Dan Gerson writes in with a follow-up on my post about short scripts:
You had a footnote about the length of feature animation screenplays. You described them as often shorter than live action screenplays, and obviously, that was your experience on Corpse Bride.
Just wanted to offer a different perspective. Having worked on a whole bunch myself, for Pixar and other studios, I’ve found that more often than not, page counts are a little higher than live action. Often, it’s because of the level of description.
Dan offers some examples:
Toy Story – 80 minute running time, 143 page script
Finding Nemo – 100 minute running time, 141 page script
Incredibles – 115 minute running time, 125 page script
Toy Story 2 – 92 minute running time, 117 page script
I’ve chosen these at random. It could be that this isn’t a great sampling. Whatever the case, I thought my experience might help those writers out there who are concerned their feature animation scripts are running long.