About a year and half ago I interviewed a quirky Sarasota snowbird who had just won an award from the Sarasota County Film & Entertainment Office for an 82-page screenplay he wrote about a city kid who imagines he’s a cowboy in the wild west. The fella’s name: Mifflin Lowe. The title of his story: The Adventures of Cowboy Kareem. His objective: to get a studio to turn the script into an animated short; a big dream, but not impossible for someone with ambition, heart and talent.
As Lowe described scenes from the story – Kareem envisioning skyscrapers as mountains, bike handlebars as ox horns and women’s fur coats as grizzly bears – I immediately saw the project’s potential. I could picture it almost as vividly as Lowe could; this beautiful and lively animated short about a boy with an overactive imagination.
In a perfect world, the script would fall into the hands of the geniuses at Moonbot Studios. (Note: Moonbot won the Academy Award in 2012 for Best Animated Short for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. In September the studio grabbed headlines again when its Scarecrow ad for Chipotle went viral. Dear Moonbot, Lowe is on to something with Cowboy Kareem. You read it here first.)