Animal Crackers, a cg family film by first-time feature director Scott Christian Sava and veteran Tony Bancroft, has premiered on Netflix. The fact that it has reached our screens at all is newsworthy.
Why did the film take so long to become available? Because the film has been stuck in distribution limbo for three years. The production, which ran from 2014 to 2017, went over budget, embroiling Sava in financial deals that he struggled to honor. These problems complicated efforts to secure a distributor, and he eventually lost control of the film to an investor, who sold the global rights to Netflix. The saga is recounted in a report by Variety.
So Netflix didn’t produce the film? No. The film was a passion project for Sava, who based the story on a comic he’d written for his sons. Over time, the film secured $19.5 million from investors in Seattle, South Korea, and China. In 2014, the Tennessean reported that he had received offers from Warner Bros., Disney, DreamWorks, Sony, and Harvey Weinstein. None came to pass, and Sava produced the film through his Nashville, Tennessee-based Blue Dream Studios, with the animation done in Spain at a subsidiary of the studio.
