I have such an idea for a Pixar movie....
There’s this kid, a colorful boy about 10, and he lives in a world where everyone’s imagination is visible. When you’re imagination is working, it shows above your head in swirls and swirls of bright colors. This boy has such an active imagination; it grows and grows until it fills the entire room.
The movie opens in a classroom. He’s sitting at his desk, writing down a story, dreaming of a Western. Above his head, shapes form and react with one another, and it gets brighter and more colorful, and pure red horses are galloping around the classroom while outlaws are trying to escape out the window - until he’s reprimanded by the teacher.
The swirls of color fade, and we see what the teacher sees. The classroom is wrecked, and the children are running wild, the boy’s imagination the catalyst for the destruction and chaos. The teacher looks frustrated and angry as she writes something down. The boy’s head falls, and the scene fades.
We now see the boy’s home, only in dark colors, angular silhouettes and shadows. We see the boy shamefully handing his parents a note that has been pinned to his jacket. His parents (who are just deep purple silhouettes, as angular and flat as the rest of the house) look very worried. His father puts his arm around his mother as their shadows grow, and the scene fades to black.
Next shot is the boy looking out a car window. You can tell he’s puzzled as the car pulls into an unhappy looking parking lot. All angles in this parking lot are blunted, like a rectangle that has had the corners cut off, and the cars reflected in the window as they pass by are dull and similar to one another. They park and his mother (off screen) takes his hand and leads him out of the car, and into a big grey building. The boy looks up at the sky as they walk, but the sun and blue sky are obscured as he is pulled into the building.
Here, his imagination is strangely inactive. It struggles to bloom, but it is still clearly more active than anyone else there. All the other people have dull, or grey, or just totally gone imaginations. This frightens him. Pulled into a white room by his mother, the door locks as he sits down.
It’s a typical doctor’s office, with the plain white walls and uncomfortable sterility. Here, his imagination is slightly more active than in the grey waiting room, and you can see it beginning to form a pirate ship scene on the blank walls of the room. The colors become brighter and he is about to be taken completely into his imagination, but just as the ship begins to move on the now-filled walls, the doctor walks in. His mother covers her eyes in shame.
The boy’s mother is sent out of the room, and she reluctantly heads out, and the door is quietly shut behind her by the doctor. The boy turns from his pirate ship scene and looks at the doctor. You can tell he’s frightened, and the scene fades from the wall. The screen goes dark as the doctor’s shadow falls over the boys face. From this point forward, each time we see the boy, he looks a little less colorful, a little more grayscale.
The boy is at school now. Everyone’s imaginations are blooming and swirling as normal, but the boy’s…..the boy’s is missing. He looks listless, depressed. Like he hasn’t been sleeping or smiling in days. He is sent home with a new note, this one praising his improvement in class. His parents look happy, if a bit worried as well. The boy slogs up to his room and the scene ends.
In his room, we see it now has the same blunted angle look as the parking lot, color drained out of everything, a small metal box sitting on his bedside table. The boy sits on the edge of his bed, doing nothing until he reaches over and grabs the box, bringing it into his lap. This box is the only sharp-cornered thing in the room, has one small keyhole, and, aside from one small dent in the side, is just as sickeningly medical and pristine as the doctor’s office was. The boy tries in vain to open it, but soon gives up and places it back on the table before curling up to sleep.
The next bit is a sequence of the boy finding his way back to the office with his box via walking, waiting, and bus, until he’s finally standing in front of a door in the office that looms over him, an ugly tan color with frosted glass in the window. The boy pushes open the door and walks in.
In here there are thousands of keys, in rows and rows and rows, and he simply sits down, methodically trying one key after the next in his little box. The pile beside him grows and grows, until finally, we hear a “click” and the lid to the box opens. He opens the box, and finds a thick layer of colorful dust, barely glowing in the dim light of the office.
As he stares down at the remainders of his imagination, he hears the door squeak open and turns around, terrified it’s the doctor. But in the doorway is a little girl, maybe five or six years old, clutching a teddy bear and sporting an imagination as bright as his once was. She looks scared and lost, but notices his lack of imagination. She comes over to the boy and with her thumb shyly in her mouth, holds out her teddy bear.
The boy takes the bear in his hand and a small smile spreads across his face. In the glow of the girl’s imagination, he looks more colorful, more like he did at the beginning. We zoom backward from the scene, further into the shelves of keys, and as we leave the boy and girl, we see him kneel down and hand the teddy bear back, small spurts of color swirling around his head.
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