American Dog was a cancelled CGI animated film written and directed by Chris Sanders. A quirky road movie following a talking actor dog's journey across America with an one-eyed cat and a giant rabbit, the project ended up running into friction thanks to corporate shakeup by new ceo Bob Iger and the Pixar acquisition with the new regime headed by John Lasseter and other Disney executives for its unusual story and characters not being "mainstream" enough, despite the film having been put into development as the result of the similarly offbeat Lilo & Stitch finding great success for the studio. Sanders was replaced by Chris Williams and Byron Howard (who in a twist of fate, worked with Sanders on Lilo And Stitch), and the film was rewritten and retitled Bolt.
The Project was conceived in 2002 when Chris Sanders and his partner Dean DeBlois signed a development deal with Disney, under Nina Jacobson, the project Which was then untitled as a co-production with Disney Feature Animation and Stormcoast Pictures, a company founded by Sanders and Deblois. The deal which will produce each project, and the deal allows each to come aboard the other’s project in a writing capacity.
In 2005, the deal is still going strong with Chris Sanders making the cgi animated film entitled American Dog for Disney Feature Animation while Dean Deblois is making the live action ghost film The Banshee And Fin Magee, and the thriller The Lighthouse for Touchstone Pictures with producer Andrew Gunn all under the Stormcoast banner.
The film's plot for American Dog told the story of a dog named Henry, a famous TV star, who one day finds himself stranded in the Nevada desert with a testy, one-eyed cat and an oversized, radioactive rabbit who are themselves searching for new homes, all the while believing he is still on television[1] and stumbling into adventures in this real world more bizarre then his fiction. Characters along this journey included a helpful Las Vegas waitress named Jo Knight, a retired Georgia circus performer with a pet knife-throwing gorilla known as the Woman in Black and an undead girl scout named Ruthie who served as the film's primary antagonist.
In June 2006, after becoming Chief Creative Officer at Disney Animation, John Lasseter along with other directors from Pixar and Disney attended two screenings of the film and gave Sanders notes on how to improve the story.[2][3] In June 2007, Sanders was removed from the project and replaced by Chris Williams and Byron Howard. According to Lasseter, Sanders was replaced because he resisted the changes that Lasseter and the other directors had suggested. Lasseter was quoted as saying "Chris Sanders is extremely talented, but he couldn't take it to the place it had to be." And Disney announced that the film, now titled Bolt, would be released on November 21, 2008 in Disney Digital 3-D.[4] In October 2008, after Sanders left the Disney Studio for Dreamworks and the original title was removed, the animation team was told to complete the filming in 18 months instead of the usual four years that is normally required to produce a computer-animated feature.[5]
