Tugger the movie started out as the story of a little studio that could start up after the collapse of Disney animation in Florida. It was the story of corporate sponsorship and local premieres… then it all fell apart. The Orlando Sentinel follows up on the story of Genesis Orlando Studios and their film Tugger: The Jeep 4×4 that wanted to Fly.
The sad tale of Tugger
- by Whit
Well, this is the first I’d heard of “Tugger” but, judging from the look of the images on the film’s website, I’m not surprised that the little jeep tanked. At the risk of sounding uncharitable, the fact is it is not very appealing character design. Considering that it is the work of former Disney artists, I am rather disappointed that this is the end result of their “dream”.
For starters, why is it that both this studio and the other unsuccessful one that was doing the film about the 4-leaf clover have chosen such unlikely characters for their first post-Disney efforts? The secret to the success of the Disney features was that they generally featured lead characters that were flesh and blood, either human or animal. How, pray tell, are animators supposed to get much mileage out of characters so inherently limited in their potential as a clover and a jeep? To be fair, I have the same complaint about Pixar’s “Cars”, but Pixar at least has a track record of animating far more organic characters so I can’t fault them too much for trying something different.
Seriously, why do these fledgling studios not spend more time on working up concepts that have more story and character potential, before forging ahead on such mediocre ideas? I hate to see animation studios go under like this but, really, can they not see that their own lack of creative vision is to blame? Just very sad…
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