In the States, animated projects tend to be massively collaborative projects. I mean, all of film tends to be collaborative in nature, but animated movies tend to be the even more collaborative than most, with the story itself often being broken down into storyboards by artists who help shape it beat-by-beat. But, at some point, these projects had to resonate with an individual. In order to even reach the storyboard stage, someone had to see some real potential.

Later this month, DreamWorks will be releasing the film Abominable, a story about a family of kids and a lovable Yeti they have to help escape to his home. Watching the trailer, it’s clear that the heart lies in the lead character and her relationship with the creature, but how did this all start?

LRM Online’s own Nancy Tapia had a chance to attend a roundtable for the film with its director Jill Culton, and over the course of the discussions, the question that inevitably came about revolved around her initial inspiration for the film — and it was really very simple.

“When I went to DreamWorks, a lot of times with directors, they’ll pitch a bunch of movies that are in development and sometimes they have a script and sometimes they don’t. And the one that resonated with me was that they wanted a Yeti movie and that was it. And so I got the blank canvas to write the movie and direct it, which is not a small thing. You know I don’t take that lightly. That was a great privilege. And so creating this movie, I think the things that really were exciting for me is that, I went home and I googled ‘Yeti’ and there’s not much that can be said about them. We know they kind of are fabled to live on Mount Everest and that we’ve all seen the footprints in the snow, but there was nothing about them. So I realized I had the opportunity to create the lore of the Yeti and what they could do and give them things like the power to control nature and this magical home.”

But, of course, if it was just a blank concept, that wouldn’t necessarily make the entire film. Part of the movie is the lead character, Yi, and her relationship with the Yeti, and it’s that aspect that deeply resonated with Culton.

“The other thing I was really excited about is to create a female lead character who was strong and stubborn and had a mind of her own and someone who could really drive this movie, but who was also flawed, sometimes leaps before she looks and gets in trouble for it. A true tomboy who even dresses like one. And the reason I was excited about that, cause that was me growing up. I grew up in Ventura, California, which is a little beach town, surfing, skateboarding. I threw on clothes in the morning, never looked in the mirror once and wasn’t ever really aware of what I looked like or what a girl was supposed to look like. But I grew up on princess movies and so there was nothing that I could really relate to as a role model. And so it was really important to me to create the role model I wish I had had growing up.”

Abominable hits theaters on September 27, 2019!

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SOURCE: LRM Online