This production is officially 'troubled'
From www.animationnation.com:
posted December 19, 2002 07:40 PM by Strawberry
i'm an animator on Li'l Pimp.
yes, the test screening was a spectacular failure. word has it over half the audience got up and left halfway through, followed by a sony marketing exec.
the screening wouldn't have been a failure if the movie itself wasn't a massive failure - TWICE over. This movie was put into production in april of 2001, with an unfinished script, and it quickly fell apart and the crew was put on hiatus in november. the script was put back into the grinder & reworked.
at this point you'd think that after Revolution (the production studio - Sony is the distributor) had sunk a few million into 7 1/2 months of worthless labor, the production team would have tried something different - you know, actually finishing the script before putting the film back into production.
you'd think.
but animation executives don't, and production again ramped up in april of 2002 with a full crew, an unfinished script, and an unfinished storyboard.
poor management combined with a complete lack of passion and vision on the part of the creative team made the movie weak. creative executives made it weaker. the cronish hag of a producer (a true dinosaur of animation management who had also helped ruin films at Warner Bros. & Disney), riddled the film with song and dance numbers. The top floor executives then thought it would be cool to add some x-treme fight sequences, and proceeded to steal scenes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Iron Monkey, Blade II, & various jackie chan films. very inappropriate to the overall feel of the movie - made a bad thing even worse.
all the while, the script was constantly being rewritten. scenes came and went. i'd finish a shot & it would magically reappear on someone else's desk months later because they changed the dialogue, or because they wanted this instead of that. we were constantly given scenes that weren't ready to be animated, poorly set up or with temp dialogue.
i could go on about the film itself - racist & sexist, borderline mysoginistic. blacks are portrayed as one dimensional sodomites, the humor isn't tongue in cheek or witty. it's written by a couple of cracker morons from colorado who haven't talked to a black person in their lives.
you know what the test audience liked though? those who stayed long enough to get a response card thought the animation looked nice.
so we did our job, did it well, and were rewarded with a nice round of christmas layoffs. over half of the crew was let go this week, a skeleton crew staying behind to collect a few more paychecks, because the script is again going into rewrites & the possibility of a full shutdown looms.
but the dumbass producer's staying. and the dumbass production manager is staying. and the dumbass assistant production manager is staying. the dumbass creative team is staying. basically everyone on the management side who fcked this movie up (or is utterly useless) is staying.
so i'm part of the skeleton crew, & i'm writing this from my workstation. it's been an incredibly stereotypical animation production - perhaps to exaggerated proportions. i mean, at least disney can get their films out the door. it was amazing to watch all the sht go down that i heard about in school & from my employed friends, and especially looking back at the "articles that started this" here on AN. nothing has changed since then. it's gotten much, much worse. monkey boy can't evolve or change, he can only degrade.
the crew was as good as the movie is bad though. great people, some real talent scattered throughout. plus i've had a steady paycheck since july, moved out of my parents house, got a nice one bedroom in west LA & a nice girl to join me in that bedroom, so all in all it's been a rewarding & educational experience.
that's it, i'm done, i've gotta get out of this place, it's way past quittin' time. peace, and KEEP CREATING, it's the only way we can stop this kind of travesty from happening again!