Shadow's Prospects

Back from the nearly cancelled?

Though Dreamworks Animation and 20th Century Fox previously removed the CG and hand-drawn animation hybrid Me & My Shadow from their official release schedule, we understand work on the film was still underway as recently as the last couple of months of 2014. ...

To give a bit of history on Shadow: the movie was in development in 2011, when Mark Dindal was developing the feature from an idea by one J. Katzenberg. Mark started work on the picture in 2010.

I saw some of the early art and test animation, and it looked promising. Different. Mark was nice enough to sit down for a TAG blog interview when he was slammed with work on the film (we talked in a DWA conference room and cut the session short when he had to get to a meeting); seven months later he had departed the project due to creative differences. (From accounts these were actual, 24-karat creative differences. Not the fake press release kind designed to cover a firing.)

Alessandro Carloni, a DWA veteran, has been listed as director of Me and My Shoulder for some time. There was a long stretch where not much work was happening on Shadow; reamWorks staffers told me there was a skeleton crew and the word was out and about that the picture would most likely die a quiet death in its crib.

Now Film Divider and others say that's not the case, and I hope it's true. I haven't paid close attention to MAMS's current status, but the picture always struck me as a different kind of project and definitely worth making.