Terrible Ideas File: Steven Spielberg Wanted To Do Harry Potter Series As A Cartoon

We're just a few weeks away from the penultimate chapter of the Harry Potter film series being released, and there are oodles upon oodles of stories being written about the making the movies in the last ten years. Most of it is "oh didn't we have a grand time" nostalgia, but there's glimpse of frightening alternate universe in these articles: a universe where Steven Spielberg directed an animated Harry Potter movie, a movie that would combine books into one single feature. Yikes!

The Los Angeles Times reports that, in the making of the first film, Dreamworks Studios offered to partner up in the production of the film and Steven Spielberg offered to direct it. Says Warner Bros. head Alan Horn:

One of the notions of Dreamworks' and Steven's was, "Let's combine a couple of the books, let's make it animated," and that was because of the [visual effects and] Pixar had demonstrated that animated movies could be extremely successful. Because of the wizardry involved, they were very effects-laden. So I don't blame them. But I did not want to combine the movies, and I wanted it to be live action.

Let us all now praise Alan Horn for not only preserving his revenue stream, but also understanding there were fundamentals to the Harry Potter story that could not be rushed, chopped, or otherwise pureed into a different form. Of course, Horn also let terrible director Chris Columbus take the reins, so let's not praise him too much.

With this news and the old rumor that Spielberg wanted to Americanize Harry Potter by either setting it in America or casting an American boy in the lead role, it's incredible to think how an otherwise great director can fundamentally misunderstand a story and a character. You Americanize Harry Potter and he's no longer Harry Potter. You staple-gun different stories from different books together and it no longer has the graceful, artfully-planned unraveling that the author intended.

Last night I happened to do a double-feature of E.T. and A.I. (the film Spielberg would do once he was out of the running for Harry Potter), and both of them are great, great films with two of the best child performances in history, and I happened to idly wonder how nice it would've been if he had directed the first Harry Potter and managed to get an actual performance from the kids, rather than the talking mannequins that Chris Columbus gave us. But it seems like the Harry Potter world dodged a bullet once Spielberg left the building.

· Steven Spielberg wanted to make 'Harry Potter' an animated franchise [LAT]