Any proper discussion about Scott Christian Sava’s debut animated feature, Animal Crackers, includes multiple elephants in the proverbial room.

The first is the title, which Sava is acutely aware is the same as a certain comedy classic, though he rightfully isn’t worried about the overlap. Titles aren’t copyrighted and the other film in question has been around so long that it’ll enter the public domain in 2026.

“Animal crackers is a generic term, like hamburgers or pizza,” he says. “But, also, the Marx Brothers movie was 90 years ago.”

The other pachyderms worth addressing include the literal one that the film’s protagonist Owen turns into when he eats the titular snack — one of many magical beast-shaped cookies in a secret box that’s the key to Buffalo Bob’s Animal Circus’ success — and, perhaps most importantly, why a film with Pixar-level vocal talent took three years from wrapping production to its July 24 debut on Netflix.

Digital roots

While majoring in Illustration at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, Sava interned at SEGA of America, where he worked on 16-bit video games and learned animation skills. After graduating in 1991, he embarked upon a 10-year career in the video game industry, eventually working for Atari Games, and also designed Star Trek, Mortal Kombat, and other covers for Malibu Comics in Los Angeles.

Also during that time, he got his first animation job as the lead animator for Stretch in Casper: A Spirited Beginning (1997) and Casper Meets Wendy (1998), which led to work on Power Rangers and video games for the X-Files and Predator series.

“This is in the mid-to-late ’90s, so there wasn’t a lot of CGI animation outside of, like, an [Industrial Light & Magic]. Pixar was just starting out, so there was a lot of work that people needed and the talent pool was very low,” Sava says. “There was no animation training. I was just learning on the job, coming from illustration, doing some video games stuff, and then going and doing that.”

By 1999, Sava was getting enough work to start his own company, which he dubbed Blue Dream Studios, and in 2002 achieved his childhood dream of working on a run of Spider-Man comics. But once he and his wife became parents to twins boys, they moved outside of Nashville to Franklin, Tenn., and Sava started writing books for his sons. He’s now had over 10 works published, which have caught the attention of several major studios.

“Disney, Fox, MTV, Nickelodeon — they would all option the rights to the different books, and then a few years later, I would get the rights back. It would just sit in development hell and nothing would happen,” Sava says. “Then, in maybe 2012, I just decided I was tired of this cycle. And, you know, you say those stupid things: ‘Well, we should just do this ourselves!’ And it just became that.”

Follow the money

At the time, the Savas were struggling financially, with their house in foreclosure and barely getting by on food stamps. To help him fully focus on raising money to get a film made, Sava’s wife went back to work while he took care of the kids, tried to make connections, and wrote more books and screenplays to generate enough substance to attract an investor.

Through a friend of a friend of a friend, he met none other than Harvey Weinstein, who was looking for family-friendly content. Having just made the animated alien film Escape from Planet Earth, the producer passed on Sava’s screenplay for the E.T.-esque Ed's Terrestrials, but perked up when Sava described Animal Crackers, which was originally written as an animated/live-action hybrid in the vein of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

“He goes, ‘That’s what I want — but I can’t do anything with it with your name. You’re nobody. I need some big names attached,’” Sava says. “So, I went out and I called my friend Tony Bancroft, who directed Mulan, and said, ‘Would you attach your name to the film?’ He said, ‘Sure!’ I called another guy I had met named Dean Lorey who’d written [for] Arrested Development. ‘Would you attach your name?’ He goes, ‘No problem!’”

With those famous folks on board, Weinstein then requested an animated short to show his company. Sava called his friend and animation colleague Jaime Maestro in Valencia, Spain, and convinced him to take on the sizable undertaking. Weinstein liked the result, greenlit the feature, and asked Sava to meet him the following week in Spain to see Maestro’s studio. Scraping together roughly $5,000 from various family members for last-minute tickets and new clothes, Sava made the trip — only to be stood up.

Taking another flight to Spain wasn’t an option, and the Weinstein relationship soon fizzled, but Sava persevered and spent two years trying to find the funds. Eventually, through what he calls some combination of blind luck and providence — during which he worked relationships to the extent that he had 12 degrees of separation between one particular investor — the funds started to pile up.

“Everyone got a little bit of money, everybody got a credit. I was giving out producer credits like candy on Halloween,” Sava says. “We went to a couple of meetings out in Los Angeles, I met with the Chinese investors, and one day went from food stamps to $10 million in our bank account. We suddenly had money and my wife was able to quit her job and she came and she ran the whole production. And then we had to go get a cast.”

Assembling the (vocal) crew

Working with an overall budget typically seen on direct-to-DVD animated features, Sava knew he had enough money for one big name and planned to round out the rest of the cast with professional voice actors. His ideal get was Ian McKellen, whom he’d had in mind while writing the story’s villain, Horatio P. Huntington. But in case that didn’t work out, the film’s casting director sent the script to various agencies, hoping to get Sylvester Stallone for stunt expert Bullet-Man or Danny DeVito for Chesterfield the clown as backups.

Within weeks, McKellen had signed on, word of which spread to Stallone, DeVito, Raven-Symoné, Patrick Warburton, Wallace Shawn, Harvey Fierstein, and Gilbert Gottfried — all of whom wanted to take part. In order to afford these talents, Sava got more funds from his investors, but still didn’t have anyone to play the two leads, Owen and Zoe.

“My casting director says, ‘I’m gonna run a name by you: John Krasinski.’ I said, ‘Never heard of him.’ It was 2014 and I had never seen The Office,” Sava says. “So he tells me about him and I say, ‘OK, sounds good. I trust you.’”

Out in LA to meet the cast, Sava and Krasinski became fast friends. One day, the two were talking in the sound stage, just before Krasinski was set to leave, and he told Sava how much his wife loved the script. Unfamiliar with whom Krasinski was married to, Sava acknowledged the compliment and walked off, but the casting director, having overheard the conversation, burst into the room and asked Krasinski if his significant other would be willing to be in the film. Expressing his confusion at the offer and assuming Mrs. Krasinski was a non-actor, Sava was promptly told to shut up by the casting director. Krasinski then sent a text to his wife, and, a few minutes later, the request was accepted.

“And that’s how Emily Blunt came on,” Sava says. “That was their first time working together. It was amazing. We had them in the room together and they were rewriting stuff. She was laughing so much, we just kept most of it in because it was so cute. And he was making her laugh so much and she was making him laugh and they were just talking over each other and arguing — it was so adorable.”

The improvised parts — including the driving scene just before Owen turns into a hamster, his first such transformation — impressed Sava and Bancroft so much that they went back to the storyboards and redid the animation to accommodate their unscripted gold. Sava says the couple’s spontaneity “changed the whole dynamic of the film,” prompting him and Lorey to tweak Sava’s original script of a guy who inherits a circus to one with more of a family focus, rooted in an equitable partnership that Sava says mirrors his own marriage.

“It was something that Tony and I…I don’t want to say we argued about it, but Tony comes from Disney, so he kept talking to me about the hero’s journey: ‘The audience isn’t going to understand you. You’ve got too many people playing too many parts in this movie doing too many things.’ And I’m saying, ‘But it’s a family,’” Sava says. “And I don’t know if it works in the film or not, but that was what I was trying to do, was to say, ‘Everybody’s got a backstory.’ I might be better suited for TV where I get a little more time to fill out some of that stuff — but it was my first movie and I’m learning, you know?”

Sava notes that while both Lorey and Bancroft mentored him throughout the filmmaking process, they were quick to stress that Animal Crackers was his film and that he had the final say. Sometimes he took their advice, other times he didn’t. “And so whenever anybody doesn’t like anything, I usually say, ‘Well, that’s the time I didn’t take their advice,’” Sava says.

One final step

Along the way, Sava got to fly to London to see McKellan; New York City to work with Shawn, Fierstein, Gottfried; and LA to hang with DeVito and others from the cast. And the most recent time he’s seen Blunt and Krasinski was in London when they recorded at legendary Pinewood Studios right before she was going to film Mary Poppins Returns.

But following what he calls the “super high high of making a movie” and signing a deal with a studio at the end of 2016, Sava was stunned when the studio went bankrupt and had no intention of paying him — and, in turn, his trusted investors. After going through “some legal channels,” he eventually got the film back and wound up going to another studio — who, six months later, went under. Then he went to a third studio, which sat on Animal Crackers for 14 months.

“What I found was the larger studios who make animated films for $200 million a pop, they have the money. They know what they’re doing. They spend 5-6 years making these movies. They put another $100 million into marketing them, but they know they’re going to make $400-500 million. They’re going to make a billion dollars. So, they have this formula. And every once in a while, you get a Good Dinosaur that doesn’t make their money back, but for the most part, they’re good,” Sava says.

“Well, none of those studios want to buy an independent film because we did it for a tenth of their budget. So, it doesn’t look good for them — it completely takes away the justification for the high salaries and the long lead times and everything else. So, the only thing we could do was go to smaller studios who wanted into the animation game. The problem is the smaller studios don’t have the marketing budget. They can’t market something that big, because to be in a theater, you have to spend $30-40 million, and they just couldn’t raise the money.”

But during those frustrating months, streaming services increasingly became a desired destination for original content. Sava says Netflix knew about Animal Crackers all along, but wasn’t in the animation game until 2019 when Disney+ came out and the original streaming giant decided to make a push in that direction. Netflix approached Sava’s sales agent during the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and though the rep wasn’t selling the film at the time, negotiations began. With 200 million subscribers, the prospect of signing with the leading company in the business offered the possibility of connecting with a far larger audience than Sava would experience via a theatrical release, and, in December 2019, he delivered the film.

“Netflix just writes the investors a check — “Here you go!” — there’s no worrying about doing well in the box office, because we only get 50% from the theaters. There’s no worrying about, ‘Well, first we have to pay back the marking money.’ So, the investors are very happy because they get their money back really quickly and there’s really no risk,” Sava says.

“There’s a little disappointment that we are just one of 100 movies that come out this month from Netflix. There’s no marketing — I’m doing all the marketing. That’s the only downside is you are part of a very large machine. But we couldn’t be happier that our film’s coming out and people are planning on their kids seeing it.”

Sava feels that having a summer release is a fantastic perk to the deal — especially with a dearth of quality animated features in 2020 — and hopes that his intended child audience enjoys it. He says his expectations with adult film critics aren’t high, and though he feels that the film’s third act, starting when Owen eats his first animal cracker, is especially strong, he understands if viewers have quibbles with its opening stretch.

“We had talked about editing it, and we really wanted to, but Netflix just said, ‘Nope!’ What you’re seeing is like a director’s cut — it’s every shot we ever animated. We never got a chance to edit it. Tony and I, we would have cut out maybe 15-20 minutes of that film, mostly at the beginning, just to tighten it up and speed things along just to get you to that point because, really, the chemistry with John and Emily is what I felt sells it,” Sava says, adding that the production only had enough funding to make roughly one out of 10 changes to the animation.

“I want to get to that part sooner, but again, with me, I love the backstory. I love giving you something because I feel like the third act pays off because of the first act. We went through that. There were studio execs who’d say, ‘The beginning is a bit long.’ ‘OK, well, we’ll edit it.’ We haven’t heard that from kids yet, but these are the lessons that we’re going to learn, and hope I can take those into the next film — if I ever get to make a second film.”

As for the next step, Sava has an Animal Crackers sequel written, plus adaptations of his books Pet Robots, My Grandparents are Secret Agents, Ed’s Terrestrials, and Cameron and His Dinosaurs. But he feels like it was “such a fluke getting that first $10 million,” that, combined with not knowing people with money and being very much an introvert, he’s unsure if the opportunity will arise again.

“It’d be like me trying to get into Major League Baseball or something like that,” he says. “I really don’t have any pedigree, so I would have to somehow find a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy — but we’ll see. I’d love to.”

Photo of Sava and Ian McKellen courtesy of Blue Dream Studios