DAC Senior Thesis, First Blog

Some vague inspiration and original concepts for the Fox Story thesis being produced 2022-2023

Hello, For the first blog, I'm going to share some pretty early ideas I had, as well as some of the inspirations for this short. As this is the first blog, I want to talk about the story a lot before moving on to the more technical side of things.

To be honest, this short is surprisingly personal to me. . . I think the main reason is that until recently I've felt an extreme disconnect to my cultural heritage, and in some small way, it feels like this story is reconnecting me to it. I shall be referring to the earliest versions of the Huli-jing Thesis as "Untitled Fox Story" from here on out, that way its clear that I'm talking about my individual ideas and what lead me to pitching this story in the first place. I never expected that the story we would be making would be one of mine.

To start with, it's no secret that Untitled Fox Story draws heavily off folkloric Chinese or Taoist beliefs about foxes, namely the concept of a hulijing. To make a much more complicated belief system and story short, a hulijing is a fox that has grown powerful enough to take human shape. In lore, they can be either benevolent or malevolent, but the most famous huli-jing I can think of is Daji. Daji appears in a very famous Chinese classic, and is also evil. Off to a great start.

As for the story side, I was deeply inspired by the concept of an "animal Bride." Stories about animal brides, or adjacent figures appear all over the world. Seal Maidens in Northern Europe, swan maidens from all over the Eurasian super-continent, crane maidens in East Asia, and celestial maidens from Japan are some of the more famous iterations of this type of story I can recall off the top of my head. These stories usually involve a hunter or some other bachelor who spies on a maiden bathing, before stealing a magical piece of clothing from her. This clothing allows the maiden to change forms or return to the heavens, thus the maiden is trapped by the bachelor and forced to marry him. Animal bride tales usually have themes of possession and deceit, and tend to end unhappily for the bachelor, and sometimes the "bride". There are of course subversions to this format, and Untitled Fox Story is how I wanted to subvert it.

The Initial concept for "Untitled Fox Story" was that a hunter would find a fox in his trap, and free it, which at that point the fox would turn into a pretty woman

After which the two would get along and court. The story would be a a lighthearted, almost comedic affair from the POV of the surrounding villagers and neighbors who are convinced their young man has been bewitched by a dastardly huli-jing while the couple want to be left in peace. Eventually, after many hijinks the confusion is cleared up, and the fox bride is welcomed into the community.

The second major point of inspiration is, uh, fanfiction. To be clear, I did not intentionally adapt this story based on any fanfiction I read, nor was I particularly inspired by a source material, as far as I'm aware. Rather, fanfiction put hulijing on my radar and made me consider different story scenarios, one of which has developed into "Untitled Fox Story". This reason is part of why I'd like to step away from the story and character concept art and work more on developing the environments and costuming accurately.

Of course, with the help of my team, we developed the story in a very different direction tonally, and plot wise. It is now a more compact story with a grounded message as opposed to fairy tale whimsy

Some early character concept work. I did some early costuming based on some recreated peasant clothes, though now I'm hoping to nail down some concrete era or the like for the costuming and setting. I used Fox-bro (Huli-gege in pinyin, or Older Brother Fox) as my production name for the hulijing. He starts in ragged clothes and has a wild untamed appearance. Later in the story, he gets a make over and appears as a somewhat charming young master. The hunter meanwhile has a simple outfit for being practical in.

I hope that this new team can continue to develop it in a meaningful way going forward. The next few blogs will probably delve into research and other pre-production things more so than actual production.

This is from a now deleted part of the story. I just really liked how I drew the chickens!