There are numerous examples of animated features getting the "fast-fast, zoom-zoom" treatment during the production process. Here is yet another.
... It was October 2008, and although “How to Train Your Dragon” previously had been moved from November 2009 to March 2010 (largely to steer clear of “Avatar”), ... Sanders had just a year to remake it.
... Required to make decisions and never second-guess them (“Everyone knew that time was running out,” Sanders says), the filmmakers put together a large poster laying out storytelling themes that could not be violated as they rewrote and reshot the film ...
I'm a big fan of not noodling creative endeavors to death. I've seen projects that had an abundance of time, yet ended up being drek. I've seen features that were jammed through in a hurry and ended up being good. (To be fair, I've also witnessed the reverse.)
The truth of it is, the production part of an animated epic often takes twelve or fifteen months. Most of Snow White was animated and painted in the year before its release, Dumbo was even shorter, and -- as I type -- the production of Tangled/ Rapunzel is tumbling through a nine-month production pipeline (much as Bolt slid down a nine-month chute.)
Story development is something else again, but one interesting wrinkle about story? Longer time doesn't necessarily equate to better story telling. Often it means the tale told is worse because ranks of executives and other second-guessers have the luxury of beating the property to an unrecognizable pulp over and over again.
The reality: Sometimes extra weeks and months help, and sometimes they hurt. There's really no way of knowing with certainty which it is until you're sitting in the back of a theater staring at the screen and thinking: "Oh shit."
Or possibly, "Yahoo!"
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From the Los Angeles Times article quoted above:
...The novel and the early movie version had the North Sea residents and the dragons intermingling; in place of warfare was cooperation. “We felt there wasn’t enough peril,” DeBlois says. In Hastings’ movie, the young children collect dragon eggs and raise them to do tricks. In Sanders and DeBlois’ version, Berk is under attack from the dragons, who steal the remote village’s livestock and burn its homes...
The implication is that Hastings was making a ridiculous kiddy movie, with children collecting dragon eggs like on an Easter hunt, hatching them and making them do cute tricks. In reality, the egg hunt was a perilous journey into the heart of the dragon's cave. The dragons were very much the enemy, attacking the village, stealing livestock and burning homes. This is not unique to the Sander/Deblois' version. The eggs were gathered, hatched and trained as part of a right-of-passage for the young people. Once mastered, the dragons were then supposed to be slaughtered. Hardly the kiddie flick implied by the article.
Less time is always better than more. Indecision is what often kills good film story telling. I say, move fast - and don’t let the damn executives keep up with you.
I was looking at the Entertainment magazine that came out yesterday and somehow they were already able to have seen and printed a review of Dragon. They gave it an A-. I guess that speeding it up helped.
I'd say Dean DuBlois' skill in story and as a director helped more.
i am really looking forward to this film and it may be up there with panda. perhaps dreamworks will get more heart and less fart in their movies going forward.
Quote: "Story development is something else again, but one interesting wrinkle about story? Longer time doesn't necessarily equate to better story telling. Often it means the tale told is worse because ranks of executives and other second-guessers have the luxury of beating the property to an unrecognizable pulp over and over again."
This, off course, is due to the big studio process. It has nothing to do with 'less production time makes a better film', because that obviously is nonsense. The more time you have to get to know your characters and the underlying themes in the story, the better the decisions in all the following departments will be, that will bring those things to the surface.
The same goes for Floyd's remark on 'indecision'. In good storytelling (good) decisions come from vision and storytelling skills, not time pressure. Fast decisions are better than no decisions at all, but ideally decsions are thought through thoroughly. I've seen a lot of good ideas in the boards not make it to the screen because of fast decision making during the production process.
"perhaps dreamworks will get more heart and less fart in their movies going forward."
DREAMWORKS: MORE HEART, LESS FART
(would make a great license plate frame)
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