The Big Picture
- DreamWorks Animation’s Australian musical film Larrkins was ultimately cancelled and written off as a tax write-off.
- The cancellation was a result of new management and changes in the studio’s focus on franchises and sequels.
- Despite the cancellation, the legacy of Larrkins lives on through leaked footage and the creation of the short film “Bilby.”
In the 1980s, America became fascinated with everything Australian. Everything from tunes like “Down Under” to big movie stars like Mel Gibson (born in New York but raised in Australia and broke out in that country’s cinema scene) to hit movies like Crocodile Dundee was obsessed with this country. Then, suddenly, this fascination with Australia stopped. The land of Koalas and Kangaroos went back to being just another continent to Americans. In an alternate timeline, a second wave of that fascination would have emerged with the release of the DreamWorks Animation feature Larrkins, which would have been set in the Australian Outback.
With a title derived from an Australian term for a rebellious young person, Larrkins would have chronicled the exploits of a little blue bilby who finds himself caught up in a grand adventure across the Australian outback. The feature would have been helmed by DreamWorks Animation veteran Chris Miller (who previously helmed titles like Puss in Boots for the studio) and a newbie to the company, acclaimed songwriter Tim Minchin. Being an Australian native, Minchin had a personal connection to Larrkins and that premise had attracted a murderer’s row of Australian voice talent, including Hugh Jackman, Margot Robbie, Ben Mendelsohn, Jacki Weaver, and Rose Byrne. Despite so much talent lined up for the project, Larrkins would be shelved and become a tax write-off just a little over a year before its planned February 2018 premiere.
What happened here exactly? Why did this Australian musical fail to come to life as originally planned?
The Early Days of ‘Larrkins’
The first major news item about Larrkins emerged in June 2013, a little under five years before the film’s planned February 2018 release. Animated films take so long to make and Larrkins was no exception. This initial news concerned Minchin coming aboard to write the songs for Larrkins, which would be an incredibly rare original musical from DreamWorks Animation. While the studio’s initial two hand-drawn animated titles The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado were musicals, DreamWorks had abandoned such titles in the 21st century. This was the studio responsible for Shrek which lampooned traditional musicals. Times were changing, though, and DreamWorks was eager to branch out into new things, especially as it ramped up its annual slate of features.
In the early 2010s, DreamWorks Animation, at the time a rare totally independent production company making big-budget theatrical movies, was aiming to bolster up its slate to deliver as many as four films a year. Among those initial ambitions was another big original musical from DreamWorks, Kevin Lima’s Mumbai Musical. With annual production increasing so significantly, DreamWorks was now planning to embrace genres it had previously deemed unsuitable for the DreamWorks brand. By June 2014, the studio did another slew of release date announcements and revealed that Larrkins was aiming for a February 2018 bow.
At the start of the following year, though, DreamWorks Animation had to come clean and be open about the need for the studio to undergo some changes. Three years earlier, DreamWorks had harbored grand ambitions about doing four annual films hot off the heels of delivering four films over two years that each grossed $490+ million globally. By January 2015, the studio had experienced a string of box office duds like Turbo, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and even the franchise title The Penguins of Madagascar. DreamWorks was looking to reduce its annual output significantly and would now be outsourcing animation for certain movies to outside studios for the first time. A new era was dawning, but at that moment, it looked like Larrkins would be part of the proceedings.
In June 2016, a major update for Larrkins emerged in the form of a star-studded voice cast getting announced for the project. The likes of Hugh Jackman and Margot Robbie (among many others) would now be headlining this project. This news dropped just a few weeks after the major development that Comcast (parent company of Universal Pictures) would be purchasing DreamWorks Animation. The independent days of this studio were now history. DreamWorks would quickly transform into another brand in the Universal library. Larrkins had already survived one seismic evolution of the DreamWorks Animation brand…all eyes were on this title to see if it could survive another.
The Death of “Larrkins”
When new management takes over a movie studio, previously existing projects often have a tough go of it. The new leadership wants to put their stamp on the institution they spent a lot of cash for, not support projects they have no connection to. This phenomenon seemed to occur at DreamWorks Animation, which quickly shuffled several projects into development hell. Kevin Lima, the director of Monkeys of Mumbai (the final title of Mumbai Musical) would later reveal in December 2017 that his title was one of several DreamWorks Animation movies that had been shelved once Universal took over DreamWorks. The titles were not just put on the back burner, though, they were treated as as tax write-offs, which made it exceedingly expensive to try and get rival studios to revive these projects. In hindsight, Larrkins was also one of those titles DreamWorks wrote off once Universal brass took over.
Once DreamWorks got picked up by Universal, its new studio home quickly recentered the outfit to have a franchise-first focus that amplified the sequel-heavy tendencies DreamWorks Animation had always engaged in. While the second DreamWorks title released by Universal was the original feature Abominable, that was a low-budget exception to Universal’s new norms for DreamWorks. Out of the initial eight DreamWorks Animation movies launched by Universal, six were either sequels or spin-offs to older titles in the studio’s library and one of those non-sequels (The Bad Guys) was an adaptation of a popular children’s book. A completely original production like Larrkins did not fit the new standards for what constituted a “proper” DreamWorks title under Universal ownership.
One interesting thing about the demise of Larrkins compared to other canceled DreamWorks Animation projects from the mid-2010s, though, was the notoriety of one of its directors. While the filmmakers behind B.O.O. and Monkeys of Mumbai are well-known in the animation industry, they are not exactly household names who are constantly showing up at buzzy events. Larrkins director/composer Tim Minchin, meanwhile, is a super famous person who is always getting interviewed. This level of prominence has ensured that Minchin has repeatedly opened up about his understandable pain over seeing years of effort put into Larrkins flushed down the drain. Minchin announced the project’s demise with an emotionally raw post on his blog in March 2017 while in 2020, Minchin revealed the movie was 75% finished when it was shut down.
He further divulged in this interview that Hans Zimmer (a fixture of DreamWorks titles) was composing the score and that the assessment of Larrkins by Illumination head Chris Meledandri (a massive figure in Universal’s animation exploits) proved a key factor in the feature’s demise. Minchin also tragically revealed that a slew of other companies (like Netflix and Animal Logic) wanted to purchase the production and pick it up, but that Universal made it financially unfeasible for the movie to be revived by another outfit. Minchin’s media exploits have allowed a fascinating window into the tragic demise of Larrkins, but that surely does not erase the pain the artists behind this movie feel seeing all their work come to such a ridiculous end.
The Unexpected Legacy of Larrkins
Larrkins has been gathering dust in a Universal vault for many years now, yet the ripple effects of the project continue to revibrate. Tim Minchin eventually got to utilize his vocal talents in a computer-animated movie set in Australia with the 2021 Netflix feature Back to the Outback while he has stayed plenty busy as a lyricist and singer. That Outback movie was written and helmed by Harry Cripps, an artist who produced the initial idea for Larrkins. His DreamWorks Animation film had not panned out, but at least he got a CG film set in the outback made somewhere. Key actors in the project like Hugh Jackman and Margot Robbie have, of course, had no trouble securing work as actors while the film’s other director, Chris Miller, is now helming a Smurfs project for Paramount Animation.
As for the legacy elements related to Larrkins specifically, the fact that this project was so close to completion before it was shut down has ensured that there is lots of shockingly finished footage that has been leaked out to the public over the years. Such clips give a general impression over how the voices of actors like Jackman and Robbie would have looked like coming out of kangaroos and dingos, though most of Minchin’s musical numbers have been locked in a vault and have not been heard by the public as of this article. The level of completed material that’s emerged for Larrkins has inspired a small fan movement to get the movie finished and released, but the issues Minchin brought up previously about Universal’s tax write-off practices make that potential outcome nearly impossible.
The most interesting legacy item related to Larrkins, though, is the 2018 short film Bilby. This short’s three directors all worked together on Larrkins and, per a Cartoon Brew interview with Bilby director JP Sans, developed a good enough rapport that they wanted to keep on working together. Once they got the chance to direct a short film as a trio, the group opted to make a brand-new plot utilizing the plucky tiny blue lead character and certain assets from Larrkins. Though it was radically different form than a feature film and, thanks to it being a silent short, devoid of any of the star-studded actors once attached to Larrkins, Bilby did allow this unfinished movie’s universe to get seen by some kind of audience. It was an unexpected end for a project that Minchin once spoke about with such passion. In 2014, Minchin noted to The Sydney Morning Herald that he was living out a dream getting to realize a big animated musical and that “these things can stop, but right now it seems to be going” regarding the development of Larrkins. Tragically, the entire production of Larrkins did stop in the most dramatic of ways, but at least subsequent projects like Bilby and Back to the Outback have allowed flickers of Larrkins to get released to the public.
Bilby is available on Peacock in the U.S.
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