Released today by Artist Patrick Schoenmaker, comes a video short titled “The Adventures of Indiana Jones”. Based upon “Escaping The Tomb,” a piece commissioned by Lucasfilm for the abysmal “Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. Five years in the making, this animated short features Indy accompanied by his beloved sidekick, Short Round as he swings his way through several adventures. While it doesn’t include the voices of Harrison Ford or Ke Huy Quan, it has a wonderful John Williams -esque score by composers Alexander Reumers and Jorrit Kleijnen.
In an interview with Inverse.com, Schoenmaker details the process of creating the first ever cartoon version of the iconic hero.
They didn’t ask me to do a print in an animated style, but it was just the natural approach for me. My background is in animation, and the seed for how you’d translate the Indiana Jones character into an animated style was already somewhere in my mind. The print was the best chance to explore that.
The preliminary sketches I had were really cartoony, and I felt that it broke with the Indiana Jones world. If it’s too much of a cartoon, it loses the danger and thrill. It becomes too slapstick. Each draft, I started over with what worked in the previous attempts to keep making it better.
After seeing this short, I’m left wondering why there hasn’t been an Indiana Jones cartoon before? Indy seems ripe for a Saturday morning cartoon series. Can you imagine if someone like Dave Filoni or DisneyXD got behind this?
To read the rest of the interview with Schoenmaker, head on over to Inverse.com.
SOURCES: INVERSE.COM, PATRICK SCHOENMAKER
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