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Michel Gagné Unveils The First Trailer For ‘The Saga Of Rex,’ A Solo Hand-Drawn Feature 14 Years In The Making
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After 14 years of painstaking, almost entirely solo production, Michel Gagné has finally released the epic first trailer for The Saga of Rex, a 60-minute hand-drawn feature that he created, designed, directed, and animated largely by himself.
The only other person to contribute to the film’s visuals was a single inbetweener, his friend Seung Kim. Throughout its lengthy production, he continued taking select jobs on major Hollywood films, using that work to help finance the independent project and further develop his filmmaking skills.
Gagné boasts an absolutely ridiculous resume, including effects work on Don Bluth productions such as An American Tail, The Land Before Time, and All Dogs Go to Heaven, and several standout ’90s live-action and hybrid features like Space Jam, Mortal Kombat, and Demolition Man. He served as an effects animator and supervisor on The Iron Giant, headed 2D effects on Osmosis Jones, and created the celebrated taste visualizations in Pixar’s Ratatouille. His other credits include Star Wars: Clone Wars, Brave, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Brad Bird’s upcoming Skydance feature Ray Gunn. Gagné also co-created and directed the video game Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, which won BAFTA and Annie Awards.
The Rex character first appeared in Gagné’s self-published 1998 book A Search for Meaning: The Story of Rex. The character later featured in Kazu Kibuishi’s Flight anthology before Image Comics collected the complete story as a graphic novel in 2010. Gagné began developing an animated adaptation following a successful 2012 Kickstarter campaign. Belgian studio Grid Animation subsequently optioned the film, but the rights reverted to Gagné in 2018.
“I wanted to make the film that was in my soul,” said Gagné, a BAFTA and Annie Award-winning filmmaker whose credits span more than 25 features. “To do that, I needed to remove the commercial and transactional aspects of the process.”
Final sound work is now underway, with completion targeted for the end of 2026. Festival screenings and wider release plans are expected to follow in 2027.
