Abominable, DreamWorks Animation’s upcoming feature, is making history. Industry veteran Jill Culton is the first woman to be the writer and main director of a major, original animated film. “It’s a mini-breakthrough,” she said. Culton came-up with the idea for “Abominable” — which is about a Chinese teen girl’s relationship with a yeti, seven years ago. She worked on the film for several years but then left, but was then brought back after one of the new studio heads (she said they’ve had eight bosses while the film’s been in production, thanks to NBC/Universal’s purchase of DWA during that time) saw her old reels and realized that her story is the one that needed to be told.

When Culton got the call to come back, she honestly said, “I was not surprised. I was waiting for it.” She was thrilled to get to present this tale that she hopes pays “100% respect and authenticity” to the Chinese culture. And when it comes to the creative team, according to Culton, “We got the best of the best of DreamWorks.”

Abominable begins in a Shanghai-esque metropolis. DreamWorks partnered with overseas production studio Pearl, who will also distribute it in China. And many of those who worked on the film visited China for inspiration. Co-director Todd Wilderman believes it is “accurate and true to China”. He and Culton, who have known each other for 20 years, spent the last year and a half “getting the story just right”. Wilderman says that working with Culton was “a very comfortable, easy partnership” and that in the end, “the best version [of the film] came out”.

Chloe Bennett (Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD) voices 16-year-old Yi (the character was younger in earlier versions of the script). Yi discovers the yeti (named Everest) on the roof of her family’s home. The creature has just escaped from a scientific lab, and when Yi realizes her new visitor wants to go back home to the Himalayas, she and two friends join him on a quest that takes them all over China.

When it came to finding the right voice for Yi, producer Suzanne Buirgy said the studio asked, “Can’t we have a big name?” But Buirgy says, “We stuck to our guns about casting properly”, adding that Bennett is great in the role. Everest doesn’t speak English (something Culton requested). His grunts and other vocal sounds are contributed by Joe Izzo, with key humming contributed by the movie’s composer, Rupert Gregson-Williams.

John Hill, head of character animation, said “we spent most of our time trying to figure out who the heck [Everest] was. And how did he move? He was kind of a combination of a panda, a grizzly bear, a cat, a puppy and an orangutan.” There were 51 animators in total on the film, more than the average count on a DWA feature.

Also higher than usual: the number of different sequences. There are 40, according to production designer Max Boas. He told me that he and the rest of the DreamWorks team often had Skype sessions with colleagues at Pearl, calling it “the perfect hand-off”. “We had our end of day, and then our next morning was their end of day.” Boas believes “the effects drive the storytelling. There’s everything except fire, in terms of effects, in the film.”

That includes a challenging coy fish clouds sequence. Buirgy believes it “was the hardest to do. At first, we didn’t know how to do it without it looking corny.” VFX Supervisor Mark Edwards agrees. “Jill said that it shouldn’t feel like a weird carousel ride in the sky.” Edwards has enjoyed being a part of the “Abominable” process for the past three and a half years. “One of the things I love about animation is that you can really push on the color, and it doesn’t break the world.”

DreamWorks screened about 30 minutes of footage for the press during a recent studio visit. These select scenes, from different points in the film, were also shown at the Annecy International Film Festival in France last month. Some standout visual moments are both gorgeous and ambitious, a word Wilderman thinks perfectly describes the film. And the emotional themes are given just as much devotion as the adventure sequences.

Wilderman, who was head of story on 2015’s “Home”, personally relates to this storyline of longing. “Being a long ways from my family (in southern Illinois) and not getting to get back very often. It’s easy for me to get emotional when I see stories like that, so I like telling stories like that,” he said.

Two months ahead of Abominable’s release, DreamWorks does have a bit of a marketing mountain to climb. It’s the third studio animated film in the past year about a yeti, following 2018’s Smallfoot from Warner Bros. and this past spring’s Missing Link from Laika. “It’s weird, because this was probably conceived first,” Buirgy says. “I hope audiences think it’s special enough.”

Abominable is also the second DWA film to be distributed by Universal, who asked for a title change. The movie was originally called “Everest”, but Universal had released a 2015 live-action film called “Everest”, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, that didn’t do well at the box office. Buirgy has grown to like the change. She thinks kids will have fun simply trying to say the word “Abominable”.

And as for kids, everyone at DreamWorks is hoping millions of them (along with their parents and grandparents) see their latest film on September 27th. The final weekend of September slot has proven to be a coveted one for animated releases over the years, helping films such as “Hotel Transylvania”, “The Boxtrolls” and even “Smallfoot” to box office success.

When I asked Culton if the nature of animation studios securing release dates is as crazy and competitive as it seems, she replied, “Totally. And it’s getting worse.” But she’s pleased with when Abominable is opening. “The cool thing about the end of September is that we don’t have a lot of competition,” she said. “You can have longevity, and I think that’s the weird race right now. If you get a summer slot, you get really excited. But then you’re bumped out by everything around you immediately. We hope it will have legs so that it can continue on… can we last through Thanksgiving? I hope!”