Since Stephen Anderson has left WDAS and joined DTVA, it's presumed his project there has been shelved.
Q: I'm also curious to see what you were working on during the mid-late 2010s before you left Disney, too. Whatever it was, I bet it sounded really cool.
Stephen Anderson: Thank you for your interest! It was pretty cool but after 5 years of development, the project stalled out and I stepped away. Oh well.
Source:
https://x.com/stevehatguy/status/1562565732843474944
Stephen Anderson wrote:After Winnie the Pooh, I went back into development. I pitched 4 projects to John Lasseter in 2012; he gravitated to 2 of them and I started developing those. By early 2013, I hit a wall with both of them. I still loved the projects, but I kept feeling like 'I don't know if these are Disney movies'. To be perfectly honest, I just thought to really do these the way I would want them to do, I don't know if it could be done here. So, I went to John and said 'I'm not sure I want to continue moving forward with these'. He said 'that's totally fine; come up with some more pitches'. You have to at least pitch 3 ideas. That was John's thing, both at Pixar and Disney. I did 4 initially, so the second round I did two. He unanimously picked one. This was in 2013. Cut to summer 2018. Still developing the same project. Had finally gotten into the first draft of the script. We had a table read and it was a disaster. Nobody liked the script. They still loved the project, I think. The promise of what the project could be. But the actual script, nobody liked it. It led to them having us fire our writer, who I'd gotten really close to over the last couple of years prior to that. That was a horrible day when we had to let him go. I just couldn't do it anymore. I said 'I'm done. I basically would have to start all over again. We'd have to hire a new writer. We'd have to start from square one. I've been doing this for 5 years. I've completely lost my compass for this project.' So, I stepped away. I just couldn't do it anymore. Ultimately, that led to me, a year later, leaving features and going to TV animation to work on Monsters at Work.
The project went through a few different iterations, but basically was about night creatures, night mythology. The thematic of the movie was all about literal and emotional dark and light. I started researching different mythologies around the world of the things that go bump in the night. Every culture has boogeymen and goblins and witches and all these characters that live in the dark. Especially back in the day, before artificial light, humans did everything by where the sun was in the sky and when the sun went down and it got dark outside, you went inside, you locked your doors and windows and you went to sleep. Whatever was in the dark that you couldn't see, you were afraid of. Superstitions were created because of not knowing what was out there. What we can't see, we are terrified of. All this mythology and all these cultures were born out of that fear of the dark. The story took on several different versions and the executions was different, but that was the root of it. It revolved around those themes and those ideas. For my early pitch, I put some inspiration boards together and I put on there some frame grabs from Snow White, Pinocchio, Sleepy Hollow, Fantasia, to say 'look, Walt was not afraid of those darker aspects of these fairytales and fables that he was adapting.' There was a quote from him where he talks about how it does a disservice to children to tell them there aren't these dark aspects of life. So, I put those up and said 'part of our heritage at Disney is some darker imagery. I think kids can handle it, especially of done properly. Kids like a good spooky story.' I was pushing to do something tonally that felt more like that than say Sleeping Beauty or The Jungle Book.
We didn't have any story artists with us at that point; it was just myself, a writer, and a producer. Prior to that table read, we did have a story artist working for us for a while. I would grab different vis dev artists from the studio every now and then, like if we wanted an inspiration piece or something for a pitch. So, there were always artists around that we would use, but we didn't have anyone officially assigned to us.
The table read took place after John left. John left in the Fall of 2017 while we were still in treatment phase. I think if he was around a little bit longer, he probably would have given us the go-ahead to go to a script. Early 2018 was when we were able to revamp and get a first draft written of a script.
Source:
https://boardwalktimes.net/the-zach-per ... a619ca8eef
