Storyboard - Jumping for Joy

While we were starting to hone in on our story, we looked at the gags and tried to determine what our monkey would be able to use.  There's a guiding principle in animation that Walt Disney called the plausible impossible.  If you do something in a cartoon  that is physically impossible, the audience will believe it to be plausible if there is a degree of truth behind it.  When you ride in an elevator your body does not squish when you start moving up, but you feel like it does, so for a cartoon character it will.

While Wile E. Coyote is not trying to escape the desert, but rather just trying to catch the roadrunner, we suspend disbelief in his unwavering devotion to the ACME company and the equipment he gets from them.  Our monkey Hank, however, is waiting on this island to be picked up, so it would not make sense for him to have ACME crates dropped on the island.  We felt it would be more plausible to have him use items from the island and his space capsule instead.

Storyboard - Eww, Bugs!

At one point these boards were used to introduce the other two monkeys (native to the island) to our audience, but in truth the real heart of this scene is showing that our protagonist monkey (whom we named Hank) was rejecting natural instinct in favor of his more sophisticated training.  We introduced the other two unnamed monkeys earlier, but this was the first time that the audience would see that Hank was aware of the other monkeys.

Storyboard - A New Direction for the Monkey

After our mentor from Disney asked the golden question about the monkey's inability to climb the tree, we looked hard at the story and all the work we had poured into this project, to see what worked.

One of the artists on my team had drawn up boards that had the monkey's attempts to get the bananas thwarted at every turn by an "evil cosmonaut monkey."  This became the spark that lead us to the best solution.  Our monkey was going to be a space chimp whose space capsule landed in the ocean, and floated to the island waiting to be retrieved by NASA.  While waiting our hungry monkey would have his adventure on the island.

The final solution as to why the monkey didn't just climb the tree actually came from an anecdote from one of our CG modelers.  He had worked for a major computer company in their tech support call center.  When people would call in, he would go through his standard procedures to try and diagnose the problems that they were having, and when each question would not help he would dig deeper into his knowledge base to try and find a solution, only to have the customer eventually realize that their computer wasn't even turned on (or plugged in).

He wasn't thinking of the easiest solutions because he had been trained not to.  We figured that a monkey who has lived and trained at NASA all its life would be the same way.

We were watching a lot of Chuck Jones cartoons to inspire us, and I came up with this gag that we really liked.

Storyboard - The Original Ending

When we were doing the original boards for the monkey film, this was the ending that we envisioned.

The idea that the laughter was coming from a group of school children while our protagonist was unwittingly living in a zoo had shades of the movie The Truman Show.  I always loved this ending and the potential surprise factor, but our story took a dramatic change when our mentoring professional story artist posed the simple question: why doesn't the monkey climb up the tree and get the banana?

This one question drastically altered the direction of our story, and while it was for the better, we lost some really great gags like this one.

More Storyboards

As I said in my last post, our monkey film underwent several transitions and gags while in development.  During the earlier days, the monkey's failed attempts would result in laughter that appeared to come from a couple of birds.  When I was drawing boards I started having the monkey use these birds in some of his attempts, which resulted in the following boards.

My friend who was working as a story artist at Disney loved this gag, and it is one of my favorites from the film as well.  Unfortunately it was also one of the first to go when the story changed direction.  Sometimes your favorite material has to be cut when it is not the best for the overall story, and this was one of the casualties.

Storyboard - Monkey Gag Tree Breaking

During my tenure at school, our senior project was an animated short film that unfortunately languished in development-hell for the three semesters that we worked on it.  In the semester prior to ours, the screenplay writing class students wrote a 7 minute short cartoon for their final project, and we would sort through the 4 best scripts to choose one for our film.  The script that won was a story about a monkey trying to get bananas out of a tree.  The writer intended for it to be a fast-paced Wile E. Coyote style cartoon, though the story needed a lot of work.

I was put in charge of the story team, and we went to work.  Our early story had the protagonist monkey failing to get the bananas, and hearing laughter that he presumed to be coming from a trio of birds at every failure.  As I will show, this story evolved a great deal, but this is one of the early scenes I boarded.

In this scene our protagonist tries edging out on a branch to the bananas, only to have disaster (and in my opinion, only luke-warm laughter) befall him.  It should be easy to tell why this gag was abandoned, but some of the drawings worked.

More to come very soon.