Rustboy is the name of the animated film project, which was never finished nor released to the public. The indie project was conceived by Brian Taylor, an illustrator with a very impressive professional background stretching back decades.
Rustboy was in the works at the beginning of the 2000’s and it was meant to be a short film that was written, designed and produced by Brian Taylor. With the high anticipation from Brian’s fanbase, there were numerous research partners involved in the project. To mention one, Brian partnered with a company that on a regular basis researches the best & safest US online casinos and provides their finding to the readers. There was even a website dedicated to the animated feature, which is, however, no longer active.
We decided to dig deeper into the mystery of this peculiar animated film that was not given the chance to captivate the audience, but which is still talked about by fans of Brian Taylor and by other people who highly anticipated the movie.
Who is Brian Taylor
Brian Taylor is an illustrator based in Dundee, Scotland. He is also known as his alias Candykiller and runs a website under that name where he posts his impressive art pieces, most of which are based on famous science fiction novels and movies such as Bladerunner (1982) and Alien (1972).
According to this website, Taylor has more than forty years of experience in the sphere of traditional illustration, although he now mainly produces digital illustrations. Taylor’s works are an example of hyper-realistic art that blurs the lines between painting and photography.
Taylor had no experience in animation, as he confesses, but he felt passionate about the project known as Rustboy. As you all know by the topic of this website, the movie never came out, but we have a little preview on which we will attempt to tell you more about Taylor’s original idea.
Rustboy – The Film Itself
Due to the lack of information surrounding this project, we cannot tell you for sure how much of it was filmed before it was eventually dropped by the people working on it. The only piece of empirical evidence we have of it is a video, posted by Brian Taylor himself, which was allegedly the opening sequence of the now famous Rustboy.
The sequence starts with a medieval castle (judging by the architecture) in the forefront during a stormy night. The castle is animated simplistically with few textures, while the background is in the hyper-realist style with the moon likely being a photograph.
This resembles the style of the famous Carton Network’s production Courage the Cowardly Dog (1999-2002) with its animated house in the middle of nowhere on the backdrop of surrealist skies. The overall art style of Rustboy reminds of yet another cult classic – Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009), which however didn’t come out until many years later.
We should also talk about the impressive CGI of Rustboy. Remember, the year is 2001 and their budget is only a milli-fraction of those of other heavily-CGI productions such as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999). Indeed, the creative team behind Rustboy is still being praised for their immaculate job even today with fans and other creators wondering how they were able to pull it off back in the early 2000’s.
According to our research, Brian Taylor used the now obsolete 3D computer graphics program Infini-D to create the memorable visuals that we see in Rustboy. Although Infini-D does not exist anymore, the company partnered with Ray Dream Studio to create Carrara, which might be better known to our readers.
Digital creators nowadays still fawn over this gem of a program, which was surprisingly not even among the most popular graphics programs of its time. They frame it as a story of an underappreciated underdog. However, some wonder whether it was Infini-D’s complex software or Taylor’s mastery of art that created the spectacular CGI of Rustboy.
Looking at this opening sequence, we see multiple textures in almost every single frame. The clouds are seemingly moving as if one looks at the real sky outside. The objects, on the other hand, look full and realistic as if you can touch them. Perhaps one of the most impressive CGI features of the opening is the so-called volumetric lighting, commonly known as “God Rays”.
This is a 3D computer graphics technique, which creates beams of light shining across the environment. In Rustboy, we see this in on two occasions – when the sun starts shining and then at the very last shot with light emitting from the mysterious door.
There are cool CG effects that Taylor utilised in the production. For example, there is motion blur, which is a streaking of moving objects as seen in the clouds in Rustboy. There are also light flares and glows to be seen throughout the opening when light interacts with the interior of the castle.
Last but not least, we want to turn the attention to the shadowing in the film, which could only be possible due to Taylor’s long experience in traditional illustration. To be fair, even contemporary films sometimes disappoint us with their shadowing and they have tools that Taylor couldn’t even have imagined to use back in the early to mid 2000’s.
Next, let’s talk about the music score written by composer Erik Nickerson. It creates tension and complements the mood of the initial focus (the castle and the storm). The camera zooms into the castle and gives us some beautiful details such as the delicate raindrops falling on the window, which overlooks one of the castle’s towers in a fantastic work of artistic perspective.
When the window cracks open, the music beautifully reminds of a Wagnerian opera (Trystan’s prelude from Trystan and Isolde to be exact) and again makes us anticipate what it is to come. The music and, consequently the mood, changes when an electric lever is revealed and we are back to the horror nature of the film. As evidenced, Erikson’s music is brilliantly fluid as it captures each little detail on the screen to complement it in the auditory department.
In terms of narrative clues, the lever is a reference to Mary Shelley’s magnum opus Frankenstein and we soon see the infamous table on which a faint figure lies. It should be noted that Shelley spent 15 months in Dundee as a youngster and it’s thought that she was greatly inspired by the city and that there is the shadow of Dundee in Frankenstein.
Dundonians, like Taylor, have long explored this connection and have created works of art such as novels, comics, and paintings of Shelley and Dundee. It’s possible that Taylor is contributing to this canon himself by crafting a narrative similar to that of Frankenstein.
Returning to the film, the camera zooms in on the table and reveals a little robot covered with rust or the Rustboy. At the same time, the storm ravages the castle and a lightning destroys the roof in an explosion that would make Michael Bay envious.
Then the laser-like device pointed at Rustboy is activated by a lightning, similar to Frankenstein. The little rusty body begins convulsing until a bulb lights up and he opens his green eyes. He looks around confused, while a baby-like music theme is playing in the background. He certainly looks more like a fragile baby than a strong and scary monster like his Victorian predecessor.
However, unlike Frankenstein’s monster who had a “father” in the likes of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the Rustboy is alone, nobody pulled the lever, but somebody definitely put him on the table. The image suggests that Rustboy was left there for a long time as both him and the table have rust on them. We immediately empathise with this adorable creature who is exploring his surroundings with child innocence.
A moment later, the sun comes up and Rustboy begins his quest, perhaps the quest to find his creator. He goes around the scary castle, but the music has taken on a hopeful note as we follow Rustboy with the same curiousity that he exhibits. His little insecure steps make us collectively woo over him. Rustboy stumbles upon a long staircase with light emitting from the other side.
He climbs up the stairs and the music prepares us for a big reveal as he comes closer and closer. Then the screen turns black. That’s it. That’s all we have from Rustboy. Does he see his creator? Does his creator embrace him like we wish we could? We’ll unfortunately never find out.
Rustboy – The Internet Sensation
The film’s creators sought to make the project appealing to the public before it was even close to being released. A website was made to promote the upcoming feature and it generated a lot of positive attention. There were many people who anticipated the release of the movie.
As we all know though, the film didn’t reach that point. We wondered why the interest towards Rustboy didn’t cease for all these years. Yes, the concept and the execution are fantastic, but anticipating a movie for more than a decade seemed bizarre.
While doing our research, we found out that the film’s website was up and running for the better part of 15 years! We managed to do that by accessing web archives, which detected activity between 2001 and 2016, which explains why fans remained interested in the Rustboy saga. Perhaps many of them thought the project was still active for many years to come. Based on the accounts of people who closely followed the development of the film, we discovered that the last online update occurred sometime in 2006. Remember this year, because it is going to come up again in the next section in relation to the project.
You’d think that the clear lack of information would eventually dissuade people from seeking answers, but it appears that the opposite is true. Some fans even admitted that this lack excited them and they spent a long time following the trails of the mysterious Rustboy project.
It wasn’t just regular fans of animated film that held Rustboy in high regard. It was also animators themselves who find inspiration in the phenomenal CGI of Rustboy.
Indeed, a writer for Medium, William Weiqing Teh, went as far as to claim that Rustboy made him seek a career in animation based on the teasers and artworks that came out before the project was eventually binned. Another animator, Steve Ogden, also credited Rustboy as an inspiration for him to create a short-animated film in his free time.
As we see, even a few minutes of pure artistry can turn into a creative source for a whole generation of artists.
Interviewing Taylor: Going Down the Rabbit’s Hole
There was overall no new information surrounding the Rustboy project until 2011 when Steve Ogden, whom we mentioned in the last paragraph, interviewed the man himself – Brian Taylor.
Taylor confirms that the project would unfortunately never be released. He tells Ogden that the project started as a “one-man show” where he was doing all the work and even managed to secure some financing. However, as it could be expected, the money was not quite enough to finish the ambitious project, especially when Taylor still had to work other jobs to provide for himself.
At some point in the development, Taylor began working with a major animation studio (his own words in the description of the YouTube video we shared earlier). If you look closely at the promotional updates given by the creators of Rustboy, the film was being produced by XL5 Productions Limited; a studio based in Edinburgh, Scotland, less than two hours away from Dundee.
We decided to look deeper into that and we checked the official register of UK-based companies. We found out that the company was dissolved on 15 October 2010, while the last accounts were made up on 31 May 2006, which curiously matches the time period of the last updates on the Rustboy website.
This inclines to believe that the studio encountered problems, maybe of financial sort, that led not only to the dissolution of the company itself but also to the end of Rustboy. Taylor says in the interview that he experienced a “developmental hell”, which could be argued to suggest that his problems were mostly (if not solely) the result of the company’s downfall.
Moreover, when Ogden asks him if he would try to get Rustboy back on track through private donations from Kickstart, Taylor firmly rejects the idea. He says that even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to do anything of that sort due to copyright issues since he is no longer the sole owner of the project. The studio’s dissolvement perhaps made things even more complex.
Still, we want to give you another angle to the saga brought by Taylor himself. He notes that Rustboy could have never become a successful release due to its very nature, so maybe the company’s status isn’t entirely to blame. After all, the production began in 2001 and films are usually made within 2 or 3 years, so it was definitely possible to finish Rustboy on time (before the company’s dissolvement).
Taylor says that the dark tone of Rustboy made it an unlikely candidate for the silver screen. He also says that the studio attempted to give it “the Hollywood treatment” and thus it removed some of the core elements of the story such as the themes of loneliness and isolation, which made it appealing to the cult-fans, but might have not been very popular with wider audiences.
To be perfectly honest, we are not sure if we could agree with Taylor’s statements. As we already mentioned, Coraline (2009), which resembles not only the art style but also the themes of Rustboy, was an immediate success with both children and adults (it still is), so we don’t see how Rustboy could be any different.
In order to better illustrate our point, here’s a list of other similar successful films:
- The Black Cauldron (1985)
- The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
- James and the Giant Peach (1996)
- The Iron Giant (1999)
- Spirited Away (2001)
- Corpse Bride (2005)
- Monster House (2006)
- Wall-E (2008)
- Frankenweenie (2012)
- Paranorman (2012)
- Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013)
- Coco (2017)
Still, this interview is all we have and we shouldn’t be that quick to judge. We don’t know the intimate secrets of Rustboy. We weren’t at the studio and we are certainly not in Taylor’s head. What we can definitely attest to, based on Taylor’s responses, is that his original concept was changed so much that it became a shadow of its former self.
He also noted that his strength lies in pre-production – he gives incredible ideas and draws amazing illustration, but it seems like the stress of the actual production period and perhaps the day-to-day operations are not for him, and he seems to have accepted this.
We also have to keep in mind that most film projects don’t ever see the light of day. This is especially true for TV; you don’t want to know how many pilots are red-lit every year. It is unfortunate, but sadly very common in the show business.
One thing that makes Rustboy stand out though is precisely its cult-following. You’d expect a project like that to succeed, but as we have shown you, there are many creative and legal issues entangling the project, so maybe it’s good that we never saw Rustboy, the film feature, as it might have disappointed us. We still have the magnificent opening sequence that would hopefully continue to inspire future creators.
As for Taylor, he doesn’t seem to want to go back to animation. It appears that it was only a chapter in his long artistic career. However, he is still glad that he met brilliant people during the making of Rustboy and he is also satisfied with his newest venture, Candykiller. All we can do is wish him the best and keep rewatching that opening sequence that he was kind to share.