Update on my Animation Idea

I've been thinking a lot recently, and I've pretty much now decided to drop my animation idea altogether and stop work on it completely. Unfortunately I am unable to settle on a story. I have the setting and the characters all sorted, but I can't quite nail the storyline that I was going for. I had a few similar ideas but I couldn't choose one, and to me none of them had that 'wow factor' that I wanted to have.

After having a chat with another one of my lecturers, I decided to change the story from the one in a separate post below. I really wanted to have a dark humour/horror feel to it, but nothing too drastic. My inspirations are The Wickerman, The Village, The Cabin in the Woods and also Hot Fuzz (the cult) which I'm sure you'll soon realise. As stated before, I had a few story ideas which were all quite similar, but here are the basic outlines of two of the ideas I liked the most:

 IDEA 1

Set in a remote village, this little village is a popular place to come because of a myth that surrounds it. Constantly bustling with people, soldiers and knights from all over the country come to visit and stay in the local Inns, bringing in a lot of revenue for the village. The myth itself is of a creature which resides just outside the village. For many centuries soldiers have tried, and failed, to kill this creature, who 'attacks' the village at random. To this day people still try to kill it, for there is a reward for doing so - 100 gold coins, and the title of 'beast slayer'.

So you think everything is normal. It's just another day where knights are trying to kill the creature. But we, as viewers, realise there's more to this story than meets the eye. The villagers are in fact in with the killings. They have come to an 'understanding' with the creature, which is that as long as they constantly bring him food (in the form of humans - the knights and soldiers) he would spare the village. So for many years this 'agreement' has stood strong, the village staying safe and the knights unknowingly serving as tasty food. So to show this in one of the scenes we see a group of knights being surrounded, stalked and attacked by the creature (I would want a few quick shots here) as they are picked off one by one in different ways (e.g the tail of the creature pierces a body of a knight and drags it back into the darkness of the forest).

But one day a young teenage boy, who is a farmer, decides he's had enough with this pact and thinks it's wrong that it should continue. So he sets off, on no more than an hours journey (which will just be one or two shots of him traversing the landscape and the forest) to the creature's lair on a horse and cart until he finally arrives and comes face to face with it. He tells the creature than he has come only to bring a gift, which he does - a massive baked Pie. So the creature devours the pie immediately, along with the horse which the boy unfortunately forgets about. Seconds later the creature falls to the ground, stone dead. The boy then cuts the head off, throws it into a bag and drags it back through the forest to his Village. He imagines how happy the villagers will be, no longer having to live in terror and give in to the creatures demands. Upon arriving though his thoughts suddenly vanish. In a shock twist, when he shows off the creatures head he realises that the villagers are furious with him that he killed it. After all these years they had ended up looking up at it like a God, some even worshipping it. And now that everyone knew the creature was dead no one would visit here again. So they grab the boy and punish him (now this is where I'm stuck, I'm not sure how to end it or what the punishment would be - the ideas I have are that he either becomes an outcast after being thrown out of the village OR he's tied to a steak or something - or something similar to the end of The Wickerman and burnt. Which would be a REALLY dark ending, maybe too dark, I'm not sure...)

IDEA 2

Very similar to before, but instead there isn't a creature at all (well, not at the beginning anyway)

The villagers created the myth to make their village popular again, because it was run-down and practically in ruins. But the revenue coming in had allowed them to bring it back up to how it used to be. So the knights go off to find the creature, we see that they are actually killed by the villagers at the location of the 'creature', which is hidden in the forest around the village. They then craftingly fling the helmets or weapons with a hidden catapult over the trees, and make fires and scorch the earth as if the creature had breathed fire. 

But the twist is that there is actually a creature, which is awakened after being in dormant for many, many years. So it attacks the village, killing nearly everyone but one unlikely hero (the boy) ends up killing it in a witty way (the pie?)

(As you can tell, this idea is nowhere near as developed as the last, and doesn't have as much of an ending - if one at all) 

So yeah, unfortunately I'm not sure if I'm going to carry on with this. I don't know if it has got enough of a story, if there's too much going on for it to fit into a 3 minute film, whether it will be too difficult to create...or if it should be an animation at all. As one of the things my lecturers say is that if it's something which can be created in live-action, then it shouldn't be an animation. I'll just have to see how this goes. I hope to talk to some people about my idea and give a final descision as to whether or not I will go ahead with this idea, but I am very passionate about it. I love mythical tales and stories about creatures, so I wanted to do one myself, but in a darker tone. As nearly all of the mythical tales I have read have a good ending, the most common being where the guy kills the creature and gets the girl/fame. The other reason why I wanted to go for dark humour/horror is that it doesn't seem like none of my other coursemates have gone for that theme. Most of them are going to be made for children, which is definitely not the target audience I am looking for with my film.