Apr 15, 2015

Long Lost Pencil Test Trailer for Brad Bird's "Spirit" Reveals

“Spirit” presentation art drawn by Jerry Rees. (via)

Previously presumed lost to time, the black and white pencil test trailer for Brad Bird's long-gestating but unrealized project The Spirit, dating back to the early 1980s, has emerged from suspended animation and found its way onto YouTube at last.

Animation publicist-turned-producer Steven Paul Leiva uploaded the video yesterday, encouraged by a journalist writing about the Spirit saga for Italian-language website Fumettologica and acknowledging it as “a small piece of animation history.”

Bird and his fellow ex-CalArts students had produced the test over five months. Leiva first saw it in 1980; you can see it now.

Leiva mentioned the pencil test in his 2008 piece about the ill-fated project for the L.A. Times. (The VHS was in deep storage until relatively recently.) In the piece, he recounted the attempts of Brad Bird, John Lasseter, John Musker, Jerry Rees, himself, and others to get Will Eisner's comic book vigilante onto the screen in what he believed would have been a groundbreaking animated feature film and “possibly the first $100 million-grossing animated feature.”

In an interview in 2005, three years before Frank Miller's stylized live-action The Spirit flopped at the box office, Bird described his enthusiasm for the source material.

Bird regretfully acknowledged that The Spirit's time had probably passed, however, after the wake of CG.

UPDATE: Andrea Fiamma, the Italian journalist who sparked the hunt for this trailer, shares this message from animator Jerry Rees about the trailer: