#marc haimes

MAKING KUBO PART 4: WRITING

January 2012

Deals were signed. Kubo was optioned by Laika and Marc Haimes and I began working on turning the fairy tale of Kubo into a cinematic story. Since Kubo was conceived as a fairy tale and inspired by the rich history of Japanese folktales in particular, I thought it would be cool if we honored that storytelling tradition and began the story with an invocation. As if a storyteller were sharing Kubo’s story with the audience. Inviting and challenging us to participate.

Marc thought about it for a few days and returned with these simple words:

“If you must blink, do it now…”

Simple. Elegant. I LOVED it. (If you can have a Marc Haimes on your team. I highly recommend it. Pure genius.)

Marc and I dove into the story, meeting three days a week to share inspirations and ideas. Pulling from my personal history with my family, Japanese art and folktales and our own imaginations to create a detailed treatment that would respectfully honor those sacred things while creating an entertaining narrative for an audience.

Because we were in LA, we worked in relative isolation. The folks at Laika gave us a lot of trust, allowing us to really crack the story with occasional updates to assure them that we were actually working.

Simultaneously, I had enlisted the help of good friend, Andy Schuhler, to help create illustrations for the treatment. Good visuals, in my experience, are always a tasty addition to a well told story.

April 2012

We delivered the illustrated treatment in April of 2012, waiting anxiously for thoughts and notes from the CEO and head of development. They read it. Loved it … and gave us some notes. We addressed those notes quickly and were approved to go to draft.

Writing is NEVER easy. Story is NEVER easy. But, if you have a strong structure to build on, it makes things easier. For the next few months, Marc and I continued to work, using the treatment as our guide, to develop/ write the script.

August 2012

By July of that year, I had moved my family up to Oregon, flying back to LA occasionally to work with Marc on the script. Again, I knew I wanted to deliver images with the written story.  Something that packed a punch when we delivered the first draft. So, I created a HUGE 17’ foot long character lineup that told the story of  ACT 1. Next, I hired my lovely wife, Megan (Brain) Tindle to create our first origami character and (as mentioned earlier) worked with Daniel Hashimoto to storyboard and create an animatic for the film’s prologue.

We delivered that draft in August, along with the lineup, the beautiful paper sculpture and an After Effects animatic that Daniel had actually output in 3D. It began with,”If you must blink, do it now…” the first scene of the film playing for a very small group at Laika. It went over REALLY well.

We got a round of notes on the 1st draft. Delivered a rewrite in October of 2012 and a few weeks later, we began storyboarding Kubo and the Two Strings. Little did we know, production would begin in less than a year.

KUBO: IT ALL STARTS WITH AN IDEA… AND THEN GETS BIGGER

*If you haven’t read my other posts about the conception of KUBO, please scroll down:)

Ideas are very personal. As shared in a previous post, the story of KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS is no exception. Inspired by my wife’s relationship with her mother and the beauty of Japanese folktales, I put pen to paper 15 years ago and started to jot down ideas.

Once I had the initial concept in place, i picked away at it for years until I felt it was ready to go from something private to something shared. It had evolved from a small, poetic fairy tale to an epic journey. In other words, it was ready to pitch to the big boys.

In considering what might be the best home for Kubo, I immediately thought of Laika. I’d worked on Coraline in 2006 and had a feeling they might be get the tone I was going for with Kubo. 

So, after a few emails, a dinner pitch was on the books to share Kubo’s story with the folks from Laika at the Tam O’Shanter in Los Angeles. Walt Disney often met here with his story artists so it seemed an appropriate venue to pitch a film idea. I huddled into a tiny booth with the head of production, the head of development and the CEO, and pitched two ideas. Kubo was one of them and in one of those rare occasions, I could tell they liked it immediately. I finished the pitch (and my Yorkshire pudding) we shook hands, and went our separate ways. I sent them a copy of my original story and two weeks later, we began negotiations for an option. Great. Fine. Easy. Right?

Not really. The hard work was about to come… writing the script for Kubo.

If Kubo was born in my heart and mind, he grew up at Hugo’s restaurant in Studio City. That’s when Marc Haimes and I began working on the script. It was February, 2012, I had a cup of coffee, an almond energy pancake and the REAL work began.

More to come…