The Forevergreen short, about the bond between an orphaned bear and a paternal tree, is a passion project from Disney animator pals Nathan Engelhardt (Zootopia) and Jeremy Spears (Zootopia). The five-and-a-half year journey grew out of Engelhardt’s faith-based desire to tell a story about redemption and forgiveness, inspired by The Prodigal Son.

At first, Engelhardt was focused on the tree, but soon realized that it wasn’t enough: “I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure it out, and, at one point, Jeremy came in with a completely different idea and added the bear,” he said. “And so we had the tree and the bear and it was just wonderful. It said all the things that I was hoping to say with that first version, but it was clearer. And Jeremy’s a story guy, so he’s always looking for that visual [hook].”

What Spears offered was a warm, tactile, hand-carved CG aesthetic that grew out of his hobby for making wooden figures. In terms of animation, this offered a very polished stop-motion vibe for the forest and the two characters, with the help of woodcarvings as reference. “It wasn’t until about two years in, where we had a lunch and I told Nathan that I was feeling that yearning to try some new things beyond storyboarding,” Spears added. “I had been doing the wood carving on the side and I wanted to team up on this short.”

After two weeks of diving into the story, Spears came across the image of a fallen tree across the divide with a waterfall. “It was a very simple, classic Bible image,” he said, “but, in that moment, it became a powerful visual image for our story. So I went down to Nathan’s desk and I saw that he had drawn that same image of two cliffs and the cross between. He had just had a conversation with a friend at work about the same image and later when I showed him my image, he just flipped out.”

They wound up using the image of the tree spread across the divide to save the bear during a crucial moment of sacrifice. “It was a cool moment to anchor ourselves, and every idea filtered through to support the weight of that image,” added  Engelhardt.

The idea of the wooden world continued to grow, with the cub appearing to have been carved from the tree. Later, when the bear runs away from the tree and discovers a pile of vacuum-formed plastic that he becomes obsessed with, you have the stark contrast of man-made materials in the organic-looking forest.

The duo reached out to fellow Disney animators and many others around the country, and gathered 200 artists and technicians, who worked on the short in their spare time, sometimes leaving and then returning.Spears served as production designer and drew on mid-century Disney 2D animation for inspiration. They deveoped a pipeline anchored in Python for Maya focused on textures with great surface detail. The hand-painted quality utilized a special tiling system with texture maps and warm brushwork.

Although they were concerned about length and aimed for seven minutes, editor Jeff Draheim (the Frozen franchise) actually encouraged them to go longer. With the addition of the cub story in the beginning, that added six minutes.

“He kept going, ‘I think you guys need to make this longer,” Engelhardt recalled. “He wanted us to open it up, let it breathe more, and execute the beats so they have the emotional effect. And it seems to have resonated, even with younger people. Jeremy and I  have heard about kids crying and having great discussions after watching the film with their parents. It’s a testament to telling a compelling story where the narrative dictates the pace.”