Lost Films - Disney's American Dog

Disclaimer: I could be wrong on some details. So take this with a grain of salt.

So originally I wasn't going to do another one of these until April for Sam Raimi's unmade Spider-Man 4 but I was bored so I decided screw it let's do another Lost Films only this time I'll be talking about an incomplete 2007 Disney animated film called American Dog.

Part One - The Plot

The story would have been a dog actor named Henry who stars in his own action show where he is a secret agent. While filming another episode for his show one of the stunts go wrong and Henry blacks out. He then would have woken up on train in the Nevada desert 2000 miles away from home. Henry then has to make new friends to get him. The new friends would have been a one-eyed cat and a giant radioactive rabbit. While on this adventure Henry still would have thought he was on TV.

Part Two - Downfall

The ultimate downfall to this film was Disney though this was "too surreal and too bold". Before that even happened in 2006 after John Lasseter became Chief Creative Officer at Disney Animation he attended two screenings of this movie and gave Chris Sanders(the writer and director) some notes on how the story could be improved. Now according to John he was replaced because he was very stubborn to some of the changes both he and other directors suggested. Lasseter was evening quoted to say "Chris Sanders is extremely talented, but he couldn't take it to the place it had to be".

Part Three - From American Dog to Bolt

After Chris Sanders was removed from the project he was replaced with Chris Williams and Byron Howard. The original title was removed and the animation team was giving eighteen months to complete the film instead of the usual four years that is what it normally takes to make a 3D animated film. So then the story and character designs were reworked into 2008's Bolt. Also in honor of American Dog Chris Sanders used the one-eyed cat with the eye patch in his webcomic Kiskaloo.

Part Four - Concept Art & Test Footage

Concept art can be easily viewed just by typing in Disney American Dog in Google images. You can also very test footage which was shown at SIGGRAPH in 2005.

Here's a link http://vimeo.com/91895271