Matt Braly is plotting.
Not in the insidious, rubbing-your-hands-together way. Instead, he’s trying to figure out his next move – or, to be more specific, moves, in the increasingly pothole-filled world of animation.
The 37-year-old Braly, if you’re unfamiliar, has contributed to some of the most influential series in modern animation – he was a storyboard artist and director on Alex Hirsch’s acclaimed Disney Channel series “Gravity Falls;” wrote an episode of Cartoon Network’s “Steven Universe;” and wrote and directed episodes of Disney’s “Big City Greens.”
Most importantly, though, he created “Amphibia,” a sprawling, frog-filled fantasy for Disney that lasted for three seasons and 58 episodes and, thanks to its combination of winning design, lovable characters and deep lore, has become a fan favorite, meticulously obsessed over to this day (despite a bizarre lack of merchandise or spinoff materials).
When “Amphibia” wrapped up its somewhat contentious third season, hampered by the pandemic and the hand-wringing of nervous Disney executives, Braly was ready for his next challenge: a feature film. It was to be co-written by “Steven Universe” creator Rebecca Sugar and produced by Sony Pictures Animation, which had quickly established itself as the go-to place for boundary-pushing animated features with projects like “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” “KPop Demon Hunters” and, of course, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and its equally compelling sequel.
That film, after years of development, was scrapped over concerns its premise wouldn’t be digestible enough for a mass audience. So now, as TheWrap reveals some exclusive concept art from Braly’s never-made movie, the creative explains why he’s opted to forge a new path: starting an independent animation studio. The risky move involves a Kickstarter and eschewing for-hire work in favor of crafting a safe haven for artists to create the kind of animated films and shows that major studios are too risk-averse to greenlight in this contracted, cash-strapped moment for the entertainment industry.
But the road to independence begins with a movie about a sick kid.
What happened to Matt Braly’s Sony movie
In 2023, a breathless press release was issued by Sony announcing that Braly’s movie was in development. This is a rarity for animation, where projects are developed and can fall by the wayside, all in relative obscurity. They were excited about this project. Until they weren’t.
“After ‘Amphibia’ ended, I had this one dream project, which was a Thai spirits movie with a little boy who was sick and needed some operation. He would go to the world of spirits to be healed and he would return unhealed, but with a sense of acceptance or a shift in perspective that allowed him to move forward,” Braly explained.
This story was so important to him because it was his story – Braly suffers from short bowel syndrome, described by the Mayo Clinic as “a condition in which the body cannot absorb enough nutrients from foods because part of the small intestine is missing or damaged.” He had his intestines removed when he was a kid and, since the fourth grade, has fed himself nutrients at night through a port in his chest.
“I really felt so strongly that I needed to get this out there, mostly for sick kids, but the reality that all of us are years away from some kind of significant medical event. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but it comes for all of us, because we’re human and our bodies are fragile. They break down,” Braly explained. “To me, this was a movie that played for every age group. I don’t care if you’re 40, I don’t care if you’re 70 or if you’re 12. This was a story about having a big, scary lifestyle change and changing your circumstances and learning to grapple with it.”
Braly said that he felt “the movie had a really great reason to be.” He pitched it to Sony and they loved it and were very excited about it, particularly the “Thai cultural stuff.”
“I would say that after they optioned it, that’s when everything went south,” Braly said.
Development on the feature, Braly said, “felt a little bit scattered and deeply unserious.” He loved his development team and they would work for years on the project. At a certain point, it would go to the very top and then it would be “rejected based on its one sentence premise.”
“You’re doing all this work and we’re nitpicking the logo, you know, we’re talking about the music in the trailer, we’re looking at the character designs in the art, but then at the end of the day, the people who are presented the movie are just like, ‘Can I make a movie about a sick kid and Thai spirits work? No. No thanks,’” explained Braly. “As sad as it sounds, that’s where rubber hits road on dozens and dozens of projects, where it always ends up a discussion of commercial viability.”
What made the process particularly frustrating for Braly was the fact that he didn’t get a lot of what he describes as “actionable feedback.” “Even when the film was ultimately rejected, I remember being on the phone with my development people and they were asking if the executives had any feedback that we could move on, anything we could do to come back to them with a different take. And there was just no interest. There was no desire to make the movie work for the studio’s needs,” Braly said. “It was a hard pass after a lot of work and not much wiggle room. That was a bit frustrating, because I think of myself as being very good with feedback and very good working with others.”
A representative for Sony Pictures Animation had no comment.
Not that Braly harbors any ill will.
“To their credit, they could never say, ‘Ah, well, we didn’t give it our best shot.’ Everyone was pulling for the movie. I just think in this incredibly demanding landscape, it was seen as too out of reach,” Braly said.
Braly’s project was dismissed before the arrival of “KPop Demon Hunters,” which similarly mixed cultural specificity with supernatural angst, not that it matters much now. “It’s not like anybody has called me and said, ‘We’ve changed our minds,’” Braly said. “It’s not like my phone was ringing off the hook to bring this movie back into the shop and make it work for them.”
After the project imploded, Sony allowed Braly to shop the project around – Netflix was “really receptive” and had a strong working relationship with Sony, but had some projects on their slate that were deemed “too similar,” he said. This was 2025, and “it was Netflix or independent funding and independent funding is such a tricky beast,” Braly said.
There were conversations with some international animation studios. The problem was that any studio that picked up the rights to the project would owe Sony for years of development costs. He was talking to tiny studios who couldn’t afford the massive costs associated with a negative pickup on the project.
“Those conversations didn’t really get off the ground and after a year of hoping something would happen, I just decided it would be best to move on so that I could focus on different things. I didn’t want to be in a holding pattern with this movie,” Braly said.
He decided to announce, publicly, that the movie was over and shared some concept art across his social media platforms. “I’ve got to tell animation enthusiasts where I’m at. Because if I don’t, they’re going to be like, ‘Hey, didn’t this guy have a Sony movie?’” Braly said. Shortly after he announced that the movie was done, he revealed a pair of exciting new ventures. But he had to send his passion project a fond farewell before he moved on.
“Many of the projects go on a shelf and are never made and that’s it. You just don’t talk about them. We’re talking about dozens and dozens of movies. They get to the same place and the creator or the person who cared about this thing enough to pitch it around for two or three years has to bury the dead body in the backyard,” Braly said. “But for me, I was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to play this Agatha Christie mystery and not talk about it.’”
After he announced that the Sony movie was dead, Braly said that many people reached out and told him they wished that they could say something about their own project that was canceled. He encouraged those creatives to share their experiences. “You should care as much as they do, which is not at all. They’re just hoping you’ll disappear, that you’ll climb out the window without making any noise,” Braly said. He acknowledges that sometimes NDAs can get in the way of artists telling their story, along with fears of being deemed unprofessional, but he still thinks more people should tell their story.
He was also encouraged by the amount of people that reached out with comments about the art and how excited they were by the project – people were sending him fan art of characters from a project that will never see the light of day. This was especially true in Thailand, “where it went a bit viral and everyone was disappointed that, once again, the West was not taking a chance on Southeast Asian culture,” Braly explained, pointing to animated projects that have fully embraced Chinese, South Korean and Japanese culture.
Thankfully, Sony was cool with him talking about the project and why it was rejected. Even in death, they have remained supportive.
And while he is still tinkering on some studio projects (along with projects like a new “Amphibia” graphic novel), Braly knew that it was time to forge his own path. His public announcement was part of this journey – he wanted to make sure that, if you were interested in his work, you could know how to support him. Not by buying a ticket to a big studio feature, but by helping him out more directly.
Fantasy Project
With the Sony project dead, Braly had hit what he described as a “fork in the road.”
“Am I going to get back in with one of these big studios and just get back to work developing something for two or more years that will end up in the same board room where some group of individuals thinks it’s not commercial enough?” Braly said. “To me, I saw this as an opportunity to relaunch myself as someone who is creating something directly for the consumer, directly for the viewer. Because the real dream for any artist or creative is to own your own work and to be able to support yourself with something that you yourself own. I figured, instead of going back into the diamond mines of development, where there’s no air and you may not come out alive, I would strike out on my own and try something really crazy and see if I can’t get something made faster and more to my liking.”
To facilitate this dream, Braly has formed a new studio called Fantasy Project. Its logo is a baby dragon hatching out of an egg – a perfect encapsulation of Braly’s innate design sense, his skill at inherently appealing character design and his deep love of fantasy tropes. Braly said that the studio is just him and “a couple other folks.” (He did not name the other folks.)
“We really want to try and build a business model that allows us to create original stories, with different lengths. We’re going to start with short form and work our way up from there and see if we can eventually get a movie in theaters. That would be the biggest win for someone like me,” he said.
“But really, this is a studio that’s not about contract work. It’s not about, hire us and we’ll animate your commercials. This is about telling extremely compelling stories with resonant themes and great characters of our own creation. If I opened an animation studio and we were just doing what everybody else did, which is like, we’re going to animate sneakers commercials, and we’re going to do, God forbid, NFT stuff, that would just be a grind, and I would just end up shackled to commercials for God knows how long.”
Instead, Braly’s company will be focused on creating content they themselves ideate.
“I wanted something really different, which is that Fantasy Project is not for hire. We’re not looking for contracts to animate shows for people or do their animatics or workshop their scripts,” he said. “We are looking to create our own things with support from animation enthusiasts and fans.”
As for the business model meant to sustain Fantasy Project, well, that’s in its embryonic stage. The first part is a Kickstarter, meant for a new Braly original project (more on that in a minute).
“The Kickstarter is really to say, Do you guys even like this? Would you maybe throw a five our way to see something like this hit the screen?” Braly said.
The next phase would be following in the footsteps of something like Glitch, which has a new show from Braly’s Disney Channel compatriot Dana Terrace coming soon, or Spindle Horse, which was the original home to “Hazbin Hotel” (which has since exploded into a multimedia bonanza). Both come from a merchandise-forward place; unlike Disney which will often wait years to produce a single piece of tie-in merchandise for one of its original series.
“We’re after the same model, which is that you make characters and worlds that people love, and then you cover merchandise based around that world and those characters,” Braly said. In this model, the merchandise drives the creative production, not the other way around. “I know this sounds so bold and new, but it’s how it used to be in the ‘80s. It feels like somewhere along the line, we forgot how to make money from these wonderful characters, which is utterly bizarre to me.”
Disney never made any official “Amphibia” merchandise, which still haunts Braly.
“Why would you make these great characters for this big company that was known, by the way, for exploiting IP and here we are making nothing. And the revenue being brought in by these shows is shrinking every year because it’s based on linear ads,” he said, pointing to the declining business model of linear TV. “It’s just a mess in terms of something that used to work, now just doesn’t work, but everyone has blinders on, hoping that somehow this ads-based model will work again for them.”
While starting the new studio, Braly admits, is still “very scary,” he’s also deeply committed.
“I’m terrified to start the studio which, by the way, the studio of our size and what we’re capable of, might as well be a YouTube channel. We’re talking more about a brand, because in order to have full-time workers, we’re going to need millions of dollars,” Braly said. The company doesn’t have any angel investors and while he thought about starting it with him and a bunch of his friends, he decided that having multiple CEOs would be a nightmare. “It’s really important to show the world that you can put your money where your mouth is before you start asking for their [big companies or streamers] money,” Braly said.
Braly is not, he wants to double-underline, quitting Hollywood. He is still “developing on the side,” as he puts it. (Like for those projects for big studios.) Braly is open to working with anyone who wants to make great things, he’s just not interested in sinking years of his life into development again.
“I think that’s really a demonstration of where we are as a business, where, like, Hey, I’m ready and willing to do make great shows and movies for people, but until they get their act together and are interested in actually making things, I’m going to try and make things by myself,” he said.
He encourages people to “check this space” in five to 10 years to see where things are with Fantasy Project. But right now, he describes the studio as “a small, dedicated group trying to make some really cool stuff, hoping that we can turn it into something viable.”
And if they can’t?
“At least we tried,” Braly said.
“Clara and the Below”
The first project from Fantasy Project is “Clara and the Below,” which has a Kickstarter campaign that will launch on March 17.
On social media, Braly described the story as this – “To save her bedridden ex-military father, Clara must fight the ghosts of the soldiers he killed on the battlefield in a surreal world under her house simply called the Below. She is aided by a mischievous toy nutcracker who represents her innocence and childhood, her only guide in a place where the ghosts of the past run rampant.”
The idea, Braly said, is to do four episodes, which are each eight-to-ten-minutes in length. (The new Kickstarter is for the first episode.) All four episodes would take place in the same world, but “maybe feature different characters and different perspectives.” The idea is that, when all four are put together, you have a bigger story – eventually forming, in both story and length, what you would imagine could be a traditional pilot for a network or streaming series. With a story borrowed from “The Nutcracker,” the first episode concerns Clara, the second episode is about the Rat King, Episode 3 is about Drosselmeyer and then the fourth episode has them all converging.
“What’s really cool about that is that you’ll have four stories that play by themselves, but when you put them all together and take a step back, you should have something really special,” Braly said.
One key source of inspiration for “Clara and the Below” was the Gothic fantasy of Guillermo del Toro – things like “Crimson Peak” and, of course, “Pan’s Labyrinth.” “I really think that we have sucked the danger out of fairy tales. What I love about this dark, Gothic setting is that we can really juice up the danger here. These things should be like a dark tunnel that you’re so glad to like see the back of when you get out,” Braly explained.
He was also hugely inspired by Genndy Tartakovsky’s groundbreaking series “Samurai Jack,” which ran on Cartoon Network from 2001 to 2004 and then was resurrected for an additional, more adult-skewering season in 2017.
“The most wonderful thing about ‘Samurai Jack,’ to me, is how dialogue-free it often is,” Braly said. With “Clara and the Below,” the main character can talk but she doesn’t much. (“She’s a mostly silent protagonist, there to get the job done,” said Braly.) He responded to the fact that “Samurai Jack” is full of chatty characters that are playing off of him but Jack himself, a samurai who is unstuck in time and space, stays pretty quiet.
“Storytellers, especially now in Hollywood, are terrified of this. They’re terrified to take half the dialogue out of their scripts, especially kids programming. Every movie has so much dialogue explaining to you what is literally happening right in front of you,” Braly said. Part of this he understands, since streaming series and movies have become “second screen” entertainment, played in the background. But “Clara and the Below” will not be that.
“If you want to watch ‘Clara and the Below,’ you have to watch it. You can have your phone out, do whatever you want, but there’s no dialogue that will hold your hand. You will be forced to engage with the story. I think somebody’s got to push back against this incredibly talky generation of media. Obviously I love great dialogue and dialogue-driven stuff. But it can’t be all that there is,” Braly said.
If the Kickstarter is a success, the first episode of “Clara and the Below” will debut on Dec. 25, 2026.
And while he doesn’t know how the Kickstater will do, at the time that we spoke, it was in the middle of a 30-day pre-launch, which is meant to build excitement for the project before you can plunk down your hard-earned cash. There were 3,000 follows on the Kickstarter page when we spoke, which was very heartening to Braly.
“It fills us with a lot of confidence that this is something that people want,” Braly said.
The post After His Movie Was Scrapped, ‘Amphibia’ Creator Matt Braly Is Forging a New Path in Independent Animation | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.
