You know what’s fascinating?
Director Chris Sanders has never directed sequels to his own animated features.
In his lengthy career, he has directed three all-animated features total: Lilo & Stitch for Walt Disney Animation Studios (then “Feature Animation”), and then How To Train Your Dragon and The Croods for DreamWorks. His latest feature is a live-action film featuring photorealistic animated animals, The Call of the Wild. Released by the now-owned-by-Disney 20th Century Pictures, I have yet to see it, but I want to talk about how his all-animated films almost form a trilogy of sorts.
It’s interesting that Sanders’ animated features spawned sequels that he didn’t direct or have much of a role in. Outside of voicing Stitch in the direct-to-video Lilo & Stitch sequels and TV series, he had little to no involvement in any of those endeavors. His directing partner Dean DeBlois took over the How to Train Your Dragon sequels, while Sanders served as executive producer on both. Sanders was going to direct the sequel to The Croods with his directing partner on the first one, Kirk DeMicco. Their iteration of the film was shut down in fall 2016 following Comcast’s acquisition of DreamWorks Animation. The studio restarted the film under director Joel Crawford about a year later, but the finished picture does credit the story to Chris and Kirk. After all, it looks quite similar to the tiny scraps we’ve seen of the cancelled version. (A pencil test of a character that Kat Dennings was set to voice, done by none other than animation legend James Baxter, is one such morsel.) It appears that DreamWorks went through with the story that Chris and Kirk laid down, but it was too late to get them back because Chris immediately moved on to Call of the Wild, and Kirk took on Sony Animation’s forthcoming Vivo. I haven’t seen The Croods: A New Age yet. If we lived in a world with more responsible leaders and citizens who didn’t fret over simple steps to get around our current international problem, I and many others probably would’ve already safely seen this film by now… On top of not having to deal with everything ELSE going on, and not having to worry about spreading a deadly novel coronavirus that has already taken so many lives… But alas, I have to wait till it comes to VOD sometime later this month, so you’ll hear about that film from me by the end of the month.
Instead, I want to talk about the little thematic links between Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon, and The Croods. The Chris Sanders trilogy.
At first glance, the parallels are pretty obvious. All three have some form of human/creature friendships; whether it’s Lilo and her pet alien experiment, Hiccup and an elusive Night Fury dragon, or the Crood family and the critters they save during their survival. Guy already has a silly sloth companion, on top of that. The majority of the creatures in question are fantastical. Stitch was created by a race of aliens that look like sea creatures, and Stitch himself appears to be an amalgamation of various animals. How to Train Your Dragon, well obviously that movie is about cows. The Croods? The eclectic prehistoric wildlife are all unique hybrids, like the Macawnivore. From the looks of it, Chris certainly loves this kind of worldbuilding… But where Sanders goes right is in his ways of helping audiences inhabit these worlds and high concept settings, instead of showing them off without much reason or feeling.
Take this quote from The Look Back Machine podcast interview with Disney and DreamWorks long-timer John Sanford, who was the director of Disney Animation’s Home on the Range and director on multiple DWA television shows, including the Dragons spin-off series:
“Having worked with Chris on Lilo & Stitch… was really interesting because I’ve never seen animated movie developed this way before. He started with the two central characters and just kind of developed outward from there. All the plot, all the story came from the needs of those two characters, and where he wanted to go with them. But everything was character, character, character and relationships.”
John Sanford, The Look Back Machine, 2018
Certainly a night-and-day difference from how some animated movies are too over-plotted. Chris’ way of approaching the fantastical worlds and concepts from the characters first is fully on display in his two DreamWorks films. Lilo & Stitch by contrast largely takes place in our world, a town in Kauai specifically. The opening five-or-so minutes, however, are with the aliens in a massive spacecraft. All three of the stories are relatively simple in structure, and are not quite hampered by some doomsday scenario where something absolutely HAS to be done in a ludicrously short amount of time. Another thing that plagues a lot of animated stories that quite frankly don’t need them. Chris’ stories are very much “characters exist for 90 minutes.” Of the three, Lilo & Stitch‘s stakes are indeed the most immediate. Nani has to prove to a tough-as-nails social worker that she can raise her exceptionally strange younger sister. Things really kick in when Stitch’s brutish creator arrives, resulting in an incident that gets Nani fired from her job. In order to keep Lilo from being put into foster care, she must find a new job, but Stitch and his alien pursuers – who both don several human disguises – make that increasingly difficult for her.
As such, the film follows the day-to-day actions of the characters, instead of rushing through scenarios to get to the climax. This allows for character details, and for scenes of characters just having a moment or two together. As a result, the film earns its genuinely emotional moments. The film isn’t a string of set-pieces that then out-of-the-blue asks you to feel for characters for a quick minute. It is astounding how something running at maybe 80 minutes without the end credits factored in doesn’t feel like it’s rushing from plot point to plot point. That day where everything goes wrong just gradually arrives, and not too too much is happening before we get there.
How to Train Your Dragon, by contrast, takes place over a pretty lengthy period of time, and much of the film is… Ahem… About Hiccup training Toothless the Night Fury, and becoming pals with the beast in the process. A being he can connect with, because he has a hard time connecting with his own community. Hiccup’s Viking home of Berk values physical strength, as their inhabitants are regularly bothered by dragons. Much like Lilo & Stitch, Hiccup is befriending a creature that is one of his only friends, if not his only friend… a friend that should be hidden from other humans. For its conclusion, it takes a similar route to Lilo & Stitch. Where that film ended with Stitch and his former pursuers becoming a part of Lilo and Nani’s improved lives, this film ends with Berkians and dragons co-existing in peace. Before then, Hiccup can’t let his father (who believes his wife was killed by a dragon) or any other person in the village of Berk know about his bond with ostensibly scary dragons, those are the main stakes. Much of the film is just Hiccup being trained to fight dragons while caring for one secretly, while his father is off to destroy the source of the dragons. The big stakes kick in once Hiccup’s whole dual-life is exposed, and the climactic encounter with a gargantuan queen bee-esque dragon that every dragon on the island answers to.
Again, I want to point out that these two films were also directed by Dean DeBlois, and that The Croods didn’t re-pair Chris with Dean, but instead with Kirk DeMicco, who had been working on the caveman project since 2005. The Croods began life as Crood Awakening, a co-production with the brilliant British animation house Aardman, who had already successfully collaborated with DreamWorks on Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The latter of which, again, has rather muted stakes or at least doesn’t rush through its scant runtime. DeMicco, who had already worked on animated features such as Quest for Camelot and Casper’s Scare School, was writing the script with Monty Python alumnus John Cleese. Cleese, of course, had also voiced King Harold in the Shrek sequels. Their film was going to be about an inventor and a luddite on the run in a prehistoric world, but Aardman chose to split from DreamWorks after behind-the-scenes drama during the production of Flushed Away, which sadly bombed by early 2007. DreamWorks had first rights to the Crood Awakening story, thus they kept working on it after Aardman’s departure. From the get-go, this wasn’t Chris’ film. Neither was How to Train Your Dragon, though! When Sanders came to DreamWorks in 2006, following his exit from Walt Disney Animation Studios, he had inherited a film that Kirk and Cleese already did plenty of work on. (Cleese is credited in the final film, too.) Sanders was first attached to The Croods, until he took over How To Train Your Dragon from Peter Hasting in approximately 2008. Upon finishing up with Berk, Dean would handle the next dragon movie by himself, because it seems like Sanders really gravitated towards this prehistoric picture.
Certainly, the idea of an inventor dealing with a backwards uber-traditionalist wasn’t too far out of Sanders’ wheelhouse. His previous animated protagonists were very much their own: Lilo was an unabashed weirdo that many a neurodivergent like myself could relate to, and the “weak” Hiccup certainly saw past his village’s traditions and became so dedicated to such creatures. Dare I say dragons became his… Special interest? Much of this “inventor and luddite” idea is preserved in Guy and Grug, the family-less boy who knows his way around the wilderness and the overprotective father of the titular family. DeMicco’s stuff for sure, but Sanders is right at home with it. Much of The Croods is Grug being super-stubborn (and he’s not without reason) and even borderline unlikable, while Guy is just trying to show the way and genuinely tries to get along with this kooky family. The stakes are the earthquakes, the rumbles, the crumbles, so there is some immediacy there, but again… Sanders and DeMicco’s film doesn’t rush. The film can be a little frenetic in spots, but that arises more from fun situations (like animal encounters) than the impending danger of the “end of the world”. The Croods is mostly about survival, and how the family must adapt and evolve in order to get to a safe new home. All told with a pretty solid pace in less than 95 minutes.
It had been a long time since I had seen The Croods, and by long time I mean since opening weekend. In March 2013… 20-year-old me in spring 2013 was not the man I am today, while I did come out of the film satisfied, I felt something had been missing and that it was too little hyper for its own good. It didn’t help that I was super-insecure about the medium that I love, which was likely me projecting my own insecurities about my professionalism, my art, and my writing. Younger me thought that Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon mostly got it right, while this film was more regressive, trading what worked in Chris’ first two films for kiddie movie conventions and rather stock archetypes: Overprotective dad, daughter who is enthusiastic about something outside of tradition, etc. Maybe it was some animation tribalism going on as well. Me thinking that people were picking on Pixar and rushing to praise DreamWorks as better, because Pixar released a couple of movies at the time that weren’t utter perfection… Or better yet, some folks’ definition of what makes an animated movie “worthy”.
I’m older now, and we’re still living in the hell-year that is 2020. Well, hell-times I should say, because this all won’t magically go away on New Year’s Day. Anyone with a grip on reality knows that, I hope. I don’t have such rigid standards for animated features anymore and my outlook on these studios is much different. As an artist and writer, it’s laughable to expect them all to be Masterpiece Theatre or whatever; I can’t expect them all to be this one kind of “good”. A.k.a., the kind of “good” that makes them temporarily acceptable to “grown ups” who otherwise can’t be bothered with this kind of stuff. As a neurodivergent, I try to engage with the writing rather than say “this isn’t what animation should be. You need to do this in order to be acceptable!” Maybe back in 2013, I still wasn’t fully accepting of my autistic self. Nowadays, it’s refreshing to just see an animated feature being its unabashed self.
So with that, I re-watched the film and I now see that it more than stacks up nicely next to Sanders’ previous animated ventures. The Croods at heart is a fun spin on prehistoric times, and its characters are fun to hang out with as well. It is very much a Chris Sanders film, even if its design isn’t as Sanders as one would expect. Make no mistake, Sanders had almost complete say over Lilo & Stitch. It was his original idea, he had the roots to it as far back as 1985. Just by looking at that film, you know it’s his. Let’s also highlight the work of his closest collaborators on that film, too, like Byron Howard, whom designed many of the film’s characters. How to Train Your Dragon has a very Chris Sanders-looking Toothless, while the rest of the characters don’t necessarily have Sanders-esque designs. Some of his aesthetic makes it to The Croods.
And yet, both CG films are still visually as creative as ever, and distinct from one another. Berk is a compelling world, as is the world of The Croods. One leans more towards naturalistic epic fantasy, the other towards bright, colorful, extravagant, and cartoony. If an animated movie creates a world I’d love to live in, it did something right. Despite my very critical reaction to the movie in 2013, I was open to seeing a sequel and more of that world, and was even upset that DreamWorks briefly canned it in 2016. With Sanders not directing it, then we are left with a trilogy of films that share similar ideas.
Perhaps Chris’ greatest strength, and arguably the draw with all of his films, is his ability to balance the wonderfully weird with raw heart. Lilo & Stitch endures to this day not because of a mischievous blue alien that clashes heavily with many of the animals in the Disney house, but because it rings true in ways many big budget animated films don’t. Here we have a story about two sisters, both polar opposites, coping with the loss of their parents (NOT Frozen) and trying to stay together despite the harsh inevitability awaiting them. In the mix is a renegade alien running away from his eccentric creator. The alien is a little weirdo, his creator and his assistant are weirdos. Actually, Pleakley is interesting because he’s into Earth biology. His special interest. There’s lots of solid comic relief with these two characters, too. Two disparate tones that probably shouldn’t work when sandwiched together, but it mostly all does. How that film could balance those two things so deftly astounds me to this day, even if the third act does become a bit too conventional. The Croods by contrast isn’t as drama-heavy, but is nonetheless heartfelt and has an utter blast with its setting. It’s nice to see that family slowly but surely use their heads and navigate that rough, unpredictable world of nature. Sometimes its super-duper cartoony action can be a little exhausting, as it is Chris is in full mode here. How to Train Your Dragon isn’t as wacky as these two can be (it is a book adaptation after all), aiming for a more serious fantasy adventure vibe, but he’s still able to get some weirdo things into the proceedings. His films connect by knowing a fine balance between weird, wonder, and weep-worthy storytelling. Dean DeBlois curiously took the subsequent dragon films in an even more serious direction than Chris, and opted to end the trilogy on a rather downer note.
Of course, we also can’t leave out the film that Chris Sanders almost made at Walt Disney Animation Studios folwoing the release Lilo & Stitch… American Dog.
While Disney Feature Animation was in a far from ideal state in the early 2000s, Sanders and DeBlois were able to make Lilo & Stitch happen during that period. Under those circumstances. You would think that a more “filmmaker-friendly” Disney Feature Animation would’ve given us something grand from those two. Three years after Lilo & Stitch‘s summer 2002 release, the studio had been through a lot. Between executives being given too much say over the animated features, box office misfortunes, and the impending demise of the studio’s traditionally animated product, the place wasn’t thriving the way it was some ten years earlier. Former CEO Michael Eisner’s historic exit from The Walt Disney Company in September of 2005 led to an overhaul of the animation studio. Upon Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, another historic event, new faces were now in charge of Disney Animation by the middle of 2006. Out went all of the executives that barricaded the artists and creatives at virtually every turn, in came Pixar veterans John Lasseter and Ed Catmull.
In a move that shocked and shook the animation community, John Lasseter fired Chris Sanders from American Dog. The usual “creative differences” reasoning was thrown out, for it was alleged that Lasseter found the project to be “too quirky for its own good”, and it is known in some circles that Lasseter – due to his narrow idea of what a “good story” is – really disliked Lilo & Stitch. American Dog was given to Chris Williams and Byron Howard, and under Lasseter’s mandate, the dog story was hastily reinvented in order to make its penciled-in fall 2008 release. The released film, Bolt, bares little to no resemblance to what Sanders had envisioned, only retaining a few core ideas. Bolt, much like Henry in the original, is lead to believe that the TV show he stars in is actually happening. He meets a one-eyed cat and an oversized radioactive rabbit after he is plunged into the real world, they are looking for homes. In Bolt, Mittens the cat and Rhino the hamster are obviously the surrogates for those characters. Few have any idea how this picture would’ve been, though I was once told by a Disney effects animator that its storytelling was Sanders’ sensibilities run wild, almost similar to The Croods in execution. Only those who were there at the time would know. As you might know, The Croods didn’t earn the same critical love given to Sanders’ first two films, but looking at the film now… I wonder if that is due to some critics expecting all animated movies to live up to one nonexistent (read: Pixar) standard… Were those critics secretly John Lasseter moles? (Sarcasm note.) From everything I’ve read, Bolt does sound like it *is* American Dog, but completely stripped of anything really out-there or weird, anything Chris Sanders-esque, basically. Lasseter turned it into the kind of movie he specialized in at Pixar. That’s why people tend to remark that Bolt “feels a like a Pixar film”. As such, Bolt was critically acclaimed (around 88% of Rotten Tomatoes-counted critics gave it an approving grade, whereas The Croods hovered somewhere around 72% – but really, Rotten Tomatoes aggregates are meaningless), even hailed by some as a comeback for the once-struggling Walt Disney Animation Studios.
I hope in vain that one day, Disney releases more material from a project like American Dog. I do like Bolt a great deal, but like many animation lovers out there, I am genuinely curious to see what Sanders’ to-be sophomore Disney Animation effort would’ve been like. It seems like he was initially given free reign to really go hog-wild on this particular picture, but rigid new rules prevented it from moving forward. Lilo & Stitch was a very rare, entirely director-driven animated film made on the mainstream circuit in this millennium. So, American Dog… What does the cancelled film seem to have in common with these three other animated features? Obviously, Chris’ weird sensibilities are the first giveaway. It also looked to be a movie with its own unique pacing, again, characters just existing day by day. Bolt plays out much like this, no rush. Would it have been about a relatively normal character embracing weirdos and unlikely things? Maybe. Certainly, a one-eyed cat and a radioactive rabbit are something you don’t see every day. Was that story going to be about Henry the dog befriending those two against all odds? After all, Bolt has a similar scenario. The titular dog is so convinced that his TV show adventures are all actually real, that he is completely at odds with Mittens, and all is made more confusing by the fanboyish, similarly out-of-touch-with-reality Rhino. Rhino lives in a trailer park, while Mittens was abandoned by her owners, so there’s a little bit of that “looking for a home” element in the film. Bolt certainly is about two weirdos, and the one seemingly normal animal in-between. At the end, Mittens and Rhino are adopted by Bolt’s owner Penny. This brings me to the next link I see between Chris Sanders’ films… His three animated films are, in some way or another, about found family.
Lilo & Stitch is the most obvious example, given how that film ends. Nani, Lilo, Stitch… Plus David, Jumba, Pleakley, even Cobra. Everyone’s a big happy family at the end despite all the odds. In How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup and Stoick’s relationship is better plus he has an unlikely pet, and everyone in Berk is all about dragons. In The Croods, Grug changes for the better, the lonely survivor Guy is now part of the family, and a few animals were saved and adopted in the process. If American Dog was, at its core, like Bolt, then that looked to be a story about a TV star dog finding a family in two unlikely animal friends outside of his former pampered life. Then you might be asking me, “Have you ever read Chris Sanders’ comic Kiskaloo?” I actually never have! But one day I will get a copy of the paperback collection and catch up on that. From what I’ve seen of Kiskaloo, it looks like ideas that Sanders had for American Dog but reused with another one-eyed cat who also happened to be in showbiz. Sanders explained in a recent interview that the cat is indeed from the cancelled film, and that he actually negotiated with Lasseter to keep that character for his own future use. That comic format more than allows characters to exist without moving them along from plot point to plot point. Much like his feature films. Speaking of which, there were some rumblings not too long ago that the strip could be adapted into a movie, which would be very nice. If that happens, we would essentially get American Dog in the end, but without the dog and the Midwestern settings.
I could also highlight Chris Sanders’ contributions to Disney’s animated features in the early-to-mid 1990s before getting the opportunity to direct his own, but that is a whole other field. His three features, however, form what could be an intentional or accidental trilogy, regardless of whether he got to direct the follow-ups to these stories or not. To me, that’s far more interesting and I don’t usually see that applied to directors of animated movies…
