It all started one afternoon with a pack of cookies.
Franklin's Scott Sava was playing with his children more than a decade ago when he decided to use Animal Crackers as more than a snack.
"I came up with the idea you become a giraffe or a lion, or whatever it is you ate, and we played around the rest of the day like that," Sava said. "Maybe a few weeks later, I started writing a children’s graphic novel."
After some tinkering and getting the idea in front of the right pair of eyes, Sava and his wife, Donna, restructured the story as a script for a movie named after the pack of cookies. Netflix will premiere the children's animated flick "Animal Crackers" July 24.
"It will be seen by potentially 200 million people in 100 something languages," Donna Sava said. "It’s very exciting and it’s bittersweet for us because of all the stuff we've went through to get here, and we still have the scars but it’s exciting to see it. We are trying to stay positive."
After distribution issues and the 2008 Recession, seeing the work come to fruition became a labor of love.
Saving a circus
A-list actors from "The Lord of the Rings," "The Office" and "Girl on the Train" came together to make the voices of the movie come to life.
Directed by Tony Bancroft ("Mulan"), he and Sava created a magical box of animal crackers at the core of the movie.
Only there's a catch.
The box must be used to save a failing circus from an evil family member, Horatio P. Huntington played by Ian McKellen. Like Sava's game, when characters eat an animal out of the box, they become that creature, as the trailer shows one character evolving into a small gerbil and landing on his smartphone.
With that, Owen — voiced by John Krasinski — and Zoe — played by Emily Blunt — face challenges in bringing back the animals to the circus and making the experience magical to audience members.
Raven-Symoné, Danny DeVito and Sylvester Stallone voice other characters in the movie as the circus finds its path forward.
What it took to create
Getting to this month's release date was anything but easy for the Sava family.
At one point, the family was working several jobs and trying to fight out of debt from a contract that left them without payment during the height of the Great Recession.
Their house was close to foreclosure and their car had been repossessed.
But as luck would have it, an overseas investor saw their pitch and believed in it.
"You go from food stamps to a million dollars in your bank account," Donna Sava said. "It was crazy to think we could do that. We were crawling out of the hole. We were paying off all the debt, but then we had the opportunity to do something people only dream about doing."
In total, the movie filmed on an $11 million budget, and the couple imagined it would go directly to DVD. But three different distributor deals fell through, leaving the movie in purgatory.
The Savas and Bancroft recollected the rights to the movie after the failed contracts.
Then in 2019, Netflix came calling.
"It was a relief, and we worked so hard and put our heart and soul into this," Sava said. "We thought make it would be hard with investors and turned out the distribution was the biggest part. Now, we are already hoping for a sequel."
Emily West is a reporter for The Tennessean, covering Franklin and Williamson County. Follow her on Twitter at @emwest22 and email her at erwest@tennessean.com.
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July 24, 2020 at 05:02PM
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Franklin couple unveils children's movie 'Animal Crackers' on Netflix - Tennessean
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