Juno (film)
Diablo Cody was first approached to write a screenplay by film producer Mason Novick, who had previously landed her a book deal for her memoir, "", after discovering her blog about stripping. He persuaded her to adapt the book for the screen, but suggested that she first write a screenwriting sample to show studios; that sample became "Juno". After deciding on an adoption storyline, Cody collected the stories of adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents, including that of her then-husband, an adoptee who reunited with his birth parents after she wrote the film. She also found inspiration in the story of a close friend who had become pregnant in high school and used some details from her friend's experience in the film, such as mistreatment from an ultrasound technician. Much of "Juno", however, was based on Cody's own high school experiences: She dated a tic-tac-loving boy similar to Paulie, she was best friends with a cheerleader like Leah, and she used a hamburger phone identical to the one that appears in the film. After writing the screenplay over seven weeks in the Starbucks section of a Target store in Crystal, Minnesota, Cody compared writing to breathing, seeing Juno as an extension of herself.
Little Nemo (1911 film)
Inspired by flip books his son Robert brought home, McCay said he "came to see the possibility of making moving pictures" of his cartoons. McCay, then in his early forties, asserted he was "the first man in the world to make animated films", but he was likely familiar with the earlier work of American James Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl. In 1900, Blackton produced "The Enchanted Drawing", a trick film in which an artist interacts with a drawing on an easel. Blackton used chalk drawings in 1906 to animate the film "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces", and used stop motion techniques to animate a scene in the 1907 film "The Haunted Hotel". Cohl's films, such as 1908's "Fantasmagorie", were dreamlike nonnarrative pieces in which characters and scenes continually changed shape. Cohl's films were first distributed in the United States in 1909, the year McCay said he first became interested in animation. According to McCay biographer John Canemaker, McCay combined the interactive qualities of Blackton's films with the abstract, shapeshifting qualities of Cohl's into his own films. In the films of all three, the artist interacts with the animation.