Young DaVinci

Story brief

Synopsis

Ren is twelve, and the best thing in his life belongs to somebody else. He sweeps Leonardo da Vinci's workshop, catches his master's flying machines in a cargo net, mixes his pigments, and carries everywhere a half-finished portrait of an imaginary girl he is too afraid to complete. At home, his father takes every coin he earns and leaves marks where they don't show. Da Vinci gives him the idea the whole film runs on: art already exists, complete, somewhere. It only needs an artist pure enough in heart to bring it into the world. Ren doesn't believe that applies to him. Then a jealous, talentless rival buys an enchanted brush from a back-alley mystic and plants it in the workshop as a murder weapon. Ren picks it up first. On the other side is the Realm of Unfinished Art — the Great Wave frozen mid-curl, a prairie with no buffalo drawn in yet, a Starry Night that swirls when you fall into it, a griffin with a temper, and a Medusa nobody ever got around to giving a happy ending. And there is Lisa: a girl painted from the waist up and sketched in charcoal from the waist down, who swaps her transparent hand for her finished one when she wants to look at it, and who has been waiting a very long time to meet the coward who walked away from her canvas. She doesn't know it's him. Until, falling through a sky full of stars, he tells her. She calls him a coward and runs — straight into Medusa's coils. And Ren, who has never once believed in himself, has to arm himself out of a world of unfinished paintings: a Spartan shield, the Sword of Damocles, the Wright brothers' flyer. It ends in a wizard's duel of paint, an army of half-drawn legends led by a girl who announces that nobody touches my artist, and a boy kneeling beside what's left of her to say the only true thing he has ever known: You're not gone. You're just... unfinished. Then he finishes her — and paints the most famous smile in the world.

Tone

A full-throated Broadway-scale animated musical — joyous, funny, gorgeous, and unafraid of real cruelty, about the terror of your own talent.

Setting

Renaissance Florence, and the Realm of Unfinished Art: a world of half-painted masterpieces waiting for someone brave enough to complete them.

This original feature screenplay by David R. Wilcox is available for option, development, or production. A complete review copy is available to qualified producers, literary managers, and development executives on request.