Lucy is an environmental fantasy drama for our time from the world of speculative fiction.
Animated, or a blend of animation and live action.
A museum guard’s imagination places Lady Time on trial, as she tries to discover a
Bear’s Song in the hopes of reconnecting humanity to nature.
The theme of disconnect and reconnecting humankind to nature runs throughout the story.
The story was inspired by the death of a Bear and her unborn cub gunned down in Flagstaff, AZ.
Synopsis:
In a North of England Museum, tucked away in a corner is a 400Lb Brown American Bear – LUCY. Lucy is a real animal that had been mounted after death, treated to preserve her, and posed to appear rageful and a lifelike predator. How this bear came to a museum in the 1880s, via a London Circus, is a mystery. Today, no one really cares, except HAROLD, a guide at the museum near retirement.
On the same day the new Director of the museum BRIDGET CROMER arrives with her rebellious vision to do away with collections. Harold’s daydream imagination sets a challenge to TIME. Time hasn’t been very kind to you, old girl, has it? The challenge to hear Lucy’s Bear Song, to see the world of human interaction with the natural world as perceived by bears, is taken up by TOMORROW and issued to the current keeper of time, LADY TIME.
Harold’s curiosity over the bear and her fate at the hands of the new Museum Director inspires the Head of Collections, CRAIG, a British-Asian, to do a little digging in what he calls the playground for the mind, how he understands museum collections to be. In this environmental fantasy Lucy takes Lady Time on a journey of discovery and self-realization which reveals why Tomorrow took up the challenge and set Lady Time down this road.
Often dark, powerful, a moving tale about the modern world we live in, humanities disconnect from nature, and the need to engage to shape the planet of tomorrow.
Lucy is a new kind of screen story, a dark environmental fantasy. Intended to be told as an animated film mixing styles befitting a fantasy tale it may even include some live action. With strong female characters, Lucy is aimed at the young adult audience in a tale about humanity and mankind’s often fatal disconnect from the natural world as viewed by a 400lb North American Brown Bear in her imagined world.
An escape into the mind and imagination of a Bear. As Richard Adam’s Watership Down dealt with Humankind’s connection to the natural world, Lucy explores man’s relationship and loss of connection to nature as seen through the eyes of a bear.
“With Lucy I wanted to create a family story that explores a tale from the natural world about humankind’s disconnect with nature causes a calamity for one species, the bear. This is a very different kind of story intended to be told using animation in an environmental drama.”
Peter M. Kershaw, writer