Hello everyone, and I thought it would be interesting if I shared with you today a project that I was working on, but abandoned a long time ago before I finished it: a concept trailer for the animated Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever film announced in 2012 that has now been reworked as the third installment in the animated reboot film series that is coming out this December, titled Diary of a Wimpy Kid Christmas: Cabin Fever!
I know what you’re thinking: Why? And why now? Well, let’s just say it arose out of my attempts to help tackle what was, at the time, a Diary of a Wimpy Kid problem, only to get concerned about copyright issues. Now that the problem has long since been rectified, there is certainly no reason to release it now. But I figured that with the upcoming release of Diary of a Wimpy Kid Christmas: Cabin Fever, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the project by sharing at least some of my hard work in a series of animated GIF’s. If you wish to share my work, be sure to only share the post and not the work itself so no one gets the wrong idea. And of course, I’d like to give a heads up to obvious spoilers to the Cabin Fever book. So here’s the story of the time I tried to make an animated Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever trailer!
Development on My Trailer
In Fall 2018, I took an animation college course distinct from the animation course in which I made my concept trailer for Poptropica: Explore. Collect. Come Watch. For my final project, I knew exactly what I was going to make: a concept trailer for the animated Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever film that Jeff Kinney announced in 2012 and planned to release in 2014. I fully intended to release it during the holidays for it to coincide with the Christmas season, as I found that my Poptropica movie trailer hadn’t been as successful as I hoped for whatever reason. In August 2018, my post of the first ten books from worst to best dethroned my initial post about the Diary of a Wimpy Fall as my most viewed post on the blog, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the traffic I’ve received around the world. This made me realize just how much of a position I was in for this trailer to be a hit, compared to the Poptropica trailer.
The whole point of the Poptropica trailer was to raise awareness of the Poptropica and Diary of a Wimpy Kid problems at the time. But then I realized that the poor viewership may be simply due to the fact that Poptropica is not as known as Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and to tackle the Poptropica problem, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid problem must be tackled first. I initially thought the release was justified, because all I was trying to do was to bring more attention to demands for an animated adaptation. It was only a trailer, not a full film. Of course, now that we actually have animated adaptations on Disney+, including this upcoming Cabin Fever adaptation, we all know today that nobody needed my help.
In the First Ten Books post, I stated that Cabin Fever is the best book in the series, which makes it ideal for a great movie entry. Because of this, if the film was made as the first installment in an animated soft reboot as I described it in my initial Wimpy Fall post, and it stayed true to the source material, it would have righted the wrongs of the Long Haul film. Given my current animation capabilities, I knew that I obviously couldn’t make the trailer look like the Peanuts Movie and Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie affair I imagined in my initial Wimpy Fall post. But the beauty of Kinney’s art style is that because it’s so simple and animation-friendly, it didn’t have to look that way, and I could keep it in 2D.
For one of my earlier assignments, I decided to make the first footage of the trailer: a walk cycle of Greg in the school hallways that I animated in After Effects; you’ll see that sequence a bit later. I then separated that walk cycle into a set of sequenced images to create a zoetrope, which I’ll repost below. You may have seen me post it on Twitter and to the Fanart page a while back:
Production continued to go relatively smooth, until my instructor warned me about releasing it publicly due to copyright concerns. I was only a little worried about it at first, but then increased research on the subject led me to the disappointing, if right decision, to not release the trailer publicly. After all, it wasn’t parody or some other original spin on it like the Poptropica trailer. I was basically replicating the original work, and was at risk of taking the creator’s success away from him if I indeed hit all the right buttons and it became a hit. If I don’t want anybody using my work in a similar way, why should I do the same to someone else? Unsurprisingly, this hindered my motivation, and I didn’t finish it, skipping many scenes I had planned before getting to the ending. And that’s okay, because I aced the course anyway.
Development on The Actual Film
In January 2023, Jeff Kinney announced in an interview that the third film in the animated reboot film series would not be adapting The Last Straw, but was being reworked as an adaptation of Cabin Fever. It was also reported that Brady Noon and Ethan William Childress might not be returning as Greg and Rowley due to them growing up and not sounding as young as they used to. As you might imagine, both of these announcements kind of surprised me. Zachary Gordon had played Greg for three films while Noon would have only played him for two, although Gordon’s voice had deepened by Dog Days, so that wasn’t too surprising.
But the decision to adapt Cabin Fever this early was way more baffling. Disney apparently wanted to take advantage of the fact that the films have been releasing in December to capitalize on the holiday season. But if Kinney was committed to adapting the series in the order the books were released, and assuming the films keep coming out once a year, we would have eventually gotten a Cabin Fever adaptation by 2026 anyway. At the same time, this finally fulfilled Kinney’s plans to release that animated Cabin Fever film that he announced in 2012. There is also precedent in the franchise skipping multiple books to adapt, as the live action film series had shown in The Long Haul (badly as I’d hate to keep bringing it back up).
Still, this put into question the direction the fourth animated movie would take. Would The Last Straw finally get a proper adaptation, or would that book, Dog Days and The Ugly Truth remain skipped, and we’d get an adaptation of The Third Wheel next? Kinney later took to social media to answer a fan who asked this exact question, to which he replied that “they’d get back to it”, so it looks like we’ll still be getting that Last Straw adaptation. By September 2023, it was announced that the third film was officially titled Diary of a Wimpy Kid Christmas: Cabin Fever. It was also announced that Brady Noon was being replaced with Wesley Kimmel, while the film’s synopsis had also been revealed:
With only two weeks until Christmas, Greg Heffley is doing everything he can to be good as the gift giving—and receiving—season approaches. And though he wants to stay in the good graces of his parents, Frank and Susan, in order to get a prized video game system, he can’t help but get into trouble with best friend Rowley, accidentally triggering a giant snowball that rolls down his neighborhood hill and damages Gabby’s snowplow. Though he and Rowley escape without being identified as the culprits, Greg soon realizes that evidence tying him to the crime might be discovered in the town’s nearby toy donation bin. But when a giant blizzard descends on the town, Greg ends up trapped in his house with no power, dwindling supplies, a frantic Frank, a suspicious Rodrick, and a mother desperate to try to find any way to get her family together to enjoy the holidays. And that’s not to mention the antics of toddler brother Manny or the creepy Santa’s Scout elf that seems to be watching his every move. Confined to his home, Greg must find a way to cover up his blunder without anyone finding out, or he can kiss that new gaming system goodbye. Even worse, with no plow to rescue them, the Heffleys must do the unthinkable, spend time together as a family.
Based on the synopsis, it looks like the film will take some liberties with the original story, which I’m not sure how to feel about. In the book, Greg and Rowley fear that the police are after them after they accidentally vandalize the school with posters of their Holiday Bazaar. Those stakes feel a bit bigger than the destruction of a snowplow. As I previously stated, Cabin Fever is the best book in the series, so little changes are needed to improve the story. It’s true that the point of an adaptation is to slightly change parts of the material to give audiences a reason to get invested in something they were already invested in. But the trick is to change it in a way that doesn’t hurt the story and even improves it. But other than that, most of the synopsis feels familiar, so perhaps these changes might not hurt the film’s quality. By November 2023, the (official) trailer for the film was released, after which it was announced that Ethan William Childress was being replaced with Spencer Howell.
Production on My Trailer
For a long time, I pondered on whether the trailer would be in color or black and white. I correctly imagined that the Peanuts/Captain Underpants approach would be in color, but then I figured that the original Cabin Fever project could’ve been envisioned as black and white, given that it was just a TV special. The idea could be that the entire film is an animation of the drawings in Greg’s journals, which would make the film faithful to the books in its very direction. So I ultimately made it black and white, so I could make the truest version of the trailer.
When approaching this trailer story-wise, I knew that I couldn’t just make a carbon copy of the book like the real film is doing, given what I said earlier about the point of an adaptation, which I really thought about. So for my approach, I decided to place an emphasis on how the book made Greg’s character more selfless than in other books, and give more dimension to Manny’s character, given that he’s the antagonist of the story.
So while I ultimately didn’t put it in the trailer because it is just a trailer, the trailer does imply that Manny specifically wanted Greg to help him tie his shoes, and thus he made Greg suffer in the house during the storm as revenge for ignoring him. After Greg realizes this, instead of being mad at Manny, Holly’s words about caring for family instead of more trivial things (Alfrendo, Gregory’s Little Friend) would make Greg care about Manny instead, also making him remember the whole point of why Susan bought Alfrendo. Manny would then reciprocate that care Greg gave him by undoing the other things he did to Greg (selling everything he owned, locking Greg out of Net Kritters, etc.). That last part may sound like a stretch, but this is Manny we’re talking about.
When studying the live-action trailers, I remembered how the characters were introduced by showing their appearance in the books via a draw-on animation before showing the live-action version of the character. I wanted to reflect that in my trailer by doing a reverse version of it given that it was animated, by showing an image of the live-action version before showing their appearance in the books. I used the versions of the characters from the original trilogy, rather than the Long Haul film for two reasons: there were simply more characters, and, well, you know.
Also, you may notice that Angie and Holly both appear during this sequence, and thus, share the screen if this were to be an actual movie. This was simply for fan service and imagining a what-could’ve-been scenario. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid Wiki states that Angie either graduated or moved to another school, but what if she didn’t, and stayed like we all wanted? If this were to be canon to the live-action films (after retconning The Long Haul), Angie could simply move back to Westmore, rather than graduating.
I took care in not spoiling most of the book’s crucial parts, while keeping out as many of the scenes that don’t progress the story as possible (aside from those in the character introduction sequence). Among these scenes included:
- Greg playing with Alfrendo
- Greg playing Net Kritters
- Susan telling Greg to work for his money
- The scene in which Greg accidentally vandalizes the school wall
- The Heffley residence getting snowed in, in which I animated the cover
- Greg, Rodrick and Susan shivering under the blanket
- Greg hiding from the cops on his way to the Toy Drive and the church
- I used the same font that is used in the books, CoopForged. It’s a relatively hard font to find for free, but I managed to access it for this trailer.
There were also a few Easter eggs I littered throughout the trailer.
- I placed a few books on Greg’s desk. These books are Greg’s
diariesjournals, which are piled on top of each other in the order of which Greg wrote them up until Cabin Fever, which my trailer was adapting. Greg rarely makes mention of his other journals in the books, so it’s easy to forget that the series is Greg’s as much as it is Kinney’s. So it only makes sense that Greg would have the other journals in his room somewhere. The journals were in color to make it easier for the viewer to make them out, being one of the few parts of the trailer that was in color. - Before Greg plays Net Kritters, he is playing none other than Poptropica in his room. This is not only a fun nod to the body of Kinney’s work, but it is to also remind audiences that Poptropica matters, too. As for how Greg playing Poptropica makes sense, it actually doesn’t, since Kinney never said that the online game exists in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid universe. However, the easter egg nonetheless teases the possibility that the trailer is set in the same continuity as the Poptropica trailer, and does acknowledge that the Wimpy Kid universe is one of the many parts of the Poptropica multiverse. This sets up a hypothetical crossover between the two properties in a screen adaptation, in which they would meet with the surfacing of Wimpy Wonderland and/or Wimpy Boardwalk Islands via the Nexus. (Check this post for some insight.)
- The credits used the end of the song “What Do You Want From Me” by Forever the Sickest Kids, being the same song used in the credits of the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid film. Given its significance, I thought that it was the perfect way to bring everything full circle. The visual I used in the credits was the Class Clown animated short film from the Dog Days home media release sped up to match the runtime of the credits, to remind audiences how close we had gotten to getting a full-length feature animated film up until that point.
Well, that’s all I’m willing to share about this now abandoned project. I hope you like my process, though I think I did a pretty good job attempting to adapt Kinney’s work. It may have been fun, but what’s even more fun is actually watching Diary of a Wimpy Kid Christmas: Cabin Fever. It will be interesting to see how my work compares to the film, and hopefully, I’ll be able to write a review of it, as well as its prequel, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, once I carve out some time to do so in the middle of my other projects and duties.
But for now, try not get snowed in like our unlikely hero this holiday season, and stay enlightened, educated and entertained, folks. ❄️
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