Inside How Stephen King’s First Animated Film Was Made

Stephen King is at the point in his illustrious 58-year career when there aren’t many firsts left for him. Yet, the legendary author who’s published 65 books and has dozens of films inspired by his imagination machine of a mind has found time for one more first: his first animated feature. Lily became King’s first-ever animated short, and its origins trace back all the way to his high school days.

In the pop-up-book-styled animated short, a young student named Robert is stuck between a rock and a nightmare as he has to deal with his cruel teacher, Ms. Sidley, and a large tiger named Lily in the bathroom. After his teacher berates him for choosing to urinate outside to avoid the tiger, her inspection of his claims has a devastating consequence for her. There’s no blood or gore—trademark components of many of our favorite Stephen King visual adaptations. There’s just kid-friendly horror in the Kate Siegel-directed short, which is exactly how King intended for it to be when he wrote the script according to Lily’s animator Pete Scalzitti, who spoke with Kotaku after the short’s screening at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

“Last summer Stephen wrote our screenplay, adapting it himself from one of his earliest stories ever, Here There Be Tygers, which he actually wrote when he was in high school,” Scalzitti explains. “Deep cut fans of his short stories will notice he changed some of the plot, as well as the names of the main characters, using instead the names from another of his darkest short stories, Suffer the Little Children. But the plot is all Tygers.”

Here There Be Tygers was released in 1968 when the prolific author was only 20 years old, and Suffer the Little Children was published four years later in 1972, making Lily a sterling example of the timelessness of King’s work. The hand-drawn animation makes Lily feel like it was pulled from a time capsule unblemished, and also makes it reminiscent of children’s picture books. All of this was intentional, even down to the way Siegel’s voice guides you through the horror.

“Kate chose to leave in Stephen’s screen directions and use them as narration, which she discussed with Stephen. This made the film feel like King was reading us a bedtime story, which gave me my solution for how to animate this in 21 days—I treated it like I was creating a pop-up book.”

Lily is part of Dark Corners, a series created by Siegel and Krsy Fox, which features eight animated horror shorts meant to “gently or not so gently introduce children to the world of horror.” While there isn’t any official word on if and when King decides to drop another, don’t put it past the master of horror to dig back into his treasure trove of stories for an animated feast of terror for the eyes.