Yes, Roel was the one who presented the stop motion film at SDCC a couple years back. Unfortunately, I'd take the year of silence since the original post to not be a good sign.Spam Musubi #7 wrote:Is this for the Usagi Claymation film that was shown at Comicon a couple of years ago? Not a rich man but would be willing to contribute to a Usagi Movie Kickstarter campaign. Wish you the best.
- Spam
While I love stop motion animation, sadly the box office hasn't been too kind to these sorts of films in recent years, so potential investors would likely be put off by that aspect. Even Fantastic Mr. Fox, with big name director Wes Anderson and an established story from popular author Roald Dahl, ended up losing money at the box office. Even once home video is taken into account, that movie likely ended up losing money. Coraline (one of the biggest stop motion releases in recent years) may have barely broken even at the box office and only turned a real profit on home video, the same for Frankenweenie (even with Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas pedigree), ParaNorman (may not have ever achieved profitability, even with home video), Boxtrolls, and The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Over the past decade, the only ones that were certainly financial successes are Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (hey, maybe rabbits are a good box office investment!) and...uhhhh...that's it. (I'm not sure about Corpse Bride or Shaun the Sheep, as budget numbers weren't published, but I'd guess that Corpse Bride may have broken even while Shaun the Sheep lost money.)
It seems that anymore, full CGI movies tend to do the best business, but they require large up front investment and -as much as we love Usagi- a samurai rabbit is probably a tough sell for these people that prefer risk adverse, established film brands (which is why we see so many sequels). Big names like Pixar, Disney, Sony, and Dreamworks can get people to their original CGI movies based entirely off of their studio name recognition, but unless Usagi were to get picked up by one of these big 4, I don't see a CGI movie getting made. Pixar aside, most of these movies rely on cute, humorous sidekicks and pop culture based humor, both of which don't really fit the Usagi brand. I'd love to be wrong about all this, but reality leads me to believe this is the situation.
