Overhyped Animated Films That Were Never Released
For every movie that gets made in Hollywood, there are many more that ended up languishing in development hell. Often the public doesn't hear about these films at all, or if they do, it's well after the projects have fallen apart. Because animated films take so long to make, however, publicity for them can start years before they're actually released — making it easier for fans to get hyped for movies that might not actually ever be finished.
While the word "overhyped" often has negative connotations about the quality of something, let's make it clear that the movies on this list all have or had the potential to be good or even great. It's the fact that we could get "hyped" at all for something that we're never going to see that makes us regard any such build-up as "overhype." Of course, maybe we're being a bit presumptuous in saying "never" — after all, films like "Nimona" and "Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio" were canceled until they weren't.
Wild Life
In the late '90s, long before "Strange World" introduced Walt Disney Animation Studios' first gay lead character, the studio's Secret Lab CGI division was busy at work on "Wild Life" — a loose adaptation of "Pygmalion" about an elephant navigating Studio 54-era New York club culture. That's not exactly the setting you'd expect for a Disney movie, and the film might have had better luck as a Touchstone release — which is what the directors were hoping for.
For a long time, the rumor was that Roy Disney himself shut the production down after getting angry over a scene in which two gay characters crack a double-entendre about "manholes." The movie's co-director Howard Baker later explained that, while there was a "manhole" joke at one point, it was cut from the film by the time Roy saw it — as was much of the more adult-oriented content it was originally pitched with. Instead, the reason the film got canceled was that, in following the executives' advice to make it more like a traditional Disney film, the story ended up becoming too messy and pleasing no one.
Mort
In all fairness to Disney, John Musker and Ron Clements' adaptation of "Mort," Terry Pratchett's fourth "Discworld" book, was never officially announced, so the studio can't be accused of overhyping it. Even so, reports about its development were all over the internet in 2010, so forgive a few "Discworld" nerds for going through the cycle of excitement and disappointment about this unannounced film's cancellation.
Though you might expect this cancellation was due to controversy over having Death as the main character of a Disney movie, the reasoning appears a lot more mundane. According to commenters on The Animation Guild's blog, the rights holders wanted Disney to make multiple "Discworld" films, and Disney only wanted "Mort," so the deal ultimately didn't go down. It didn't help that Disney was once again moving away from traditional animation following the underwhelming box office of "The Princess and the Frog," since Musker and Clements wanted to do "Mort" in traditional animation. The directing duo went on to make "Moana" instead.
King of the Elves
Here's another unusual choice of source material for an unfinished Disney movie: "King of the Elves," a dark fantasy short story penned by legendary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, whose other stories have inspired the likes of "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall." The film was announced in 2008 with Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker attached as directors, hoping to make a December 2012 release date. This version of the film was confirmed to be canceled in December 2009, but the project re-entered development in 2011 with a new screenwriter (Michael Markowitz) and director (Chris Williams) and a targeted 2013 release date — which also came and went.
It seems that there wasn't a dramatic story of cancellation so much as a slow dissolution of the production: according to animator Clay Kaytis, Williams lost interest in the film after a year, and though animators kept working on it after he left, the film just never got to a place where it could be released. It's also been speculated that lack of clear merchandising opportunities made "King of the Elves" a lower priority for Disney.
Newt
Pixar has a long history of completely reworking films in mid-production, sometimes even firing and replacing directors, but there's only been one time the studio has announced a new computer-animated project only to cancel it: "Newt." Announced in 2008 for an intended 2011 release, the Gary Rydstrom-directed film was going to be about the last two blue-footed newts on the planet, who hate each other but have to be together to save their species.
Replace newts with parrots and the plot is basically identical to Blue Sky's "Rio," which happened to be in development at the same time and actually got released in 2011, while "Newt" got canceled. John Lasseter cited the "Rio" similarity as one of the reasons for the cancellation. Originally, Pixar considered its typical route of replacing a director for a project that wasn't working. But the potential replacement director, Pete Docter, had a different idea for a film he was much more passionate about: "Inside Out."
The Shadow King
There's a reason the previous slide had to specify "Newt" as the only computer-animated film canceled by Pixar. Hot off the success of "Coraline," Henry Selick was hired by Pixar to set up his own stop-motion studio, Cinderbiter, within the company. Its first project was to be "The Shadow King," about a boy whose deformed hands make amazing shadow puppets.
The issue was that Pixar's typical style of reworking its CG movies midway through production led to an extremely ballooning budget when applied to stop-motion. John Lasseter's producing style did not mesh with Selick's directing style. Selick told Entertainment Weekly, "If he just left us alone, they would've had a really good movie for the budget."
Selick has since regained the rights to "The Shadow King," so of the various films on this list, "The Shadow King" is theoretically best positioned to pull a "Nimona" and get completed if some studio is willing to take a chance on it. Another extremely promising, yet canceled, Cinderbiter project, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book," might still be attempted at Disney in live-action; Marc Forster was attached to direct as of 2022.
Gigantic
There are many times that Disney has announced films before they were actually certain to be finished, but perhaps no other such announcement has come with as much prematurely confident hype as the presentation of "Gigantic" at D23 Expo 2015. At the time, director Nathan Greno's musical version of "Jack and the Beanstalk" was set for release in 2018, and "Frozen" composers Robert Lopez and Kirsten Anderson-Lopez even performed one of the songs they'd written for it. "Zootopia" included a "Giraffic" Easter egg, but "Gigantic" was delayed to 2020 before eventually being canceled.
Official reasons for the cancellation haven't been given, beyond Disney Animation president Ed Catmull saying that the story just wasn't working. John Lasseter, who stepped away from Disney due to sexual misconduct allegations a month after "Gigantic" was canceled, might still produce a version of the story outside the Mouse House: Netflix has announced the development of a new "Jack and the Beanstalk" movie at Lasseter's Skydance Animation — a studio which also happens to be employing Greno. Even so, one doubts this version would be just like the one Disney was developing.
B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations
DreamWorks Animation's "B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations" faced the most down-to-the-wire cancellation out of all the films on this list. To be clear, there was never a public announcement that it was scrapped; it just had its June 2015 release date removed from the schedule (allegedly to get distance from the release of "Inside Out") seven months in advance and then got quietly shut down two months later. There was already official merchandise being produced for a nearly-complete movie that the studio never released!
DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was allegedly displeased with how the film was turning out. Given that director Tony Leonidis' next film happened to be "The Emoji Movie," maybe this time we can trust Katzenberg's quality assessment. Even so, canceling an animated film that had already begun final rendering stages so close to its release feels awfully harsh. It seems that the film was a victim of restructuring at DreamWorks, which was seeking a buyout and was purchased by Universal in 2016.
Me and My Shadow
The second film on this list about shadows, "Me and My Shadow" was announced by DreamWorks Animation in 2010. This comedy about a boring man whose shadow drags him on an adventure was set to combine 3D animation for the physical world and hand-drawn animation for the shadow characters. Like many films on this list, it experienced multiple delays and changes in directors before its ultimate cancellation.
According to animator Matt Williames, CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was unenthused by the film and thought it wouldn't be a big enough blockbuster. Katzenberg even fell asleep during one screening — though at the time he'd just flown in from China, and the fact that Katzenberg somehow thought "Part of Your World" from "The Little Mermaid" was also boring proves his judgment on these matters isn't always accurate. The shadow concept was temporarily revived as a potential live-action/CG hybrid film for director Edgar Wright, now simply titled "Shadows," but this version became a victim of corporate restructuring.
Monkeys of Mumbai
Another victim of DreamWorks Animation's restructuring in the mid-2010s, "Monkeys of Mumbai" is a project that went by a number of working titles over the years, including "Monkeys of Bollywood," "Mumbai Musical," and "Bollywood Superstar Monkey." This would have been an adaptation of the Hindu epic "The Ramayana" told from the perspective of Hanuman's army of monkeys, with Bollywood-style songs by Stephen Schwartz and A.R. Rahman.
No artistic justification was ever given for the film's cancellation: it simply came down to business issues. Director Kevin Lima told Den of Geek, "It had nothing to do with the movie, and everything to do with the politics of selling the studio." Because DreamWorks used the film as a tax write-off, it would have cost tens of millions of dollars for any other studio to acquire the rights, killing its chances to be revived elsewhere. A shame, given how stunning every piece of concept art seen from the film has been.
Larrikins
Aside from the "Trolls" jukebox musical series, musicals just couldn't seem to catch a break at DreamWorks Animation in the 2010s. "Larrikins," about an Australian marsupial known as a bilby on an adventure across the Outback, was the brainchild of Tim Minchin, the comedic songwriter best known for the "Matilda" musical. Scheduled for release in February 2018, with an all-star cast including Hugh Jackman and Naomi Watts, the cancellation news broke less than a year out from the intended release date, via a post on Minchin's official website.
"I've recently been working in 3 different continents, missing my kids a lot, sleeping too little and not playing piano enough," Minchin wrote. "And then a couple of days ago, the animated film to which I've dedicated the last 4 years of my life was shut down by the new studio execs." In an attempt to salvage material from the canceled project, the character designs got reused for the 2018 short film "Bilby."
Popeye
Note to studios: if you don't want people angry about you canceling a film, maybe don't release a promo on YouTube celebrating the director you're going to part ways with and showcasing the amazing animation he was putting together. This was what Sony Pictures Animation did with its never-finished version of "Popeye." Genndy Tartakovsky, the creator of such cartoons as "Dexter's Laboratory," "Samurai Jack," and "Primal," was going to direct, and the preview footage shows an evolution of the cartoony style of his "Hotel Transylvania" movies pushed to even wilder extremes.
With the positive response to the test footage, why remove the director? Tartakovsky explained (via Variety), "I think the studio is going through changes and I don't know if they want to make the 'Popeye' that I want to make." Some version of "Popeye" stayed in development at Sony for a bit, with T.J. Fixman hired as a screenwriter in 2016. Tartakovsky was brought back when the rights reverted back to King Features Syndicate in 2020, but two years later, the animator said it wouldn't be happening. For those curious what Tartakovsky's film might have been like, a full animatic leaked online.
Medusa
Here's yet another case where Sony Pictures Animation was making YouTube videos promoting a film and its director before parting ways with the director and eventually canceling the film. "Medusa," a sympathetic take on the snake-haired monster from Greek mythology, was originally going to be directed by Lauren Faust, best known for creating "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." Considering Faust had to leave her hit show after one season over creative differences and later had an original series canceled by Netflix before its completion, it feels especially unfortunate that such a talented artist keeps struggling to get consistent work in Hollywood.
Faust explained on X (formerly Twitter) that after she left Sony in 2015, "Medusa went in a more 'Disney' direction instead of my more cartoony approach." This Disney-esque version could have also been cool to see — the pencil test by James Baxter that Faust was responding to was absolutely beautiful — but it too failed to get off the ground.
Driftwood
The Cartoon Network Studios original movie "Driftwood," created by "Aquaman: King of Atlantis" producer Victor Courtright, was announced in May 2022. The film was described as a space opera about a mouse-like creature named Clover trying to save her forest civilization. The announcement coincided with an optimistic Vulture profile on the studio, describing the hope that CN Studios would "position itself as an appealing destination for creators of new work" and use its streaming partnership with HBO Max to expand the type of programming it produced.
That optimism proved extremely short-lived. "Driftwood" was canceled just three months after it was greenlit. It was a victim of cutbacks targeting animation and family programming at Warner Bros. Discovery, with dozens of original shows, many of them from Cartoon Network, deleted from HBO Max around the same time. Once again, a interesting-sounding animated film got caught up in the fast-moving shifts within the business.
Celebrity Harvest
The animated band Gorillaz has built up a wacky mythology via music videos, in-character interviews, and online content — and it could have expanded this mythology into a movie. When Gorillaz went on tour in 2002, animator Jamie Hewlett announced plans for the band's second album to be the soundtrack to a feature film. Frontman Damon Albarn teased the title for the film, "Celebrity Harvest," via an Easter egg on the Blur album "Think Tank."
The reason that "Celebrity Harvest" got canceled is pretty simple: no major animation studio was willing to take a risk spending so much money on something so dark. Ideas for the movie got integrated into the 2005 album "Demon Days," so in a way you can thank this project's death for one of Gorillaz's most acclaimed albums. Albarn and Hewlett once again attempted to make a Gorillaz movie at Netflix in 2023, but it ended up one of many animated projects canceled by the streamer.
Bone
Jeff Smith's fantasy indie comic series "Bone" has been the subject of many a failed adaptation attempt. Paramount and Nickelodeon Movies were attached to make an animated movie version in the late '90s before their option lapsed in 2000. Smith later revealed that the Nickelodeon executives wanted to make the Bone cousins six-year-old children, give Fone Bone magic gloves, and include Britney Spears music.
After the Nickelodeon option lapsed, Smith held off on returning to Hollywood while he finished the "Bone" comics, but in 2008, Warner Bros. picked up the rights for a CG/motion capture adaptation that promised to retain more of the source material's darker aspects. The WB version was in development for a decade, with writers and directors cycling in and out. After that version's options were exhausted in 2019, Netflix acquired the rights to do a TV series — which got canceled three years later amidst massive layoffs in their animation department.
Dreaming Machine
This one hurts the most. Over a third of the sci-fi anime "Dreaming Machine" had been completed when its director, Satoshi Kon, died of pancreatic cancer in August 2010. Producer Masao Maruyama promised Kon he'd do "whatever it takes" to finish the film (via Anime News Network), but it struggled to find funding, and Maruyama grew skeptical whether he could find a suitable replacement. By 2018, Maruyama decided that no other anime director in Japan could match Kon's talent, though he was open to seeking international collaborators.
All four of Kon's feature films — "Perfect Blue," "Millennium Actress," "Tokyo Godfathers," and "Paprika" — are must-sees for adult animation fans, and "Dreaming Machine" would have been a fascinating chance to see how this master of psychological horror and tragedy would have adapted to the needs of an all-ages fantasy. Though no animated scenes have been released from it, artwork and details about its story have been showcased in books and documentaries.