Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland - Production

Production

Nemo was the brainchild of producer Yutaka Fujioka. His dream for years had been to make a full-animated film that would utilize the resources of his Tokyo Movie Shinsha studio. As the first step towards realizing this project, in 1977 he personally flew to Monterey, California to convince McCay's descendents to allow him to obtain the film rights to the comic strip. He originally approached George Lucas in a year later to help produce the film, but Lucas found problems with the storyline. Fujioka also approached Chuck Jones but also declined. The film was officially announced as a project in 1982. In February of that year, the company TMS/Kinetographics was formed in America to produce Nemo, and the best staff from around the world were gathered together to begin production. Gary Kurtz was appointed producer of the American production side and hired Ray Bradbury and later Edward Summer to write screenplays. Kurtz would eventually step down in the fall of 1984.

In the early 1980s, both Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata were involved with the film, but they both left due to creative differences, essentially, Miyazaki was not keen on the thought of an animated film created by him where everything was a dream, and Takahata was more interested in creating a story depicting Nemo's growth as a boy. Miyazaki later described his involvement on the film as "the worst experience of his professional career." The directors who succeeded the duo were Andy Gaskill and Yoshifumi Kondo whom both exited production in March 1985 after completing a 70mm pilot film. Osamu Dezaki was also brought into direct at a brief point and too completed a pilot film, but left as well. A third pilot film was made by Sadao Tsukioka but has yet to become publicly available.

Brad Bird and Jerry Rees also worked on the film through the American department as animators for a month, while at the time were also working on an un-produced adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit with Gary Kurtz. During production, the two would regularly ask animators what they were doing, the response they were commonly given was "we're just illustrating what Bradbury is writing," upon meeting Bradbury in person and asking him about the story he was writing for the film, he replied "I'm just putting in writing what these wonderful artists are drawing." After their meeting with Bradbury, Bird and Rees looked at each other and both said "uh-ohhh."

When all of these people had left, Fujioka had drafts done by Chris Columbus, Moebius, John Canemaker and many others. He then re-hired Summer to do yet another screenplay. Subsequently, Richard Outten was hired to work from Chris Columbus' screenplay while Columbus was busy with his directorial debut, Adventures in Babysitting. Many Disney Studio animators including Ken Anderson and Leo Salkin worked on individual sequences, and John Canemaker, Corny Cole, and Brian Froud provided visual development. Frank Thomas, Oliver Johnston, and Paul Julian consulted to the production. The world famous Sherman Brothers (Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman) were hired to write the songs for Nemo. This was their first anime film, though not their first animated film; the pair had previously worked on several projects for Disney, including The Jungle Book, and Hanna-Barbera's Charlotte's Web.

Little production progress was made until January 1988, when the many ideas pasted on the walls of the Los Angeles studio were whittled down in order to create the storyboard from which the film would be made. It was at this point that Masami Hata (a former Sanrio film director) was the appointed director at the TMS studio and Frank and Ollie recommended William T. Hurtz as the director of the American production side. Actual animation for the completed film was commenced in June 1988, as TMS was just completing another ambitious project: Akira. Even though it derived from an American comic strip, Little Nemo was animated by the Japanese company Tokyo Movie Shinsha and thus was considered anime. Because of this, it was also the first anime to receive a national release in the United States.