net too.

Dory shows up, and Nemo and Remy fill her in as to what happened. Fortunately, Dory says that she thinks she knows where the boat is going. You see, earlier Percy mentioned that the boat he was picked up by was a "Planet Blue" boat. So Nemo and Remy follow her, continuing to bicker with each other all the way. Why do I have the feeling that Nemo and Remy bickering is going to take up a large percentage of this script?

Planet Blue turns out to be some sort of SeaWorld-esque marine park. Marlin and Percy are dumped into a large tank of water, where a bunch of other dolphins are taking part in an aquatic chorus line (the script's words, not mine).

Here's some concept art for the dolphins that appeared in the first Finding Nemo.

A few days later, Nemo, Remy, and Dory arrive at a bay close to Planet Blue. How will they get there now? Well, Dory says, "If we could just get the ocean level to rise... we need some global warming. Anybody got a match?" Yep, this is a script written in the 2000s all right. Then again, global warming is still a problem so I can't say that it DATES the script. It's still not very funny, though...

Remy spots a three-foot diameter intake pipe in the distance and swims towards it, Nemo and Dory chasing after him. When they get closer, they discover that the pipe has an impeller that it uses to suck in the sea water - and before they can swim away, they get caught in its suction. Uh-oh, something tells me that this is gonna become GRINDING Nemo in a second...

After getting away from the pipe, just barely managing to avoid getting shredded like taco beef (kind of like that one scene from the first film where Nemo was nearly shredded like taco beef by that one pipe in the aquarium filter. Coincidence? I think not), Nemo yells at Remy for being so reckless. How will they get to Planet Blue now? Well, they find an overflow pipe with water gushing out of it. Nemo's assumption is that they can channel the intrepid salmon and "swim upstream". But Nemo is not a salmon, he is a clownfish, and the overflow is too strong, so he winds up failing epically at it. Multiple times.

Then guess who shows up? Gill! Nemo fills him in as to what's going on. Dory mentions that she thinks she's been there before. Gill claims, "No fish has ever come out of there." And then Dory starts rapping. It's just as dumb as it sounds.

Gill finds a piece of a map of Planet Blue. Since trying to take the intake pipe didn't work and trying to take the outflow pipe didn't work either, Gill says that they have to "make the 'out' the 'in'." This requires the help of a pack of sea lions.

Not these guys, unfortunately.

The sea lions steal a parasail and shove it the intake pipe, breaking the impeller. Nemo, Remy, and Dory head in, and discover that the pipe has an echo. Then they have a burping contest. I'd complain about how incredibly disgusting that joke is, but the first movie DID have a gag where Bloat burps and I know that if I don't bring that up, I'm going to get a lot of people pointing it out to me and demanding to know why I'm complaining about a burp joke in this script when there was one in the first movie. To which I say, that was just ONE burp, not MULTIPLE. And, honestly, I don't even think Bloat's burp was that funny either.

Eventually, they come to a fork in the pipe, multiple pipes veering off in different directions. Which one do they take? Remy decides to pick one at random, and they follow him into a dark aquarium tank... to be precise, the octopus tank. Uh-oh...

This octopus isn't a comedic character with the voice of Ed O'Neil. It grabs Nemo and Remy with its tentacles so it can... eat them, I'm guessing. Fortunately, the bottom of the tank is full of squeaky toys, so Dory just grabs them and starts throwing them at the octopus, resulting in it letting go of Nemo and Remy. Blah-blah-blah, chase sequence, blah-blah-blah... eventually, they escape back into the pipe. And since Remy's the one who chose the pipe that led to the octopus tank (by the way, how come the octopus doesn't talk in a script where all other sea creatures talk?), we get - you guessed it - more of Remy and Nemo arguing!

Dory gets them to stop fighting (for now, anyway) and then we check back in with Marlin. He has to deal with Percy and two other dolphins, one a stereotypical diva and the other a stereotypical Shakesperian actor. After Marlin brings up that Nemo and Remy might kill each other if he's not there, Percy offers to splash him over the fence - the ocean's just on the other side. So he does that... only for Marlin to land in a bucket of water left on the cement next to the fence. Belonging to the janitor. You had ONE JOB, Percy. ONE JOB!

Meanwhile, Gill and the sea lions see some divers trying to get the parasail out of the pipe. This could be a problem. Fortunately, Nemo, Remy and Dory have arrived at the dolphin tank. Just after Marlin was hurled out of it. Talk about lousy timing. Speaking of Marlin, the bucket that he's in has been wheeled into a kitchen full of people chopping up salmon. I honestly thought the script was gonna go all "Les Poissons" on us for a second, but then the bucket is wheeled out of the room. Eventually Marlin falls out of the bucket and into a pool, where he encounters a polar bear. It promptly gobbles Marlin up. The end.

Just kidding. The polar bear's name is Blanca. She tells Marlin that she has to eat him because if she doesn't, the other polar bears, Brad and Louie, will laugh at her. They're always picking on her. Marlin tells her to just stand up to them, one shouldn't let their life be dictated by fear and anxiety, which is something he knows from experience.

Back to Nemo, Remy, and Dory. They're interrogating the dolphins on what happened to Marlin. The dolphins are all, "Yeah, he's probably polar bear food by now." Then we cut back to Marlin, who's still talking to Blanca, amazed that he's finally met someone more neuronic than HE IS. And then we cut back to Nemo, Remy, Dory, and the dolphins. Well, that cutaway to Marlin was completely pointless, then. Could've just had the polar bear ask Marlin if she was fat BEFORE cutting back to Nemo, Dory and Remy. But nope, gotta be disjointed. Nemo and Remy start bickering again, Dory gets scooped up by a pole net, and we get some WHACKY SHENANIGANS involving the dolphins.

One of the dolphins fills Nemo and Remy in as to which way in the pipe goes to the polar bears. They head back into the pipe... just as the divers have gotten the parasail out of the impeller. Lousy timing rears its ugly head once again.

Fortunately, instead of being shredded they wind up in some sort of pirate-themed tank, with a sunken pirate ship and animatronic pirate skeletons and all that. Meanwhile, Brad and Louie decide that if Blanca's not gonna eat Marlin, THEY will. Blanca tries to stop them, but they're only stopped by the appearance of buckets of salmon. After they leave, Marlin asks why Brad and Louie are so mean to her. According to Blanca, she's not from the Arctic like them, she's from Cleveland, and they never let her forget it. Also, when she got there, she tripped and fell down, breaking a claw in the process. That's another thing they give her a hard time about.

Remy meets an oyster, a crab, and a clam. The crab asks if he wants to "pull [his] claw" (real classy, guys...). The clam acts like some sort of Zen master. The oyster has a stick up its rear end. Back at the polar bear habitat, Blanca introduces Marlin to watermelon while Brad and Louie crack bad jokes. For example, what do you get when you cross a polar bear and a seal? A polar bear. Depressingly, while that joke is lame it's still the funniest joke in the script thus far.

Gill and the sea lions are trying to block the pipe by stuffing more trash into it. Remy nearly ditches Nemo in the pirate tank to go back into the pipe, but Nemo spots him in the act and flips out. "Hey, don't mess with me. I'm a fighting fish. You're just a wimp with a little fin," Remy replies, making it hard for me to feel sympathy for him when Nemo angrily swats him into some rocks.

Remy tries to swim off, but runs afoul of a sea snake. He's too scared to get away from it, making Nemo realize that Remy's all bark and no bite (or whatever the fish equivalent of that saying is). Nemo and Remy work together to outwit the sea snake and then get the heck out of there, the snake in hot pursuit. Eventually, they wind up in a shallow pool.

And guess who's there? The seagulls! Remember those guys? Two of them are perched on the ledge. They spot Nemo and Remy in the water and of course start shouting, "MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE!" And then the snake pops up, hissing furiously... and the seagulls turn to each other and say, "Yours." Okay, I will admit that was pretty funny.

So, after getting away from the snake, Nemo and Remy start arguing again, and then Remy is scooped up by another net. Nemo jumps into the net with him, and it takes them to the isolation tank. We cut back to Gill and the sea lions... then we cut back to Marlin and Blanca. Marlin admits that he was prejudiced towards mammals... ouch, Marlin was racist? Or in this case, species-ist? What is it with these Circle 7 scripts and making beloved PIXAR characters racist (need I bring up "Me no speakey Taiwaneesey!" or whatever that awful line was?).

Disturbingly, it seems as though Blanca is falling in love with Marlin. Despite the fact that she's a polar bear and he's a clownfish. Why does a polar bear have the hots for a clownfish? Why is this a thing that we very nearly got? Maybe I'm just looking too far into this...

Then again, he DOES look a lot like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson...

Changing the subject, Marlin admits that he hasn't done right by his boys. "I didn't know how to handle two at once. They should have been friends, but they're at each other's throats. Everything I said just made it worse," he points out. And y'know what? He's right. He didn't handle the situation well at all. So after that, Blanca swims over to the grate covering the overflow pipe and tries to pry it off. Alas, she doesn't have any luck.

Back to Nemo and Remy. Remy's got a fever (of a hundred and three... sorry, couldn't resist). He admits to Nemo that "Everybody thinks you're so smart... I could never be like you... I had to be something..." Also, he wasn't raised by fighting fish. He was raised by weed fish. Hundreds of them. "Too many mouths to feed..." he says. "I never fit in." That's why he went looking for Marlin. He's all Remy had. And now, Nemo is all he has.

The next morning, Remy is feeling better. But then he and Nemo are suddenly grabbed by a giant hand with a plastic bag! They wind up in a tank decorated to look like a coral reef. And guess what? Dory's there too. Yeah, she's still in this movie. And she's also come across her brothers and sisters. Turns out this is where she's from.

So, now we have Dory's family in this script too. Funny how many similarities the script has to Finding Dory. Like I said in my post about the Circle 7 Toy Story 3 scripts, I highly doubt anyone at PIXAR actually read this script or would've wanted to steal plot elements from it, so I'm guessing it's just a coincidence.

The other blue tangs tell Nemo and Remy about another outflow pipe that the tank has, but then a human diver shows up and starts sealing the pipe for maintenance. Gill and the sea lions are still clogging up the pipe. And the chilly temperatures of the polar bear habitat are doing a number on Marlin. Fortunately, Nemo spots a giant protein skimmer up at the top of the tank. When they swim up to the top, he, Remy and Dory spot a large drain labeled "MAIN OUTFLOW PIPE" that the aquarium workers are dumping the contents of the protein skimmer into. All they have to do is jump into the protein skimmer and they'll be to Marlin in no time. Desperate times call for desperate - and disgusting - measures.

Dory hesitates for a second (should she stay with her siblings or go with Nemo and Remy?), then they all jump in. But Marlin is now pale and unconscious, and it's up to Blanca to keep this script from taking a turn for the depressing. So she grabs a bucket led by a maintenance worker, puts Marlin in it, and climbs up the back wall of the exhibit with the bucket's handle in her teeth. Marlin comes to. Brad and Louie are impressed.

Blanca runs around Planet Blue with Marlin in the bucket, resulting in multiple tourists panicking over the fact that there's a polar bear that escaped from its habitat. They're approaching a marshy landscaping pond... but then Blanca is hit by a tranquilizer dart. Fortunately, Marlin manages to flop over to the pond.

Meanwhile, Gill and the sea lions have succeeded in clogging up the pipe again. A diver shows up to investigate, but then another beloved Finding Nemo character shows up as a Deus Ex Machina. Specifically, this guy:

How did he get there? Who cares, the script's almost over.

Nemo, Remy, and Dory emerge from a pipe into the very same pond that Marlin wound up in. It's happy reunion time... except that Remy feels left out and tries to leave. He says that he doesn't belong with them. Nemo gives a big speech about how he's part of their family, then Marlin gives a big speech about how he can handle having two kids and yadda yadda yadda. But that diver who got scared off by Bruce is explaining to the Chief Park Engineer what happened, so the Chief decides that they'll just have to "back flush the intake pipe". Buttons on a control panel are pushed, and just as Marlin, Nemo, Remy, and Dory are about to leave through another pipe, they hear rattling and banging in the pipes overhead, then see valves slamming shut. "We've gotta go back!" Marlin exclaims. "Hurry! Or we'll be trapped!"

Okay, this technically isn't a meme, but upon finding this I knew I had to put it
in the post.

They manage to get out, but in the process Dory winds up slamming her head into a root, knocking her out cold. When she comes to, she has her memory back. Apparently, the reason why she suffered from short-term memory loss in the first place is because she hit her head while escaping from Planet Blue the first time. And she knows the way out of there, so they follow her... through a habitat full of hungry flamingos. But, thanks to Dory, they're able to escape from the flamingos and approach the way out of Planet Blue - a flume ride themed after a sawmill. With a water wheel and everything. "All we have to do is get to the top. Ride the track to the splash down lagoon," Dory explains. "Wait for the right moment. Then ride the giant splash up over the park fence. Into the tidal river. And out into the bay." Will they pull it off?

Yep. They go down the track and land in the lagoon, and the resulting splash sends them hurtling over the park railing and into a tidal river... where Dory hits her head on a rock. Oh, great, so now her memory's gone again, right?

Actually, no. She's just messing with them. But wait! Where's Remy? Oh, wait, there he is. False alarm. So they all head home, leaving Gill with the sea lions. The end.

Yeah, that wasn't very good. Not quite as bad as the Toy Story 3 scripts, but I'm still reaaaaaaally glad this wasn't the Finding Nemo sequel we got. Much like the aforementioned Toy Story 3 scripts, characters spend a good chunk of the script bickering with each other and acting like out of character tools. Most of the jokes fall flat. It falls into that pesky sequel trap of rehashing the first film and making zero effort to hide it. The new characters were dull. And why does a polar bear fall in love with a clownfish? Seriously, WHY?

I'm honestly glad that Circle 7 got shut down before they could whip up scripts for sequels to A Bug's Life, The Incredibles, and Cars. Who knows what they would've done for THOSE?

I don't want to end this post on a negative note, so... here. I found this on Google Image Search and I thought this was pretty funny: