I’m glad the film has had three thousand five hundred views and its got five stars. No controversy its enjoyable. These student films go unseen. We need friends of Chris Moeller to urge him to put The Bunny Must Die on the Dark Bunny website or YouTube before all the oxide on his old video tape falls off.

I agree the story is sufficiently altered where even if Stevie hadn’t built a great career with Disney that she might not win a lawsuit. In my poll 2/3rds gave Pixar a passing grade But just in my opinion knowing Pixar was at the producers show in 93 I was pretty shocked not to see Stevies name in the credits for this film when I saw Monster’s Inc. It was four years before I could ask her about it. And another five years before I posted the comparison and poll in the Rotten Tomatoes forum.

My main point here is its not right to lay the blame at Stevie’s feet. I find the comparison inescapable because of the staging and players. How the birds hop and the big bird swings about like a sack of sand. And how he is a big gawky bird trying to ‘fit in’ with the little birds. I have seen Ralph Eggleston’s sketch and would be interested to see his original storyboards which date back to 85. But his ink sketch only resembles the one part of the film which I think was hugely changed from Small Fry.

Someone suggested I was pointing the finger at Eggleston which I was not. If I was pointing it anywhere it was at whomever attended the Producer’s show. I also need to mention that I have been writing in Rottentomatoes for seven years and have logged 30,000 posts. I have never had anything I have written become an article outside the forum before. And I tried to limit viewing to forum members but the private feature in You Tube was unworkable for members. No one could see it so I had to open it up.

Stevie is obviously more than talented enough and was back then to do all her work herself. And as students we all got a huge amount of animation help from Larry White. No one was shortchanged by Larry. He was the most dedicated, sacrificing and effective teachers at Cal Arts that year by far. Credit also needs to go to Ken Bruce and Alex Topete who wasn’t even on staff but was a huge friend to all the students. There wasnt grousing about their relationship til Stevie won the producer’s show. I hate to see that tempest in a teapot stirred up.
My fault again.

Stevie’s second film Nessie shows she was not only a talented animator but great with story. And she was hired at Disney for story rather than as an animator as I understand it.

Yeah, that’s absolutely true that Stevie did some work on “The Princess & the Frog” , but you’re leaving out several significant items on her recent resume: she co-directed (with creative partner Kevin Deters) two short animated films for Disney , “How to Hook Up your Home Theater” and “The Ballad of Nessie” , as well as co-directing the half-hour animated Christmas special “Prep & Landing” which aired this past Christmas on ABC-TV.

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/shorts/for-the-birds-controversy.html