Before SPIRITED AWAY, before TOTORO, Hayao Miyazaki spent roughly a year on an animated feature he would later call the worst experience of his life.

He was not the first to walk from the project, nor the last. George Lucas was courted and passed. Ray Bradbury wrote a script and moved on. Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz came and went.

LITTLE NEMO: ADVENTURES IN SLUMBERLAND (1989) was based on Winsor McCay's gorgeous, surreal 1905 comic strip. It spent most of a decade in development, chewing through a staggering roster of talent.

Animators, unsure what they were even making, kept explaining that they were only drawing what Bradbury was writing. When someone finally asked Bradbury, he said he was only writing down what the artists were drawing. No one was steering, and no one had been for years.

Yet somehow a film emerged - with songs by the Sherman Brothers, famous for MARY POPPINS.

The film flopped, beaten that very summer in Japan by Miyazaki's own KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE.