For more than a decade, reports have been circulating about the original version of the upcoming action movie Furiosa — an anime series that director George Miller and writer Mahiro Maeda were working on at the same time they were developing Mad Max: Fury Road. At a Q&A after a recent press screening for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga at IMAX Headquarters outside of Los Angeles, Miller revealed that while the anime series eventually evolved into a live-action film, one small element survived from the defunct project, taken from early character sketches by Fury Road concept artist and anime stalwart Maeda.
Miller revealed that the script for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was finished before he even filmed Fury Road. “In order to tell that story cohesively, we had to know everything that happened in the time before [the movie started],” he said. “So we wrote a story about Furiosa from the time she was taken as a child, as she refers to in Fury Road, until she became the Imperator Furiosa. That ended up as a full screenplay, with concept art and so on. And the actors, the designers, and all the crew got the screenplay of that before shooting Fury Road.”
That unusual production route led to the supplementary screenplay being considered as an anime project, with Fury Road concept artist Maeda — best known for his work on Evangelion 3.0 and Kill Bill — creating designs for the series. His art has been shared online since 2015, when the film version of Furiosa was believed to be just as dead as the anime project. “We were thinking of making it as an anime, and that’s part of why it was so well-developed,” Miller said. “But then Fury Road was delayed, so there was no point in making an anime.”
The only element taken from that concept art that actually made it into the final Furiosa film: an unexpected accessory worn by Chris Hemsworth’s villainous wasteland warlord, Dementus. The imposing figure wears a teddy bear chained to his body, and places it on his vehicle dashboard as he rides around in his war motorcade. After being exposed to the elements of the Wasteland, it’s a pretty beat-up bear, but it’s a key part of his look. We won’t get into the teddy bear’s origin — that’s best experienced by watching Furiosa — but we can say its positioning highlights its importance.
“That teddy bear — [Maeda] started doing some illustrations and put that bear in,” Miller said at the post-screening Q&A. “And then that became a part of the story. So that was already there before Fury Road.”
Image: Warner Bros./YouTube
Juxtaposing the cuteness of the golden plush toy with Dementus’ chains-and-oiled-muscles dynamic feels very much like the kind of cartoony, comedic element an anime series would bring to these characters. It brings an unexpectedly cute element to the brutality of Furiosa’s war-torn landscape. The film’s aesthetic sensibilities also lean heavily into anime influences, from the characters’ dramatic action poses on the posters to the hyper-stylized desert-steampunk costuming.
The teddy bear isn’t just a stylistic flourish, either. It’s deeply connected to Dementus — and ultimately, to his relationship with Furiosa and the 18-year narrative the Furiosa movie lays out. It’ll all be clearer when you see how Hemsworth’s rough-and-ready teddy plays into the film’s post-apocalyptic action epic, when Furiosa hits theaters on May 24.