Week #13? (I gotta little off because I had to go to NYC and put on a benefit) The Wale Carcass- Animated Feature or Comic Book

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. There was a dark room near the front where they played a series of short little 15 minute films about deep sea life. One of the features was about the whole ecosystem of life the develops over decades on a sunken whale carcass at the bottom of the sea.

The night before I’d watched the Pixar movie Ratatouille and although I found it perfectly charming I found myself wondering why it really needed to be animated. It seemed to me that, with the obvious exception of the anthropomorphic rats, the story and it’s narrative devices seemed pretty conventional. I thought it would be much more impressive to see animation move in new directions, not just get better at looking like other cinema, but to do new, substantially different things.

The next morning I saw the whale carcass video and it clicked. This could be a perfect project for animation. Imagine a movie or a maybe even a mini-series that told the tale of the rise and fall of this whole society that exists on the decomposing body of a whales’ body. In my mind this would be a story that starts with the death of the whale and ends with the last organisms either dying or having to migrate because there resources (The whale carcass) have run out.

I do think it the creatures in it should be slightly anthropomorphized but it should in no way be a kids story. More like a rise and fall of the Roman Empire but with different classes and races being portrayed by different species. There’s a lot of opportunity there to explore how close society and politics relate to the simple natural order of things.

I’m obviously not an animator or even much of a visual artist at all. I have no idea where you’d start with a project like this. I just thought of this and it seemed like a pretty cool idea so I decided to put it out there. If anyone knows an animator or anyone close to that feel free to send this to them. I suppose it could also be done as a comic book but this sort of thing is more common in that medium, it seems it would be a whole new thing for the world of animated features.