What Might Have Been Where the Wild Things Are

The trailer for Spike Jonze's live adaptation of the children's book Where the Wild Things Are recently was released. I stumbled upon a bit of info about Disney's attempt at adapting this film into an animated feature in the 80's. At this time, Tron had recently been made and the use of computer graphics were being toyed around with to create a complete animated feature film. The characters were going to be 2D traditionally hand drawn with the backgrounds being rendered in 3D. John Lasseter directed this test shot below. I'm not sure if Disney was actually going to make this into a film, but I know Lasseter wanted this demo to be a means to an ends to create The Brave Little Toaster to look like this. Disney animators apparently didn't like it, Lasseter got fired, and The Brave Little Toaster ended up completely 2D. It's crazy that all this was part of the history that led Lasseter to create Pixar.

Here's the Disney test shot, the Max character looks like one of the Lost Boys from Peter Pan:


If you forgot the story, here's a reading w/ animations of the books pictures:


Here's the trailer for Jonze's film, not sure how a 20 page book turns into a feature film: