COSMOThe universe is infinite.
Loneliness doesn't have to be.

You know what? The idea of Cosmo, it sounds really corny, but I genuinely dreamed about it. It was this one time. I don’t really have dreams, because I don’t sleep well. But there was this one time I had a genuinely ten-hour sleep. Deep sleep. It was the first time I’d had a dream in ages, and I genuinely just dreamed of two stars colliding and making a universe.

The stars had these little faces and they were making these weird little Pokémon noises, and I was just like, that is such a beautiful idea for a film. I woke up that day, drafted the script, and then messaged someone on Twitter to help me with the animation. Genuinely, it came to me in a dream. I hate that whole “it came to me in a dream” meme, and I thought it was the biggest thing going, but it actually came to me in a dream.

That was my main goal with it anyway. I wanted to do something hand-drawn. I wanted to do something animation. I looked at my YouTube stats and there were so many people from all these different countries asking me to sub my films, to sub my YouTube videos. And I just thought, if I make a film with no spoken dialogue, every single person in the world can watch it. Every single person. No matter what language you speak. So that was the main goal of it.

What really helped with any problems is that you get to focus solely on the sound design and on that three-act structure, without any dialogue. So everything goes into the eyes. Everything goes into the tone of the characters, which direction they go, why they’re doing what they’re doing. Because you know from the first thirty seconds of the film that Cosmo is lonely. And we did that with no dialogue. We just did it with open space. We just did it with the animation and the music.

The one thing I’m very proud of in this film is that we were able to get the most fantastic composer. And obviously the sound designer, because there’s no dialogue, we can focus solely on that. So that’s one problem solved. That’s something I really enjoyed about making a film with no dialogue.

We had little squeaks. I call them Pokémon noises. Just to elevate the characters a little bit more. But in a conventional sense, it’s not a dialogue-speaking film.

Oh, that’s a good question. What I deliberately didn’t take is their art style. As much as I love the Pixar artists, and I’m obviously doing Littlefoot, which is in the Pixar style. But because it’s just so high-tech, because everyone sees it nowadays, I really wanted to focus solely on the old medium, which is hand-drawn animation. So that’s something I didn’t take.

The reason we did hand-drawn animation is, one, because we all missed it anyway. And number two, I’ve always wanted to do stuff hand-drawn. And I found the most amazing artist, and she draws anime on Twitter. And I just thought to myself, that is kind of like the perfect look I’m going for. I want the slick, cute anime style look. And she did such a fantastic job translating my idea to Cosmo in the film itself, because she obviously did all of the drawings and I did all the backgrounds. But that’s something I deliberately didn’t get from Pixar.

The thing I did deliberately get from Pixar is the concept of a short animation. There’s this short film called, oh, what’s it called? It’s genuinely one of the most fantastic shorts on Disney+ right now. I have to send it to you. I think it’s called Running in the Rain or something like that. But it’s about two lovers chasing time. And obviously I must have been watching it when I went to sleep, because I woke up with basically the same concept. But basically I love the whole idea of creating a non-spoken film about love. And that’s something that really inspired me to do so.

Riley, this industry is all about who you know. And it’s not a lie. What would be amazing in this industry is if you’re talented, if you know what you’re doing, you will get really far. But in reality, it’s who you know.

And I know some fantastically talented people. Devso is an old school friend of mine. He’s actually composed three films of mine. This was his third, and the other two were unreleased. And if I’m not mistaken, he works with Hans Zimmer’s orchestra in some capacity. So he knows some amazing people.

When we did the original score for Cosmo, we fell in love with it so much. We were up for nights, just saying, just put a little twinkle here, put a little twinkle there. This music makes sense here. This is going to be the love scene. This is going to be the destroy scene. This is going to be the creation scene. We fell in love with the process so much and we just said to ourselves, should we get it orchestrated with a 62-piece orchestra? And I was like, no, man, that’s going to be so expensive. And it was, in a sense, but he got us a good deal with the Budapest cinematic orchestra thanks to Rutik Joshi.

Phenomenal. Genuinely. Because you’re creating something, right? Seeing it in the hands of an orchestra is something completely different. We were on a Zoom call at eight in the morning. They gave us a half-hour session, and within that half-hour session they did it four or five times, and they asked me on the live web chat, hey Joey, do you want that anywhere? Hey, what do you want to change here? And I was just blown away by what I was hearing.

And then word got around that we were doing the orchestra. Word got around about Cosmo. People liked the film. And then I think Devso was doing a course with Alan Meyerson, and Alan Meyerson saw the film. And he asked him if he could do it, for the experience. I mean, unbelievable. It’s wild, man. It was all chance as well, though. He saw it and was like, can I do it? Look at his IMDb. How many short films has he done? Two, including mine? The others are Madagascar and The Dark Knight. What a crazy experience.

A warm, fuzzy feeling. Because Cosmo, within the specific genre here, is about love, and it’s about two people, two lonely people, finding each other. And the bigger meaning behind it is, you know, love is creation. I know we overexaggerated that with two particles hitting each other and that creating a Big Bang. In reality, that’s life, right? You find someone, there’s a creation, there’s a spark, there’s a big bang. And then you create life.

So I want people to leave the film with a warm, fuzzy feeling that if you are lonely, if you haven’t found the person yet, one day you will, and you’ll create something beautiful. Whether that’s another life, or a life together.

The Land Before Time is the perfect film, and that is 2D animation. If I was to remake The Land Before Time in its 2D aesthetic, what’s the point? There’s already a perfect film out there. There’s already a masterful artwork. What Don Bluth’s team created there is genuinely masterful. The colours, the animation, everything. There’s no point even trying it, right? So what is the point?

The reason we’re doing 3D is, it’s an odd story, but I tried to watch it with my son, and he wouldn’t watch the 2D animated ones, even the Disney films. He just wouldn’t do it. And I asked him, is this like a normal thing? Is everyone not watching them? And he goes, yeah. I learned then that they want to see the Lion King, not the original Lion King. I learned that no one’s seen Aladdin. I learned that no one’s seen The Land Before Time.

So the reason I’m doing this is because there is a market out there for people to watch this film. And even if they don’t want to watch the original, hey, look, if they watch mine and then get inspired, then they’ll rewatch the original, or watch the original for the first time. Or they see Littlefoot. Because I’ve had this. I’ve posted about Littlefoot and everyone’s like, oh, okay, I don’t know what this is. I’ve done my job, because now people are googling The Land Before Time and they’re watching it.

One of the main cast, I don’t want to out her, because I couldn’t tell her to her face, but she hadn’t watched The Land Before Time, and she watched it when I told her about it, and she couldn’t believe she’d never watched it before. So already I feel like I’ve done my job, because even if people don’t watch mine, or even if people don’t agree with the remake of it, go watch the original.

So the first question, with Universal. Do they 100% know about it? They 100% know about it. We’ve had, I can’t really say much. We’ve had discussions with a few people at Universal, basically saying they’re watching the project. They’ve not said anything other than, hey, we’re watching it. And it’s like, that’s cool.

But we’ve also had John Pomeroy message us, and Stu Krieger, giving their support, and they’re the original creators, right? We’ve had Don Bluth. He knows about it. He is the original director. Every single person who has worked on that film, who has reached out, has said nothing but positive stuff.

So we’re hoping when, if it comes to the time where they do go, hey, hopefully it’s nothing but positive. But at the end of the day, the IP has not been used in the past ten years. So what I think we’re doing here, I guess it’s like artwork, right? We’re just drawing pictures and putting our own art out there and hopefully they like it.

With the other question. It frees you up, because I do my original films anyway, right? But the thing with these IPs is that you grew up with them. So with Spider-Man, I was watching the Tobey Maguire films and the Andrew Garfield films and I was like, these are cool, but there are things that I want to see that they’re not doing.

So in reality, I can see why people believe it locks you in, because it locks you into their world. But it frees you, because you already know the world. You already know the people in it. You don’t really need to introduce them. With Spider-Man as well, there are thousands of episodes of TV, there are tens of movies, there are thousands of comic books out there, so people know who he is. So as soon as they Google him and see that there’s a film, they’ll be like, I know this character, let’s watch it.

So in reality, it frees you up to be a bit more imaginative and loose with the idea, because you don’t have to worry about anything original, because it all exists in the world. So you’re just there like, okay, I’m going to take that and make it my own. Which is really fun, to be honest.