My book of cancelled stories

Saurian: The animated movie

Based on the Dinosaur simulator game by RJ palmer of the same name, Saurian was my concept for an animated movie, one for mature audiences with gore and adult themes as outside of Adult Swim's excellent series Primal created by Samurai Jack and Sym-bionic Titan creator Genndy Tartakovsky Dinosaurs don't get that much representation in adult animation. The story I came up with is set in the Hell Creek formation 66 million years ago (much like the game) following the story of a mother Tyrannosaurus named Sue and her three children Bucky (the eldest son), Jane (the middle child), and Thomas (the youngest son who's still a baby) who's lives get turned upside-down when their valley they call home is left in ruins by the infamous meteorite crashing into the gulf of mexico bringing forth the mass extinction and separating Sue from her kids. now the fractured family must struggle for survival in the fallout of the asteroid impact, what ensues is a depressing, emotionally-harrowing story where characters much make difficult choices in order to survive. the story is divided into three subplots: first we have Sue's story, where she is forced to team up with a Triceratops named Hatcher who's prejudiced against carnivores seeing them all as bloodthirsty monsters due to his mate and child to a T. Rex named Stan, eventually realizing the error of his ways seeing Sue's determination to find and rescue her children leading to Hatcher helping Sue defeat Stan before making the heroic sacrifice begging a starving Sue to kill him and eat his flesh so that she can live long enough to reunite with her kids, and she does. Then we have the kid's story, following Bucky, Jane, and Thomas searching for their mom while trying to avoid getting killed by a bloodthirsty gang of Dakotaraptors named Hunter, Ghost, and Talon who are hunting the three juvenile rexes. then the three siblings befriend Wily the Anzu and Tank the Ankylosaurus, serving as our comedic relief duo to add some levity to this otherwise bleak story. the third subplot follows a Purgatorius named Sally and her litter of pups as they try to navigate the post-impact world while trying not to get eaten or worse, squished. the family of tiny mammals are the only characters that survive the ending as the ending of the story would have Sue reunite with her kids along with Wily and Tank as we see our main characters sit down together to watch the fireworks (and by fireworks I mean a meteor shower) followed by a giant cloud of dust and ash consuming the entire landscape and taking our characters out with it echoing the final episode of 1999's Walking With Dinosaurs. we then cut to the Aftermath where we see Sally and her family standing atop the skull of Sue ending the story on a somewhat hopeful note with mammals as the future inheritors of the earth. the story would be bookended by segments in the present day with paleontologists uncovering the remains of Sue and her kids during a dig and attempting to put together what happened to the rex family. in other words a pretty emotionally-draining story, think Land Before Time meets Grave of the Fireflies. here are the designs I made for the characters along with a visual I made for the ending:

Why I cancelled it:

I actually got marginally far along with this story, but lost the file. I never bothered to start over and finish the story because I lost the motivation to do so, as the story was too depressing and took too much of an emotional toll on me to write due to the downer ending (Imagine crying over something that literally died 65 million years ago lol) so consider this one yet another one of my canned ideas.