Brad Bird's "The Spirit " 1980 pencil-test "trailer"
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- Опубліковано 13 кві 2015
- In 2008 as Frank Miller's live-action feature film based on Will Eisner's "The Spirit" was being released I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times on the time, back in 1980, when I became involved with Brad Bird and Gary Kurtz (producer of the first two "Star Wars" movies) in trying to get into production an animated feature based on "The Spirit" In that piece, which you can read here: emotionalrationalist.blogspot... I spoke of a pencil test "trailer" for our proposed film that was made by Bird along with several classmates from Cal Arts, most of whom were working at Disney at the time. Quite a few people who read the article contacted me about seeing the film. I did have it on an old VHS, but it was deep in storage at the time plus as I did not really own the film, I told them they would have to look elsewhere to find a copy. Later, I found the VHS and put it aside. Recently Andrea Fiamma, an Italian journalist writing on the subject for the website Fumettologica," asked again if the film could be seen. As it is a small piece of animation history, I've decided to post it here.
I swear we need to make Hollywood to make more 2D animated films with an adult atmosphere.
You're thinking exactly like a stooge.
aderose Agreed
Me three😀 And to make em make more modern day 2d animated movies
Cause computer animation is 💯percent overrated
Hello there, I am a aspiring filmmaker and actor, I am currently writing a feature length animated film that will be traditionally animated, and it will be PG-13.
I plan on possibly making my own animation studio that specializes in traditional animated movies with an adult edge to them. POSSIBLY, I'm not guaranteeing that I WILL make a studio but the movie is a guarantee, I will make it
"I'm a private detective."
"How private?"
Ooh la la.
Oh for the love of God, why has this movie not been made yet!?! We need Brad Bird more than ever.
Because Will Eisner turned him down. He probably regrets that after seeing what Frank Miller did with his character
@Jay although I agree with you, Eisner croaked 3 years before Miller's bizarre casserole was born, so I wonder if he did see it, or only heard from Frank about what he was planning.
Brad bird got to make a superhero movie though
Brad Bird's 1980 pencil-test faux trailer for "The Spirit" is outstanding! I especially love the staging in the shot where he hangs up the phone before it can be dialed and the extreme foreshortening when The Spirit is hanging off the tracks
Amazing! These pencil tests are so appealing. It would've been incredible to see this finished. Alas and alack, so it goes with so many animations...
Disney Corporation and Hollywood and computer animation impacted by CCP CORONAVIRUS.
If they ever do another Spirit film, it should be animated like this. This pencil test captured the look and feel of Eisner's comics. Well done.
Seeing a animation pencil-test like that always reminds me of why I love animation in the first place. And why classic hand-drawn animation is my favorite and the best type of all time.
There is no best type of all time. A lot of it comes down to preference.
Not many filmmakers could have gotten The Spirit right, but I sure as hell wish that Brad Bird had been able to take a real crack at it. If anyone could have, my bets would be on him.
That smash cut of the paper airplane into the guy crashing through a window?? Chef's kiss!
The Spirit character definitely reminds me of Mr. Incredible.
***** That could be the way Brad Bird designed him.
My mind was blown off
Mr. Incredible's design is based on Brad Bird's face, similar to the Spirit.
The Royal Ocean Film Society
brought me here.
Which video?
"That Time Miyazaki, Brad Bird, and Ray Bradbury Made a Movie"
ua-cam.com/video/DdGQSThkMLk/v-deo.html
Same.
Same
Will Einser (My favorite Cartoonist) and Brad Bird (My favorite Animation Director) together in one film, and I'll never see it! All I can do is cry, at how magnificently terrible this is. Damn this world! X{
The RubberOnion Animation Podcast (ep #77) sent me to this pencil test from Brad Bird. This was great and honestly after you get over the quality of the video, the quality of the animation takes over VERY quickly. If this were even longer I can honestly say i would have watched it without noticing. Incredible... hey! But yes, I really enjoyed the movements of the older man with the phone and the boy with the mask most, as well as the cut from The Spirit throwing the airplane out the window, panning and cutting to the next shot with people coming out of the window. This was really cool!
Right now, as the animation industry is being repetitive, mediocre and generic, we need movies like this to be made. It would've been awesome to see a master like Brad bird making this amazing script in an animated movie
I hope it gets made one day
The thing is if this film would have been made, Pixar probably never would've existed. John Lasseter was involved in the making of this.
The idea that animated movies are nothing more than "kiddie entertainment" is holding the whole art-form back.
(Hand-drawn animation still survives, and keeps thriving all across Europe, thankfully 😊)
This is the movie that should have been made!
Maybe someone else will pitch a fully coloured, animated "Spirit trailer" someday...and they'll get one studio to back them.
One can only hope...
Wow, this is a gem! Such a shame it never got finished.
Paulo Pereira I know right!
I'm hoping that Skydance Animation will produce this one as a CG animated film if Ray Gunn becomes a success.
my heart was broken when Frank Miller made The Spirit (personally, I hate the guy and his mentality). But this just reawakened a flame in my soul. Brad Bird and Will Eisner's The Spirit... I want that movie! I would Fund that movie!!
Wretneck Me too. Let's crowdfund this puppy!!
Back in the early 90's Will came to a nearby small college to talk - there were so few there that he & I had a good deal of time to talk alone and away from others. One of the things he shared with me then was, his frustration in an animation project being seen fully through.
Thanks for this - it kind of made my day.
Mike Arnold It's nice to have your day made -- glad I had a small hand in it, Mike.
Thanks Steven Paul Leiva - I have wondered since what resulted of the project, and if any of it would ever be seen... appreciated.
A lot of us at Disney at the time were very frustrated with The Black Cauldron production and were ready to jump ship if Brad and Jerry got funding for their film. I don't think Disney management ever realized how close they were to a second walkout. . (Don Bluth had headed up the first walkout a few years before.)
Not really that close, Randy. Gary Kurtz just could not get any of the majors interested in the film. Some offered to make it as a live-action film, but none of us involved wanted to go that route. The idea was just too ahead of it's time for the Hollywood powers-that-be in 1980.
Oh my god it you two animation veterans talk to each other about the spirit you friends with will eisner
I love how it's so recognizably Brad Bird yet still has the Eisner spirit (no pun intended).
Although more modern Bird is more angular. Which I love!
I wish Brad Bird considered going back to hand-drawn animation.
The Iron Giant should be his own blueprint for new, moving stories
willing to explore adult themes.
("It's bad to kill, but it's not bad to die"
😢
"Souls don't die")
This is beautiful. I can only hope that Brad still has this somewhere on his list of things to do. One can only dream...
This was awesome! Wish a film like this could be made today...maybe some indie studio needs to step up?
this is amazing!! this is the version of The Spirit I've dreamed of...
Julie McCartney Same here! :)
This is fantastic! Beautiful staging, animation and atmosphere. In the first shot of Denny Colt, I thought he looked just a bit off for some reason, but from the moment we see him with the mask (the mask his creator originally detested putting on him), he feels like Will Eisner's The Spirit through and through. And so do Dolan and Ebony, and even the odd characters appearing only for a second or two. This whole pencil test feels like Eisner's comic strip come to life. Seriously, this needs to get MADE - now more than ever, to make up for the unsalvageable trainwreck of a movie by Frank Miller. I don't know to which extent Brad Bird would still be interested in pursuing this project - or how likely it is to happen anyway, seeing as this film really needs to be hand-drawn - but here's hoping. Brad's love for Eisner's masterwork shines through in every shot of this trailer. Thank you so much for sharing it, Steven. :)
Mesterius1 You are more than welcome.
Steven Paul Leiva ...admittedly, I do hope a better-quality copy will turn up one day. This VHS isn't in the best condition, and especially in the start, the picture has some very noticeable issues. How wonderful it would be to see a scan from 16mm or 35mm film (any idea if something like that might possibly have been preserved for this?). But it's still wonderful to finally see. :)
Mesterius1 I believe ir was shot in 16mm -- That's certainly what I originally saw. But who would have that print, I have no idea. Possibly Brad. Most likely it's lost, it has been 35 years since it was made. But who knows, maybe someday it'll show up someday.
Steven Paul Leiva That's interesting to hear. I really hope Brad or someone else still has the 16mm version; it would be amazing to see this in sharp film quality. :) Speaking of which... someone really oughta do a fresh interview with Brad about his Spirit project, now that the test is finally available for people to see.
Mesterius1 Well, maybe posting this will inspire some reporter to do that. Whether Brad would be willing to talk about it, I really couldn't say.
Although Brad Bird never got the chance to make a Spirit movie, he did manage to use him as a Easter egg in The Iron Giant when Hogarth shows the Giant different comic books.
This is awesome! The 2D animation pays homage to Eisner's style really well.
Over too soon! Gosh, I miss 2D! You get such an energy of expression in the visual elasticity of the medium that you lose in 3D.
This is awesome! The stylized animation is a feast for the eyes...and a great throwback to another time and place in animation.
THAT's the Spirit.
A little bit of John William’s Score from STEVEN SPIELBERG’S CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND at the end there-- to boot !
This is one of those things that I'd been hearing about for something like 20 years, and kinda figured might be lost forever. Thanks so much for posting it!
Wow! That was amazing animation! I wish this version of the Spirit got made. I haven't seen Frank Miller's version, but I feel Brad Bird's version has a lot more potential than Millers.
It really does
The Frank Miller version of the spirit is bad this would've been so much better. Maybe it could be made as a reboot.
such a shame this never got made
Thanks so much for sharing this. Pure genius. A real, damn shame that we'll never see this finished.
I hate the fact thay this and his other animated films never got released simply because it would "frighten younger viewers". Those movie were clearly made to be either PG or PG-13. I really don't like that people assume that everything that's animated is "for kids".
After all of the adult cartoons that have been on TV, especially for the last 30 years, you would think people have now realized cartoons don't always have to be created for kids. Like Family Guy, The Simpsons, or King of the Hill. Some me of the more well known ones.
Imagine saying all adult shows are only live action.
But people still think like this.
I wish we could've had this movie.
Somebody please make this into a movie!
I wish this was made. Would have made my Childhood way better.
I've been wanting to see this for a long time. I can't believe I only just found it. Thanks for this!
You are more than welcome, Hezekiah.
I heard about this animated short film from the Iron Giant documentary, titled "The Giant's Dream"
2:06 this animation is extremely good
incredible piece...lives and breathes eisner!
i wish this was made into animated feature!.
Thank you so much!
thank you, very much for your effort of finding and put it online. you are a hero
In 2022, it was announced that Bird had signed a deal with Skydance the previous year to revive his long-dormant project Ray Gunn and reassembled frequent collaborators Michael Giacchino, Teddy Newton, Tony Fucile, Darren T. Holmes, and Jeffrey Lynch for the film.
BRILLIANT! It captures the comic perfectly!
this is incredible
Very nice work. I just recently graduated from animation in college, and even though it was computer animation, I know just how much work goes into even a few seconds, especially if you want it to look as good as this. I can only imagine how many hours you guys put into the drawing of each frame.
Disney should be grateful that they have Brad Bird.
@Eaxl I think I get what you mean
@Eaxl okay
You're more than welcome, Christopher.
+Steven Paul Leiva It was worth the long wait!
Oh wow! What a loss this never made it. :( Love the take on it.
This is fantastic! A crying shame it never got produced. I discovered the Spirit in the 70s through the Warren reprints. I think I still have the entire Warren run somewhere along with dozens of issues of Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. I'll have to dig them out now!
I much prefer this trailer over Frank Miller's trash adaptation.
Never too late!
Joplin John Yes. We have Kickstarter
Well, Deadpool got started with leaked footage on the internet
it would have been so good.
Thanks for sharing. Fantastic animation. Oh what could've been!
MAKE THIS MOVIE!!!
Four downvotes? Looks like The Octopus, Doctor Cobra, Mr. Carrion, and Darling O'Shea watched this.
Or Frank Miller created four different accounts.
Can I live in the alternate universe where this was made?
Brad Bird need complete this project !!!!!!
Damn.
We lost out on a good film here.
Very cool! Thanks for this!
They deserve this!
Bird es un director maravilloso, estoy seguro que hubiera sido una mejor versión que la que tuvimos.
Wow! Thanks for sharing!
This is awesome!
awesome!! thanks so much for sharing!!
+Albert Jimenez You're more thn welcome.
Genial!!!! greetings from Chile!!!
Well done.
Love the match cut at 2:43 :D
Imagine a Watchmen movie just like this... 🙂
How come we don't see American 2D animation movies anymore? I'm not saying we shouldn't stop watching 3D animation movies, but sometimes we need to see 2D animation once in a while! Who's with me?
Why they don't make 2D films any more in the US is not something you can answer in just one sentence.
You could write a small research paper on why this is the case but here are some of the big reasons --
1) They (the executives at Disney and DreamWorks) did NOT contain the costs of production. They spent way more money than they had to to produce the films that were made in the 1990s.
2) Those films were costing upwards of at least $120million, sometimes significantly more and they were not even breaking even at the box office towards the end of the decade.
3) The tie-in toy sales were also not great for quite a few films and the executives DO care about the merchandizing sales. After the success of Star Wars with its merchandizing -- 3/4 of the money the original films made WAS on the merchandizing tie-ins!!! --, merchandizing is a bigger part of the equation than ever.
4) The salary wars of the post-Katzenberg era at Disney were a major issue. While some talents that had been in the industry were finally getting paid what they were worth, the point is that a major fraction of production that had always been controlled before EXPLODED (salaries double, tripling, and quadrupling to above $150,000/yr under contract in a number of cases; long-time producers and directors getting paid in the seven-figure range) and everybody got greedy. There is a truth there that nobody wants to admit.
Yes, the executives and top producers still got paid more than the people who actually drew these films BUT -- big but here -- there was a huge push to recruit talent because for a while they just didn't have enough trained people to make these films. Both DW and Disney did something that NOBODY, not even Walt himself, seriously tried to do which was to have three films in production at once and produce 2D films to release one after another, year by year, like live-action films. There are reasons why in Walt's day they generally took longer to produce animated films and why they didn't rush them like a live-action film = you waste a lot of time and effort if you don't properly pre-plan, storyboard, and pre-edit an animated feature before you go into full production. They DON'T INTENTIONALLY created deleted scenes for animated features!!! It's too much money to do that and you can waste $1million or more dollars with a deleted scenes that could have been spent elsewhere, or, better yet, not spent at all! Some of the features were allegedly far into production (at halfway point at least in pencil animation stage) when the execs had the films literally torn up and started from scratch. There were story issues that hadn't been resolved before full-production began and severe cases of micromanagement from people who DIDN'T understand how an animated feature is produced! That added up to a LOT of wasted money. Probably tens of millions of dollars when all's said and done.
[I have heard a story, probably apocryphal, that Disney poured well over $200 million into the CG film, Dinosaur. One story I heard was that the film was ultimately a HALF-BILLION dollar drainage hole. It bombed. Not to worry, though -- Warner Bros allegedly WASTED at least as much money trying to produce a Superman live-action film for over a decade and produced two films within a decade that were not very well-loved.]
In the meantime, they had more people working at Disney (for instance) than at any time since probably World War II and not everybody was working on a particular project. When they DID have production wind-downs, they still had to pay people because they were on salary and permanent employees but at times, they had no project to really work on at the studio.
Part of the reason why Japan still does 2D is because they've kept the major portion of their costs (the salaries) down. It's a ruthlessly tight system but they generally waste a lot less money on their productions than what you see in the US. The general story is that the Japanese animators are getting paid 1/4 to MAYBE 1/2 of what an American animator would make. Yes, the animation salaries are not even at living level in Japan for lower-rank production people and new animators but they can still produce decent-looking 2D films for AT LEAST 1/4 if not far less of the cheapest one Hollywood could produce today!
When you see a $20million 2-D animated Nickelodeon film produced, it was really done mostly overseas. They do the planning and voiceover work in the States but the majority of drawing and coloring is still done in the same studios that make the 2-D animated TV series seen on American TV! Of course, most anime produced in Japan is LIMITED animation, it's not full animation. When they do use full animation, it's for specific scenes and for brief moments to save on cost. This is true for their feature films as well as TV production.
There very few people who seriously believe they could make an 2D animated film in California for less than $80million now. The Little Mermaid (Disney, 1989) was produced for under $30million but somehow "magically" The Lion King cost $150million (plus probably at least $30mil-$40mil in advertising) just 5 years later! Of course, The Lion King made a lot more money than The Little Mermaid (which nowhere near the publicity campaign TLK did) but was it really that much better a film than the earlier one to justify a five-fold increase in money spent to produce it?!?
5) Very critical point. The people who finance the film production do NOT honestly believe 2-D animation is "in" anymore. I think some of these jokers actually think the 2-D feature animation renaissance of the late 1980s and 1990s was a fluke. They think 2-D is old tech and kids only want to see polygons and frankly don't care about the old methods. Of course, the fact that the animated features look MORE ALIKE THAN EVER because of the computer modeling issues doesn't seem to enter the equation, either...
6) Another critical point. They can hire and use smaller production crews on full-digital/polygon features. Allegedly half or less the "required" number of people a 2-D film would need.
Oh, and they make the digital animators work harder than ever for their salaries (but some of the more experienced animators DO get paid in the low six-figure range). I've heard of some ridiculous quota figures that they "must" produce 10-30 seconds of "decent" character animation per week or something like that. A guy drawing a feature film, assigned to one character, couldn't begin to compete with that pace.
7) In a way the 2-D animation industry in the US just doesn't exist anymore.
A lot of the 2-D animation specialist companies disappeared after DW and Disney shuttered their 2-D/traditional animation studios. The infrastructure to handle a large outflow of work just doesn't exist... Even Disney had to outsource the 2-D animation produced for "Enchanted" because they shut down their old traditional studios at least 5 years earlier! They tried a 2-D film again with "The Princess and the Frog" but the film was received was less than great enthusiasm so they decided again that "2-D is dead."
If you don't know some aspect of computer animation and do that EXTREMELY well, you probably won't be able to work on a feature film in the US. If you want to traditional character animation with a pencil, you'd have to leave the country, period, unless you get work in some small animation studio that still does traditional animation but most of those surviving companies diversified and do a lot more than just one type of animation. And they get by with MUCH smaller production crews. And if they DID hire new people, they would probably be temporary contract hires unless they're replacing people leaving the company or retiring.
Awesome!
The loss of this and Fleischer's John Carter of Mars are the greatest travesties in animation history.
Now THAT'S the frickin' Spirit!!!! Please! I'm beggin ya. get to work and make (at last...at LONG LAST) a proper movie about the guy!
This is the Spirit we needed and deserves this is the movie we should've gotten.
Give me the bogus reason why this wasn't made: Lack of funding, popularity issues, creators clashing with studio, or cartoon violence...well
Disney should hire Brad to make a 3d animated movie of the spirit
Any chance we could see the other material that was on this tape?
I'm sorry, but no. It is no longer available.
Me as a memer...
Me : **still appreciates Dante Gulapa and more**
Also Me : **wants to make a meme for Brad Bird, Catherine Keener and Sarah Vowell as long as they won't get mad at me**
This looks cool, too damn bad that they never let Brad Bird make his version of "The Spirit" this would have been awesome. Just wondering, if it did happen what do you all think if this was the cast?:
Leonardo DiCaprio as Denny Colt/The Spirit
Brendan Gleeson or Liam Neeson as Commissioner Dolan
Patrick Warburton or Jeff Daniels as The Octopus
Kevin Hart as Ebony White
And Grey Griffen as Ellen Dolan
EDIT: I just had a new thought, what if Lil' Rel Howery was Ebony White? I love seeing him in Free Guy and Dashing Through The Snow.
I'll be frank chum. This cast ain't doin' it for me.
Please do it, Brad
Right next to the Thief and The Cobbler
@Eaxl ah..
This is incredible! Wish this would have been made. Even if it is a pencil test, the characters move and are designed well. I wonder if this film was meant for an all age audience like The Iron Giant or an adult audience like the direct to DVD DC Movies cause the word damn was heard once.
It was meant for an all-age audience. It was our hope to get feature animation out of the Kiddie Market!
this would had been awesome !!
Plenty O'Tool I agree.
this should be put into production - who owns the animation rights?
✌️❤️
❤❤❤❤❤❤
I'll revive it eventually
why was this never a thing!?
How's it goin', Royal Ocean viewers?
Double Toasted comment section brought me here 😊
Me too lol
I can't watch this thing without getting angry.
Such an unabashed love-note to the source material, and a reminder that we probably won't see another effort at realizing Eisner's masterwork in movie form for the next twenty years, thanks to Miller's abortion.
We should've gotten this over Frank Miller's film.
the incredibles has so much influence from this now that i see it
OMG im so shookt
Me : OMG Im so shookt
Also Me : **tagging PaoLUL**
Kickstart? Please?
This was amazing.
This also looks better and would have been better than Frank Miller's live-action movie based on The Spirit.
I wonder if Brad Bird is still interested in making his animated movie adaptation of "The Spirit"? Because if he is, he should make a Kickstarter campaign to get the budget and maybe even finance it and I would be the many people that would back the campaign up.
JimboJoe I agree, but he'd probably have to go back to Warner Bros to make it. DC, to the best of my knowledge, holds the rights to The Spirit, so if Brad Bird did want to make the movie, he'd need to go to them.
David Trotter Actually, Dynamite Entertainment owns the rights to The Spirit now so I guess Brad has to work out a deal with Dynamite to get the rights so that he can make his animated adaptation of The Spirit sometime in the future.
JimboJoe Wait, really? I thought DC still had them. But yeah, the same thing applies. A good question to ask is whether the movie, if Dynamite Entertainment lets Bird make it, will be done in 2d or 3d? While 3d was done exceptionally well in the Iron Giant, to make the Giant look 2d, and the Incredibles, I feel that 2d would probably suit the Spirit much more.
David Trotter Same here but I also don't mind seeing it as a 3D animated film.
Fair enough, my thought of it being 2d animated is more of a personal preference- it just fits better with Eisner's original style in my opinion. Still, If the movie does get made, I'm happy either way.
If you want a decent Superman movie, here is your director.