What exactly was Jims hope for the film?
KURTZ: He wanted it to be a kind of classic fantasy. If the rights had been available, he would have probably wanted to make Lord of the Rings. It had already been destroyed by Ralph Bakshi and his aborted animated version, so that wasn’t possible. Kind of the next best thing was to create your own, and Brian Froud was a really good designer and creator of a kind of fantasy world that was extremely unique. It would have never been done before. There had never been a film made with all mechanical characters … there had been films that had mechanical characters in them, but they always had humans in them. Now, in retrospect and at the time we had a long discussion about it it probably would have been better if Jen and Kira, the most human-life elfin characters, had been human beings. We did talk about it, but Jim was so set on having it be an all mechanical character film, that that colored his opinion about that. Dramatically, it probably would have been better if those two had been h
