#foodfight!

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[duplexide]

I felt compelled to draw an X-O BYTE from... wait, these things were in FOODFIGHT!?

Yeah, despite being bizarrely out of place, everyone I know who's seen foodfight completely omits these mosquito-morphs and their "deservative" from their memory. Even the narrator in the trailer doesn't know WTF they are. However, regardless of the source material, their design is unironically sick as hell and deserves some recognition.

[they-have-the-same-va]

Master Xehanort in Kingdom Hearts III Re:MIND and Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory shares a voice actor with Mr. Clipboard from Foodfight.

Voiced by Christopher Lloyd

[nickshutter]

Foodfight! fans rise up

[katy-133]

‘Drawing For Nothing’ Is A Free, Updating Chronicle Of Canceled And Troubled Animated Films Full Of Artwork, Videos, And BTS Stories

Linked in this article by Jamie Lang on CartoonBrew

Drawing For Nothing direct link for the art of behind the scenes digital booklet.

The 12 titles included in the current version of Drawing for Nothing are:

Me and My Shadow (Dreamworks Animation) – Canceled

Foodfight! (Threshold Entertainment) – Released

B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations (Dreamworks Animation) – Canceled

The Incredible Mr. Limpet (Warner Bros.) – Canceled

Joe Jump (Walt Disney Animation Studios) – Canceled

Dreaming Machine (Mad House) – Canceled

Dragon’s Lair: The Legend (Sullivan Bluth Studios) – Canceled

Jack and Ben (Laika) – Canceled

Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (Al Brodax) – Canceled

Huck’s Landing (Tom Carter Productions) – Canceled

My Peoples (Walt Disney Animation Studios) – Canceled

Larrikins (Dreamworks Animation) – Canceled

The project is ongoing and has plans to update the pdf and booklet website with additional pages.

[the-acid-pear-art]

Food fight is truly one of the movies ever made

[charliesheendog]

ROTTEN: Behind the Foodfight

[i-have-spirit]

Foodfight! Fanart incoming doodle🤪

[agentsketchbookart]

Funny food furries

[jimintomystery]

Foodfight! (ugh)

I voted for Dex Dogtective in a poll the other day and it reminded me that I never actually watched that shitty Foodfight! movie from 2012. So I did. This was not a good idea.

There isn't a whole lot to say about Foodfight! that hasn't already been said. The project was in development hell for so long that it defaulted on its debt, and investors took over to at least get something out the door. The most obvious issue is the bad animation, though that speaks for itself.

But here's the thing: This movie could've had Pixar-quality animation and it'd still be hot garbage. "What if mascots for popular products lived in your local store?" is a middling idea at best, and the story mishandles it every step of the way.

It would be easy to say this movie needed a lot of popular corporate mascots to really work, and the best they could do was Charlie the Tuna and the Vlasic stork. But I remember thinking the first Toy Story wouldn't work without heavy hitters like Barbie and Lego, and yet they got along fine with just Mr. Potato Head and Etch-a-Sketch. Similarly, Wreck-It Ralph succeeded with a cast of skillful pastiches of familiar video game characters, and mere cameos by the big names. In theory Foodfight! could make up a cereal mascot that reminds you of Tony the Tiger while leaving room for changes to fit the plot. But in execution we get...Dex Dogtective.

Dex is the mascot for Cinnamon Sleuth cereal, and also a detective, and also a dog, and also he dresses like Indiana Jones, and also he likes raisins, and also he runs a nightclub like Rick Blaine in Casablanca. So he has like six different gimmicks, and the cereal mascot part is easily the least important. The only reason you'd even suspect Dex is a character from a box of cereal is because he's in a movie about brand mascots. Indeed, none of the characters created for this movie look like they were designed to sell anything, least of all groceries.

The strongest concept in the movie (which isn't saying much) is that the brands are facing an invasion by the evil Brand X. This makes sense, seeing as Brand X is by definition generic, with no iconic mascot except the pejorative and mysterious implications of that term. Listen, I know this sounds dumb, but you could do something with this. In a world of where brands come to life in the form of their mascots, who or what emerges from a brand without a mascot? How would such a being differ from the likes of, say, Count Chocula? Such a character might reject some fundamental principle that the good guys hold dear.

At this juncture, a sharper "secret lives of things that aren't alive" movie could make some insightful point that ties the story together. Something about how the world needs brand mascots, I suppose. But nobody actually needs brand mascots, for pete's sake, except for the people who came up with this movie. So there's no core idea for Brand X to oppose--the good guys' world exists just to exist, so the bad guys exist just to destroy it. With that baseline laziness established, Brand X paradoxically has lots of mascots, all of whom look like Nazis for some reason.

Well, okay, technically Brand X's leader, Lady X, looks less like a Nazi and more like the Baroness from Cobra. But it figures that she doesn't quite fit in with the rest, since she created Brand X! Yeah, so at the end it's revealed she was a mascot for a poorly-marketed brand of prunes, and when she was discontinued she went to Brazil (???) for plastic surgery (???) to make her all hot. Then she somehow amassed the resources in the real world to create Brand X, complete with a human-sized android (!!!) so she could pass herself off as a real person and sell her wares to stores.

Dex is astonished by this backstory, since the mascots are like three inches tall and can't even leave the store. Lady X explains the plot hole by saying "Humans! When you look like this you can get them to do anything. Size only counts for men."

"Size only counts for men."

"Size only counts for men."

(She's talking about fucking.)

(fucking)

(-ucking -ucking -king)

Anyway, I need a nap now. Please don't watch this movie.

[friedfestdonut]

Who else remembers Foodfight?

[emiemi345]

If every supermarket has more or less all the same brands, how many Dex Dogtectives are there??

[dracula-smokes-weed]

Drawing For Nothing is out!

Forgot to announce this here but the first ten chapters for Drawing For Nothing have been released! For those who missed the last post, this is a free, digital art book for animated films that were either canceled or bombed due to complicated issues.

https://www.drawingfornothing.com/

More chapters are to come. A few highlights in the next installation will be My Peoples and Larrikins.

Also, if anyone wants to help research, feel free to send a DM! We're also working on a new cover that will feature custom artwork of various characters from these movies. If you think you got what it takes to draw in the style of another artist, we would appreciate the help!

[foodfightnovelization]

ROTTEN: Behind The Foodfight

Holy chips! It's an exciting time to be a Foodfight! fan, because ROTTEN: Behind The Foodfight is finally out! This really is THE definitive documentary on the insanity behind the movie, and it finally answers the question of just what was going on behind the scenes during production. Since I helped out with research (and I even get a short line of dialogue at 45:19) I've already seen everything that was shown off, but had to keep quiet until all the interviews were conducted and the documentary was finished. But now it's out and everything has been made public, the cat's out of the bag (the Fat Cat Burglar?) and I can talk about all the production material that's been shared.

Before I get into any of that though, I'd highly recommend you watch the documentary for yourself. It's insanely well researched and put together, and having worked together with Ziggy Cashmere (the documentary's creator) I know how hard he dedicated himself towards making this all possible. If it weren't for him, the most interesting Foodfight! discovery would've been finding the novelization, and we would have never gotten any real insight into how this movie came to be. It's also a documentary that really speaks for itself- I don't want to say too much about what it reveals since it's all expressed far better through its narrative and the interviews with people who actually worked on the project. My favorite is the interview with texture artist Mona Weiss- she tells such horrifying stories about how she was treated by Larry and other crewmembers, yet does it all with a sense of humor that makes it clear she's enjoying getting to talk about her crazy experiences. It's clear Foodfight! was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, and there's nobody to blame for that but Larry Kasanoff himself. The movie was rotten from the top down and despite the countless talented animators and artists working on it, nothing could fix the fact that it was fundamentally mismanaged in the worst way possible. I think the quote from producer George Johnsen summarizes it best: "Foodfight! was a good idea that unfortunately lost its way during production. The technology, the art, and the direction were not in sync. Many very talented people gave their all to make the picture, but more understanding of process from the top was needed for it to succeed."

But if you saw the documentary, you already know all that, right? So instead, let's talk about the behind-the-scenes material that's finally been shared! You can find everything I'll talking about HERE on archive.org-

It's worth following the link and checking it out for yourself- there's so much it'd impossible to discuss everything. Artwork, storyboards, bloopers, models, a nude render of Lady X, an interview with Larry Kasanoff, the list goes on and it's still being updated! Despite the documentary already being out, people who worked on the movie are continuing to share new material! It's pretty incredible- for the past year I've ran this blog all I've really had to discuss are two tie-in books, and now there's so much Foodfight! material I can't even keep up with it.

I mean LOOK at all this, isn't it fantastic? The character art by Jim George showing off just how much better these designs originally were, the countless environments showing off just how stunning Marketropolis could've looked as well as the strength of the core idea "what if a supermarket came to life at night", and insanely detailed storyboards for a 7-minute pitch reel that was used to sell the movie to investors. Normally, I'd be ALL OVER this because it's all just incredible, but there's something far, FAR more fascinating than any of it.

There are even multiple drafts of the script (one from 2005 and one from 2007 respectively) and normally I'd be insanely fascinated by those too, making extremely detailed posts explaining the differences between the drafts and how they compare to the novelization, but there's something else that was found that blows ALL of this out of the water and is easily one of the most monumental lost media discoveries of ALL TIME.

That's right, a rough cut of the ENTIRE movie from 2005 has been found, containing nearly ALL the completed animation from earlier on in production. I mean, that's mindblowing right? We first got sent this around a month ago, a little while before the documentary came out, and I literally stopped everything I was doing at work to just sit and watch this. This is the closest we're ever going to get to the "original" version of Foodfight! after all- only 7 minutes of footage was ever actually made before they switched to mocap, made solely for the aforementioned pitch reel, and this workprint contains practically all of it! On top of that there are some great storyboards in here, as well as some truly hilarious ones cobbled together from 3D renders, and the plot is far better than what we ended up with, a lot of the more inappropriate jokes being absent. This rough cut is actually pretty similar to the novelization in that regard, and it also contains scenes that we'd previously only read about in there.

For example, in the novelization there's a snowmobile chase through the mountains, with Brand X soldiers on snowmobiles and a heavy avalanche close behind. This scene was completely left out of the movie itself, but in this workprint it's here! ALL the previously novelization-exclusive scenes are included, and this rough cut is seemingly based on an even earlier draft of the script than that- here Brand X are still defeated by a flood, whereas by the time of the novelization it'd been changed to a lightning storm. There are SO many exciting differences in this workprint, the snippets of original animation we get to see are SO good, and it's SO much better than the movie itself that I think it by far deserves the crown as the DEFINITIVE version of Foodfight! There's so much in it I want to discuss, that there's no way I can fit it all into this one post...so stay tuned, because in the next few days I'll be doing a FULL analysis of the 2005 workprint, pointing out all the extra brand mascots not in the finished film, and generally just gushing about how amazing it is.

I mean, this is it. Just take it all in for a second- the original footage was considered lost media for over a decade, and now it's practically been found in its entirety, embedded in an early cut of the whole movie...isn't that just phenomenal? All the mysteries have been unraveled, all the questions have been answered, and now we can relax, take a deep breath, and watch Foodfight!...the REAL Foodfight! Make sure to enjoy it, and join me next time for my analysis!

[factual-fantasy]

Would ya'll think less of me if I told you I unironically enjoyed watching Foodfight-

I mean- I watched Jontron and Microwave Society watch it and freak out over how bad it was. And since its on YouTube for free I figured why not give it a go? And yeah they were mostly right- the movie has a lot of issues besides just the terrible animation quality XD

But I wanna give credit where credit is due. Some of the stupid jokes made me laugh, some of the character dynamics were nice too. A few of em had fun personalities and they were fun to draw in my style. Sooo I give the movie a number out of 10, I'll probably watch it again XD

[charliesheendog]

Foodfight! Investor Workprint

This workprint, dated August 5th, 2005, was created early in the second phase of Foodfight's production when they were slowly converting to motion capture. Due to investors demanding to see an early cut of the film, Larry Kasanoff had a portion of the team cobble together this workprint using storyboards specifically drawn or composited for it. Many boards are quite rough, using renders spliced together with stock photos. This was due to time constraints on the storyboard artist. Before this, there were no storyboards for the movie except for the first 7 minutes, which were drawn when Dex was a human being and were for the demo reel. This was because Larry did not understand the point of storyboards and felt that they were not needed during production. At this time, there were no lines recorded for the cast, they were in the beginning stages of recording motion capture, there was nothing to show investors. This is just a bunch of storyboards stitched in with some animation from the demo reel that was done in 2001, which was made years before motion capture was even considered. This was specifically made just to show investors and was of no use to the team. Foodfight didn't even have enough material to put together a workprint (if they even made one) until at least 2007.