The remake of the original animated film is doing gangbusters. Far more than the (better) animated film which spawned one of Disney;s most lucrative properties (worth more than 3.2 billion and several spin offs prior to this years. it almost never happened.
Chris Sanders (who is coming off the amazing WILD ROBOT) was at a crossroads at Disney and while leading the story department on Mulan had become a favorite of one of the executives who he presented this pitch to.
The challenge was, it would never be made in the studio system of Disney -- we were lucky to get Mulan made. It was too weird and not "princessy" enough. Chris leveraged his time in Florida on Mulan knowing that the satellite studio flew under the radar of the main studio and created this pitch. If you know the animated original you know the mosquito references and that comes from me dragging Chris to a national forest where we got eaten alive by the bugs but managed to escape a pack of wild boars that had us surrounded.
Here is a link to his original pitch. Much stayed the same, a lot of it was elevated in the storyboarding process to what you see today. One sequence in this document with the plane flying through the city had been fully animated and had to be pulled because of 9-11.
Enjoy the original pitch to Lilo and stitch. https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:4328b550-176b-467e-9f27-7b73...
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Thanks for sharing the original pitch, Laurie Ashbourne. It'll come in handy when I put together pitches for my animated stories.
"...me dragging Chris to a national forest where we got eaten alive by the bugs but managed to escape a pack of wild boars that had us surrounded." There's an animated movie in there somewhere.
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Thank you so much for sharing this story, truly inspiring.
It’s amazing (and a bit wild) to see how close such an iconic film came to never happening. Stories like this give me real hope and motivation to keep pushing forward with my own pitch, even when things feel “too different” or outside the usual mold.
Grateful for the insight — and the reminder not to give up.