Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Don’t cry for Chris Sanders.

After all, he’s apparently developing an animated film called CROOD AWAKENING that was written, in part, by the one and only John Cleese. So Sanders appears to be keeping busy in a very interesting way.

But if things had worked out differently, right about now, we’d be getting our first look at AMERICAN DOG, his follow-up to LILO & STITCH, a film that may have turned into an iconic Disney hit, but which started out as one of the more personal and experimental projects to ever make it out of their feature animation division.

I remember when Harry ran the first images from AMERICAN DOG in August of 2004. I loved that it didn’t look anything like the typical Disney film. Here’s one image in particular from that article that I loved:

Those are the three main characters in that version of the film: “A canine TV star, an oversized bunny, and a testy cat.”

We saw our first glimpse of footage almost a year later when one our spies went to Siggraph and sent us this clip, which may be silent but it still communicates a ton about the mood and the style of the proposed film.

So now here we are in a post-Pixar/Disney world, when many of the projects that were rumbling along as recently as two years ago have gone completely dormant, or in some cases, they’ve been radically overhauled.

Chris Sanders is gone. Off the film completely at this point. Out of Disney, too. In his place, Chris Williams (who shared story credit on MULAN and THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE) will be directing the now-retitled BOLT!

If you check out the image below, you’ll see just how completely they’ve changed the feel of this one. Will it retain any of the character of AMERICAN DOG? Are these changes all for the better? We’ll have to wait until sometime next fall to find out.