Produced by Oscar winners Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and Kurt Albrecht, and featuring the voices of Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Beck Bennett, Fred Armisen, Eric Andre, and Oscar winner Olivia Colman, The Mitchells vs. The Machines is about embracing the things that make us unique, learning what it means to be human in a world increasingly filled with technology, and holding tight to the people most important to you when the unexpected hits.

We were fortunate to talk about this both hilarious and emotional film with no less than its Director and Writer, Mike Rianda. Born in Salinas, California in 1984, he studied character animation at the California Institute Of The Arts from 2007 to 2010, and made the short films Everybody Dies in 90 Seconds and Work. He has since been employed by Pixar Animation Studios and JibJab, taught at CalArts, and worked at Disney Television Animation, where he served as a writer and creative director for the Annie Award-winning TV show, Gravity Falls.

Here’s our conversation with him.

Mike Rianda: I think so. It is about sort of connecting with the people in your life that you love and even though that’s not always easy, it’s worth doing, it’s worth putting in the effort and building those relationships because they end up being some of the most important in your life. Also, these relationships are what separate us from machines, who can do a lot of other things that we can do already, maybe better than us. So, we tried to sort of figure out what about humanity is really valuable.

AV: It’s your first feature-length movie. Can you tell me about the challenge of working in that format?

MR: It’s the hardest thing to do! It’s brutal! But it’s also a wonderful challenge because on one hand, it’s so difficult to get one of these things working, in the sense of accomplishing the thing you’re trying to do. That’s the hardest thing. It’s just like – okay, this is a joke? We want it to be funny. This is an emotional moment? We want it to work. We want this to make people’s heart glow, you know. And it’s especially hard when it’s your first time. That’s one of the reasons why it was wonderful to have Chris Miller and Phil Lord as Executive Producers, because they were able to back us when people were like, “Hum, is that a good idea?” and we were like, “We think it is.” And then Phil Lord and Chris Miller were able to be like, “Hey, we’re with them. This is great! Let’s do it!” And then they listened to them because they made hit movies and stuff, and I’m just a guy who worked on a TV show for a while. So, it was a really wonderful experience even though it was incredibly challenging.

AV: I also loved the art direction of your movie, like a bridge between the Lizzie McGuire series, for the 2D parts, and Tron, for the technological side!

MR: Our Production Designer, Lindsey Olivares, is the first person I hired on the movie, and she was so wonderful. Ultimately, there are three parts in the movie. The first part is about humans, strange humans, and we wanted that humanity to be reflected in every frame. For instance, in our movie, trees are wobbly, they’re not these perfect CG trees you would just draw right out of the box in CG. We wanted to have every single thing in the movie to have that feel of a human hand. It’s not perfect but it’s kind of beautiful in this imperfection.

And then, there is this robots thing, and we basically came to it like – what is the exact opposite of the philosophy that we have for the rest of the movie? If this looks wobbly and weak and not perfect, we’re gonna have perfect, symmetrical, strong compositions. If we’re using earth tones, we’re gonna use crazy, bright colors, like a Mac Store, to mirror sort of the aesthetics of technology. We had tons of great artists for whom that was their specialty. We had this great Color Stylist in Dave Bleich and the Art Director Toby Wilson. They really brought some of that and made that really bold.

And finally, the “Katie vision” drawings were another way to bring humanity into the movie by showing the hand of a teenager, and it ended up making us closer to Katie as a character. It wasn’t just like an idea we tried. We tried a lot of ideas but that one really stuck because that it felt – oh, you’re getting more of the voice of the character and you’re understanding from a deeper way how this person thinks. And you’re seeing it on the screen. That was really inspiring to me and that’s one thing that I’d like to chase in future movies and stuff, you know, it’s that feeling of subjective storytelling.

AV: These 2D drawings are also the way Katie imagines her own movies. But there seems to be something more personal in there…

MR: Yes! In a way, Katie makes these movies that are a little silly but they have high aspirations. She’s an ambitious person but she’s not afraid to be goofy. That’s sort of who we are as filmmakers. We have high aspirations; we really want the movie to be of a high quality and for people to love it. But at the same time, we allow ourselves to have a lot of fun and not sort of take things too seriously.

AV: In what way do you think your experience on Gravity Falls nourished your approach to The Mitchells vs. The Machines?

MR: In many ways. I learned so many storytelling lessons from Gravity Falls. Primary, among them, is just to have characters that you love and respect as the authors. We put so much love into that show and every spec of it was picked up by people. Every little joke we had, someone noticed it and someone was excited about it. And that really was inspiring because it made you realize that the more love you put into something, the more you get to people’s hearts. So, we just tried to take that philosophy of being very generous with the audience and really rewarding their attention. And also, there’s that work ethic that we had on the series, to work hard and make sure that every scene was perfect, even if it’s harder in TV because they rip the episode away from you, before you’re like, “Oh, it’s the perfect gem!” But it’s also great because it gives you tons of experience. And then the final thing I would say is Alex Hirsch (the creator of Gravity Falls) and I were, like, we talked on the phone almost every day. He was consulting on this from the very inception of the idea. He was working on his own stuff, but I would always call him and we talked about stuff. It was awesome to have him there from the beginning. It’s no Gravity Falls movie, but hopefully all the things that I learned from it came through.

AV: How did you work with composer Mark Mothersbaugh?

MR: In many ways, this movie is some sort of fairytale that I don’t deserve (laugh). I would walk around my hometown listening to The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack, the Rushmore soundtrack, and the Bottle Rocket soundtrack. I love Mark Mothersbaugh and I love DEVO. So, it was such an honor to work with him. He’s so inspiring. You can bring him an idea and he’ll find some instrument out of his closet that you’ve never seen before. He’s very soft-spoken but he’s so creative. We would be, like, “Can the robots be scarier?” and he’s, like, “Yeah, they can be scarier;” and he’ll find some weird instruments and find strange ways to play them. He’s really incredible. There’s like a couple emotional themes that no one else could have done. People were, like, “I’m crying in the movie and I never used to cry. What did you change about the script?”, and I’m, like, “Oh, we didn’t change anything. Mark Mothersbaugh just did the music, and it’s wonderful!”

AV: What moment in the film do you feel the most “connected” to?

MR: The scene that gets me every time is the one where Katie is seeing that her dad has sort of given up his cabin for her. That moment connects with me. When I was a teenager, I was, like, “Stop telling me how to live, Mom!!” I was such a brat! And as an adult, I’ve seen that these people clothed me, cooked food for me every night. And all those trips that my dad tried to take me on and I was so resentful of when I was a kid and that was just him trying to say ‘I love you,’ and he doesn’t know how to do it. So, that I really connect with in terms of seeing that character, like myself, learning to appreciate her parents for the first time.

AV: The end credits, with all these crew members photographed with their families, are very touching. It makes you think – as far as family is concerned, isn’t “weird” normality?

MR: (laugh) I hope so, because I do think that, since the dawn of time, everyone has always felt, like, “My family’s nuts!” And that’s one of the reasons why the movie is the way it is, because it’s, like, “My family wasn’t perfect growing up and I don’t think anybody’s is.” And I’d rather see a family like that on the screen instead of, “Good morning, Honey! Et cetera…”. – Who are these people?

I love the end credits because I love all the people who worked on the movie, and they all brought their own experiences into the movie. And I wanted to reflect that in the end credits. It isn’t just a movie made by me. It’s a movie made by me, and Jeff Rowe, my co-director, and all of these wonderful people. And if we didn’t have just one of them, the movie wouldn’t be what it is.

With our thanks to Mike Rianda and Fumi Kitahara.

On November 20th, Netflix launches their latest creation, Alien Xmas, a delightful stop-motion holiday special inspired by the famous Rankin/Bass classics. Based on a 2015 book written by the Chiodos themselves, Alien Xmas finds a race of kleptomaniac aliens attempting to steal Earth’s gravity in order to more easily take everything on the planet. Only the gift-giving spirit of Christmas and a small alien named X will be able to save the world…

Indeed, that out-of-this-world touch brings a nice twist to classic holiday stories, which is no surprise, coming as it does from the talented Chiodo Brothers and executive producer Jon Favreau.

We had the pleasure to chat with Stephen and Edward about their instant classic!

Stephen Chiodo: We always loved Rankin & Bass specials, the holiday specials like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer (and) Frosty The Snowman,(plus) The Grinch, Charlie Brown, all of them. But the stop-motion specials that Rankin & Bass produced were always the ones we loved the most. And we always wanted to make our own holiday special. That’s what brought us into stop-motion.

Edward Chiodo: So, the actual circumstances: We happened to be doing contract work for ABC Family, doing bumpers and interstitials for their 25 days of Christmas campaign. We created a stop-motion Santa Claus and a bunch of props, doing little gags, little bumpers between their holiday offerings, and the executive we were working with kind of teased us with the idea and asked us if we had any holiday special ideas because she loved the technique and loved what we were doing. And there was an idea that was percolating in Stephen’s head that we developed into a pitch at that time, which was the basis for Alien Xmas.

SC: Again, we always wanted to do something a little bit different – a holiday special that hearkened back to the kinds of specials we watched as children, but with something different. I thought of something along the lines of Killer Klowns From Outer Space, because we like to mix genres. We thought sci-fi, with Christmas mixed in. That’s where I came up with Alien Xmas.

EC: So we developed a pitch for it, and we took it out. People loved the idea, but for business reasons it didn’t happen at the time. It was difficult to sell an original property. So, we essentially had all these assets, the storyline, the characters, their through-line, their arc, physical maquettes, sculptures of all the characters and all this presentation artwork. It was really the makings of a book. We then had an opportunity with an independent publisher called Baby Tattoo. Bob Self from Baby Tattoo fell in love with the idea and gave us a book deal. The book then became a really powerful sales tool. I mean, so many people go to producers looking for funding. It’s just an idea, but when you have a book idea that you present, it gives a little more confidence that it’s something that someone has already invested money in, and it kind of helped us go around the block with it. But still, an unknown property, new characters, it was a tough sell. So, we reached out to a good friend of ours, Jon Favreau. We had worked with him on Elf, for which we produced the stop-motion effects. We knew that Jon loved stop-motion, and we knew he was really enamored with the holiday, so we pitched it to him and he took to it. He saw what we were trying to do, saw the heart at the core of the story, and became an advocate and helped us sell it eventually to Netflix.

EC: Yeah, he was really a big fan of the technique, concept, and we stayed in contact with it over the years, and finally when an opportunity arose at Netflix, he brought us in, and he became our executive producer. He really helped shape the final story that you see in the special today.

SC: I partnered with a scriptwriting friend of mine, Jim Strain, who wrote the original Jumanji screenplay. He and I cobbled the story together, based on my idea, and then we got my brother Charlie to illustrate it. It was a way for us to solidify the idea, as something more than a pitch, and it was something physical that we could hand off to people, which made it more valuable. We shared the book with Jon, and he really sparked to the idea. It was a tale of redemption, a Scrooge-type retelling, that type of Christmas tale, and Jon saw value in it.

EC: Jon’s involvement really came into play once we partnered and set it up at Netflix. He jumped in on the creative and helped us with the adaptation, molding it into a 40-minute stop-motion special, making sure we focused on the core story that he fell in love with, the simplicity of the characters.

SC: Quick side note, this was a feature film we were doing, and at one point we sold it to Relativity Media in the early 2000s. When the 2008 crash came, all the funding went out the window. So, I always had this feature length thing in mind. When we actually started to adapt it for a short, Jon kept coming in saying we should simplify, simplify, simplify, and kind of honed it down to its core. Jon was very instrumental in our creative journey.

AV: How did you get to the idea of associating Xmas and Aliens?

SC: Well, you know so many holiday specials are all about saving Christmas. I wanted something that would hearken back to what Christmas is really about, the secular Christmas story. And I thought, it’s just about the spirit of giving. That’s the core of it. And when we stripped it down – what IS the spirit of giving, what does it mean when you give a heartfelt gift to somebody – it’s really an expression of love. So, it comes down to a story of love and how we share love through the spirit of Christmas. And I reflected on the Black Friday sale happening in the United States, like for Thanksgiving people rush to the stores and they have these frantic, maniacal doorbuster sales, and to me, that was not Christmas. And that was the Klepts. The Klepts came out of that confusion at the Black Friday sales. They just grab, grab, grab, they want, want, want, but they don’t know how to give. So that was the core of the Klepts, and so I thought why not bring a new voice. Not an elf, not a reindeer, not something. Who could be the good nemesis? And I thought: aliens. Let’s bring aliens, a whole new vision. And then when I thought of aliens, I thought of spaceships. I thought, wow, these spaceships look like Christmas ornaments, and let’s make the mothership like a giant Christmas tree, so one thing fed into the other and we created this mythology about these Klepts that go around the universe stealing.

EC: One of the things we like to do here at Chiodo brothers, is that mash-up. Take two divergent genres or items and put them together in the same space and see what would happen. So, the alien inclusion here was really kind of a natural thing. They knew nothing about Christmas, but Christmas being so object-oriented in terms of gift giving, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to exploit that, and again (contrast it to) this nasty Klept “stealing” mentality.

SC: It’s an old story told with new cosmetics, new characters.

AV: How did you go from the book to the screen?

SC: The story is very simple, it’s only 16 pages, so we had to expand the characters and create little back stories for all of them. We had X being given as a gift; well, who gave the gift? We had Obie, and Obie has this incredible anxiety of producing this Super Sleigh by Christmas. So again, that tapped into, say, every working parent’s life of balancing work and family. So, we had to then really hone in and create those little issues for our main characters.
Santa Claus, the ultimate optimist, who thinks every obstacle can be overcome just by wishing it could happen. He learns a lesson, he entrusts Obie to build a Super Sleigh by his deadline, but it was an impossible task. He realizes in the end that he put Obie in a horrible position. So, these are the things that came out of our simple story.

EC: Again, in terms of the process, we had bigger visions, and you want to start filling in all those extra characters; and what that starts to do, is expand the story. We worked with Kealon O’Rourke, the first writer on the project; and then, with Jon’s tutelage, we were able to hone down all these great ideas, all this great action and funny bits, and figure out what the core of the story was.

AV: What led you to stop-motion? What do you like the most in that form of animation?

EC: The natural thing with stop-motion is that they are little toys on miniature sets, and it goes hand-in-hand with Christmas. And Christmas and stop-motion always go together in our minds, that’s what we grew up on. Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, Rankin & Bass classics. Even the Norelco shaver commercial with Santa on a shaver zipping through snow banks and things. It’s just a very comfortable feeling. They go hand-in-hand together. So, the opportunity to bring this story to life in stop-motion is a very organic thing.

SC: And what’s good about it, is that it really truly is magic. The audience knows that these are inanimate objects, dolls and puppets on a stage; yet, they come alive magically through stop-motion, and I think that’s the attraction. These are real objects that come alive. It’s magic.

EC : Again, we emulated the Rankin & Bass styling, upped it up a little bit production value wise, and what they were able to do in the 60s; but we didn’t lose the hand of the maker, that was really important for us. You feel that these are hand-crafted items telling this story, real characters on a miniature set, as opposed to a computer-generated version.

AV: How did you come to work on Elf?

SC: Well, it’s these connections. We were working within the industry, and you kind of meet people along the way. We were co-producers on Sid & Marty Krofft’s Land Of The Lost, we were producing the animation effects. We hired a young cinematographer/cameraman named Joe Bauer, and he was great.

EC: It was one of his first jobs in the LA area. He moved to Hollywood to pursue his career, and we hired him.

SC: And that was it, Joe was off; and then all of a sudden, we get a call from Joe Bauer – he’s working with Jon Favreau on Elf.

EC: He’s now a top-notch VFX Supervisor, and when it came to talking about Elf, Jon was really passionate about stop-motion, and having the North Pole sequence emulate Rankin & Bass, and he was talking to Joe about, “Who could do this? Who gets this?” And he says, “You’ve got to talk to the Chiodo Bros.”

SC: So it was Joe Bauer who introduced us to Jon through Elf, and that started the collaboration. It was great working with Jon. He really got it. His love and affection for stop-motion is the same as ours. He saw it when he was young, it was a major part of his early childhood, and it’s magic. And again, we tried very hard to duplicate the Rankin & Bass style, and I think it was the introduction of the arctic critters and that stop-motion world at the beginning of Elf that brought us into this familiar holiday spirit that made the rest of the film work when they went to New York. That’s what Jon wanted to see, and I think we really helped him create that. So, there we were, creative partners at that point. So, once we knew Jon and understood what he liked, we had all these little ideas that we wanted to pepper to him over the years.

EC: It was great, because we weren’t just talking on a tech level, even with Joe Bauer, we were talking about the characters and the emotion. Even though we were a contract company on the job, it’s what we do. We came to Los Angeles to make movies, to be involved in that level of conversation; and get into the head of the director, what he wanted to achieve emotionally. It was just a rewarding process for us. And really got to clue into the brilliance of Jon Favreau, his creative mind, and how he pursues his projects, how he breaks it down and executes.

AV: How did you translate the Rankin & Bass influence into your film?

SC: The Rankin & Bass style is like uber sweet and genuine and cute, and they’re little dolls, and it makes you feel kinda good, so we wanted to contrast that a bit with our evil aliens. So, we made our elves really cute, really sweet, so we had this greater contrast between these nasty little grey, colorless aliens against this really sweet, magical Christmas world. So, we kind of accentuated everything that Rankin & Bass did, and made it even more festive.

EC: There’s a simplicity to the design, the staging, the action of Rankin & Bass that we emulated on its core, but we expanded that. But really in terms of having fun with the genre, we love the holiday specials, and we wanted to have a little fun with them. Be a little self-aware of the genre we were emulating here. So, there’s a little poke at the genre here and there, but it’s done in a really loving way, because we really love the genre.

Building on the R&B style, we explored a lot of different character designs – some more complex, some more simple. Working with James Baxter at Netflix, he helped us hone in on what was true to R&B and what would work and support the story best. Stephen had done a lot of research and a lot of inspiration for Christmastown, and a lot of art, a lot of research, a lot of development went into this.

SC: When it comes to the town, I was trying to think of Christmastown, what would be the architecture, what’s the classic image. In Rothenberg, Germany, there’s a town there that they call Christmastown. And when I researched it, it’s what I think Walt Disney used for the original Pinocchio cartoon, it had that kind of hand-built, Tudor-type buildings. That seemed to resonate with everybody as a Christmas town. And then it was the colors of the town; we wanted to create a North Pole village that was warm and cozy. So, we had orange lights emanating from the town, in contrast to the cold purples, magentas and blues of the outside world. So, it’s a cold world with these warm cottages. So that was the art direction for the town. And when it came to the Klepts, they were the opposite. They were void of all color. Because of their greed, their color had faded away. So we had these grey aliens, but we couldn’t have grey ships, because grey on grey wouldn’t show up, so we had to design the interior of the space craft with a little tinge of color. What’s the best alien color? Green. So, there’s a little bit of green in the space ships to contrast against the grey aliens. But then the green became a centerpiece for later in the show when the ships turned into Christmas ornaments. So, it’s really funny how that creative process works and fed upon itself to create I think what is essential to the story.

EC: And then in terms of the movement again, R&B: very simple graphic design. Simple setups. We built upon that in terms of… it would be tough to watch 40 mins of true R&B style now, I think we have fonder memories of what it really is, which is fine. So, we just refined the technique a little bit in terms of the styling, the execution, and the art department. We had a great art director, Jeff White, who worked with a team of really incredible artists. All the food was sculpted and painted by hand, truly amazing, all the detail.

SC: And Becky Van Cleve was our head of puppets, and she created a slew of puppets, so many puppets, from Santa Claus, to the elves, to the Klepts, and SAMTU, the robot, a very special character. All done by a staff of maybe 20 people.

AV: Can you tell me more specifically about the character of X? As he can’t talk, and hasn’t many elements on his face, it looks like nothing helps to make him expressive. And yet, he’s so easy to connect with. How did you approach him, animation-wise?

SC: That was a real challenge. We looked to our silent screen stars. Actually, we looked at Buster Keaton as the inspiration for X’s performance. All pantomime, all mime and movement rather than dialogue. A lot of the gags in there that were specifically a riff on Buster Keaton, who represents the Everyman. The Everyman against the world. The little guy. And I think that’s why we root for X. Not having him speak was one of Jon’s suggestions, one that kind of took me by surprise, but I embraced it as a challenge, and I think it worked out for the best.

EC: And the idea of how to express without speaking, it’s obviously physical gesture, body positions and things, but then we had a series of really expressive eye shapes that were replacement animation that the animators did during performance, and then mouth shapes that were done in post digitally. But it’s really the acting that the animators did, in conjunction with the eye shapes that really create the emotions that we see him in.

SC: And to top it off, to seal the performance was Dee Bradley Baker’s sound, his sonic performance adds that little bit of insight into the emotional tone to support the movements. So again, it’s a collaboration between a lot of different people.

AV: From the technical point of view, what did you take from these productions and what changed since then?

SC: Technology has really added so much to stop-motion in general. Jamie Caliri has designed this software called Dragonframe which allows the stop-motion animator to watch his/her performance while they’re animating through an onion skin-type review of the footage. So at the end of a shoot, you know you have the shot, where previously shooting on film, you’d have to shoot, send it to the lab, wait for it to come back the next day and you really couldn’t move production ahead by tearing down the set until you knew the shot was accepted. That’s all changed now with technology. Shooting digital, shooting on the Dragonframe software, you know what you have the moment you finish the shot, so you move production on more quickly. Major technological advances.

EC: What hasn’t changed, is that it’s still a handmade movie. Everything you see in that show is done by a team of artists, sculptors, mold makers, casting people, seamstresses, tailors, electricians, carpenters, everything is handmade; and at the end of the day, I think the most important thing, our actors are still moving the puppets/characters frame-by-frame. That hasn’t changed since animation started over 100 years ago, it’s still a frame-by-frame, hands-on process.

AV: As FX specialists, how did you approach the film FX-wise?

SC: That’s where these new digital tools come in really handy. We did have an opportunity to shoot elements sometimes, we’d shoot characters or props against green screen, composite them later. That kind of manipulation you can do in digital post did help us with some of the timing that enabled us not to have to do reshoots all the time. 98% of the footage in the show are first takes.

EC: It’s funny, in the old days, doing stop-motion animation, if the character had to jump in the air or float in the air, you would hang the puppet on wires, and that just inherently added so much time and difficulty to executing a shot. Now we use much more solid support, rods and hard wire, rigs to hold up puppets and suspend them in the air. And with digital technology, we’re able to go back and remove all those rigs (“rig removal,” it’s a pretty common term in all sorts of movie and TV production now). The technology frees up the animator from the drudgery of the technical, of trying to steady a puppet, or wait for it to stop moving, they can just focus on the performance, because they are our actors. The technology has really opened up a whole new world for performers who may not otherwise have taken to the technique. Now more than ever, there are more people doing stop-motion at a level that’s never been seen before.

AV: How did the production go?

EC: We started writing the script in Fall of 2018, we started pre-production in April 2019, started shooting in June of 2019, and finished up right before the Christmas holiday at the end of 2019. In 2020, we were in post-production, got slowed down by Covid quite a bit, and then delivered the show in August. All in all, it was almost two years of production. But internally at Chiodo Bros, we had started working on it in early 2018, so it’s been two solid years of work for us, but actual production was just over a year, year and a half. We had over 200 people in fabrication and production working during the course of the production, a high-water mark at any given time was just over 100 people. By the time we add on all the production people, the marketing people, we were probably over 300 people that worked on this 40-minute movie. It really takes more than a village; it takes a small army. We did all the building, design and test shooting at our studios in San Fernando; but when it came to actual production, our facility just wasn’t big enough, so we went to another company who are friends of ours, Bix Pix in Sun Valley, who had some down time on their stages. So, we rented their facility. We had 16 stop-motion stages that we were shooting on, anywhere from 8-12 animators working on a daily basis, constant setup. It was quite the undertaking.

AV: Can you tell us more about your studio?

SC: It was founded in the early 80s as a stop-motion studio, but the technique wasn’t really in vogue then, Directors wanted to have live special effects, like ET or the Gremlins, animatronic puppets, so they could direct them with live action actors. So, we switched gears, we started getting into animatronics and all those different kinds of effects. At the core of our company, we were always a story generating company. A character company, designing characters. We would design characters that were then stop-motion or CG, or puppets, or animatronic. At its core we were character designers and creators, after all we came to LA to make movies and tell stories. So, we stayed afloat using our art skills and producing skills as an effects company, until we could get some of our ideas funded and produce our own work. That’s Chiodo Bros.

EC: The stop-motion was always a critical part of what we did, and it was always the dream of doing more stop-motion and bringing stop-motion back as an entertainment form, and possibly as effects in movies, like on Elf.

AV: What were the challenges of the production?

SC: I’d say for me as a director, producing quality performances given our schedule. It’s interesting – it’s an army of artists and technicians that mount the production, so before we get to directing the performances, you’ve got the art department setting up the stage, the lighting department doing the lighting, the DP with the camera, all this technical stuff that really takes the majority of the time. And then when it’s all set, then we animate. And that’s when I can step in and direct some of the performances. And then it’s the animator. And when you think about it, more time is probably spent setting up than under the camera moving the puppet, because of the magnitude, the scope of the sets and the production. That was a challenge for me, to get out there quickly and efficiently and effectively when the right time was to give the direction and get the performance done.

EC: And just from a logistics standpoint, dealing with 100 people working in two different facilities is just a huge logistical nightmare, and just making sure everyone has what they need in terms of direction, materials, resources all around. Luckily, I had a great production manager in Eileen Kohlhepp, who really assisted in that manner. Probably one of the biggest hurdles on this was, this was originally supposed to air in 2019, and when we started the production, we were on an accelerated schedule to make that happen. But when it came down to it there wasn’t such a huge rush to get it “on air,” Netflix is not like a network, it’s a different type of thing, streaming. They told us to slow down, relax. We still had financial things so we couldn’t stop production, but it really gave us the time to stop, retool a little bit, catch our breath and put the best product forward. So that was a good call on Netflix’s part. They saw what we were doing, what we were trying to do, and it is hard…to have that many people trying to stick to a coherent vision. They saw that we needed the extra time and gave it to us. They were a great partner in that respect.

AV: What will you keep from that experience?

SC: The hope that we might have created the kind of holiday entertainment that will last, like Rudolph has lasted with us. That people will sit down together and watch this year after year. That would make me feel really good, the satisfaction of a holiday family experience that they can share together.

EC: That’s what this is for me. I had this when my kids were growing up, and even now that they’re older. The family tradition was always to watch Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, Charlie Brown Christmas, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, when they would air on network television. We owned the videotapes and DVDs. There was something about sitting down as a family and watching them as our holiday tradition. It was really important, so for me, the hope is that maybe we could enter that place in people’s hearts, that they would want to watch it every year with their families, and share it with the ones they love.

AV: By the way, do you have a problem with a certain Swedish ready-to-assemble furniture company??

Both: No! It’s funny, it’s a universal joke, the thinnest instructions with one tool to pull it all together. If you think of an insurmountable task, I think everyone on the planet knows what that means. Everyone at some point in their lives has had to put together an Ikea bookcase.

Be sure to watch the Alien Xmas trailer: Click here.

With very special thanks to Stephen & Edward Chiodo and to Fumi Kitahara

This new animated gem was directed, written and produced by Kris Pearn. Born and raised in Canada, he graduated from Sheridan College. His credits include: Open Season, Surf’s Up, Arthur Christmas, Shaun the Sheep, Pirates: Band of Misfits, and Home, to name a few. He was Head of Story on Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, and co-directed Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2.
Kris has been nominated for several Annie Awards, teaches when possible, and has given a Ted Talk called “The Optimistic Opportunity of Failure.”
But there’s really no failure in The Willoughbys!

AnimatedViews: The Willoughbys is a very original novel. How challenging was it to adapt it for the screen?

Kris Pearn: When I first read the book, what I loved was the way Lois Lowry played with tropes of literature, making fun of classic children’s books. Then, going from literature to film and having spent 25 years working in animation, there’s a lot of other things, a lot of tropes that we could make fun of. Also, what we really wanted to do was play with some of the big concepts, like children’s independence, and also try to create consistent characters. Part of the journey was really understanding the voices of our characters. Lois Lowry gave us that first idea of what the joke was and then we created our story.

AV: The cat was not in the book but became a key element of the film. He’s so well written that I can’t help but wonder: are you a cat person?

KP: I grew up on a farm, so we had a lot of cats; but I’m more of a dog person. I think it’s because as a human I’m more like a dog, you know, sticking around and making people happy. I’ve always admired cats. They always do whatever they want. So, I loved the idea of a whimsical tale where a cat would follow the thread of its own interest, and the idea that he could also talk about real things. The cat allowed us to be funny because he has that perspective on things. What’s really interesting about him is that at the beginning he’s just a spectator and then he starts to participate in the story, just like the audience, I hope, in terms of investment. At the end of the story, he becomes part of this family. That arc was a fun idea.

AV: In terms of art direction, I loved the idea that we can almost feel the different materials, such as the wool you used for the hair.

KP: Very early on, I was discussing with Production Designer Kyle McQueen about our visual point of view. Imagine you’re a little lower to the ground, a little closer to kind of a miniature world, somehow like a cat. That kind of extrapolated into this idea of a hand-made world. So, every thing, every texture, every shape is kind of something you could buy at the craft store. I really liked the idea that you want to touch the kids’ hair even if it’s digital; you feel like you could reach the screen and touch them. We really wanted to give the idea that this world is kind of real, but in our sense: real in an imaginary sense! I think it allowed us to bring out the comedy. We weren’t making fun of what the kids were going through; we tried to be funny about their observation, about their emotions. So, having that world that’s a little “pushed” allowed us to always use design, and that design language really helped the storytelling. The two things were really developed at the same time.

AV: The animation is pretty much reminiscent of stop motion. How’s that?

KP: I think the hardest thing, going back to design, is always that translation between a beautiful 2D icon into a 3D image and trying to get the computer to feel like art. I come from hand-drawn animation, so we really worked hard on the classic principles of animation almost going back to key frames so that we could really control poses. We also wanted that each character had a signature movement based upon their personalities. So, Tim is very pose-to-pose because he’s a kid trying to act as an adult and all of that kind of subtext allowed us to create a style and a look that harkens to stop-motion. It’s really about trying to capture the love of the characters and that design language appeared very early in our conversations. When I pitched the idea to Kyle McQueen, he immediately got excited by the notion of boiling the shapes down to simple cartoon principles with heightened textures, almost in the vein of stop-motion.

AV: How did you get to work with Bron animation?

KP: Bron actually found me, you know. It was sort of a weird, small-world scenario in animation. I was working on a project in California and a friend of mine was doing a film at Bron and introduced me to the producer, and the producer had the book. So, I read the book and I got very excited about some of the stuff we talked about earlier like subverting the tropes of animated comedy. So, that’s how I came to work in Canada for the first time. It was a very interesting emotional experience to get to work for a studio in my hometown and looking at my home country as an international market for animation. There are amazing talents there! Bron was always very supportive of making sure that we were finding the right people and not sacrificing any quality for the sake of making a movie. For a country with a small population, we had a world-class crew. And what I love about making a movie with a small studio where everybody is localized is, you really got to know everybody.

In every shot of the movie, you’ve got story. That’s because our writers’ role didn’t stop at the beginning. As we moved into storyboarding to effect, lighting, etc., I was trying to get all my leads together. That’s something you can do with a small studio. It’s more difficult when you have big production. We had a very collaborative environment. That way, if there was a story change at the end, the animators that have been involved through the whole process get excited about it instead of thinking of it as a revision. Everybody feels like being part of the choice.

AV: The soundtrack is also pretty much involved in the narration.

KP: This would be my third movie working with composer Mark Mothersbaugh. There’s something very special about working with artists who really trust each other. When I first pitched the movie to Mark, it was like ‘imagine a dark comedy with two worlds’. He got really excited about having that musical language. And now, as the movie opens, it’s almost like having two orchestras, which allowed us to take the theme from a sitcom atmosphere to an overblown movie production with a full 120-piece orchestra. Mark really showed all his creativity to expand our worlds through sound. Everything, even in music, has the feeling of being hand-made. Honestly, it was the first time for me that the music accompanies the characters that way. This movie has a soundscape that travels with the characters, it’s part of the journey. It’s a very hard to do. It demanded a lot of coordination.

AV: Before they get to Commander Melanoff’s candy factory, the kids go by a person who tries to play the guitar, just like in the 1972 movie Deliverance. A pretty unexpected reference.

KP: Absolutely. And that’s not the only one. There’s a lot of references to The Shining, too. For instance, the twins are designed after Danny. And when Tim thinks Nanny is evil, he uses Danny’s “redrum” finger. We’re a bunch of middle-aged men in their 40s with our own culture, our own references. On Deliverance, as I said, I grew up on a farm, and that movie definitely scared me! For those like me who grew up in the 70s, that song is kind of a hit!

AV: On The Willoughbys, you’re not only the director, but also the writer, the producer and even the lyricist (“I choose”). A true film-maker.
KP: What these credits mean is just being collaborative. We formed a choral group of 10-15 people from beginning to end. We started very organically and sort of grew up over five years. But since it was a small studio, be it in animation, production or design, you’re involved in everything. Whenever you have an idea, you pitch it through whatever means that makes sense. It was also important that Netflix supported the film. They are really artist-friendly and artist-driven. It was just a pleasure to work with so many talented people with such great experiences, coming from big studios like Sony, Aardman or DreamWorks. The fact that they said yes and agreed to jump into that project, that’s just what we can dream of as filmmakers: to play and make something together.

With very special thanks to Fumi Kitahara and Lisa Anderson.

The story of The Swan Princess began with Director Richard Rich, an animation filmmaker trained in the Disney tradition of animation where he went to direct films at the studio. Inspired by the German fairy tale and ballet about a princess who is swan by day and princess by night, Rich worked with film founder Seldon Young and Executive Producer Jared Brown, to make Princess Odette the subject of their first joint venture onto the silver screen with The Swan Princess. The result is a magical, musical animated adventure film based on the classic fairy tale “Swan Lake,” now celebrating its 25th anniversary.

A Film Advisory Board Award of Excellence and the Parents’ Choice Award winner, The Swan Princess is the heartwarming story of the beautiful princess Odette, who is transformed into a swan by an evil sorcerer’s spell. Held captive at an enchanted lake, she befriends Jean-Bob the frog, Speed the turtle and Puffin the bird. Despite their struggle to keep the princess safe, these good-natured creatures can do nothing about the sorcerer’s spell, which can only be broken by a vow of everlasting love.

Animated Views recently had the opportunity to speak with Rich about the legacy of The Swan Princess. In addition to his resume at Disney, Rich directed all of the Swan Princess sequels, and also helmed the Rankin/Bass 1999 animated remake of The King & I.

AV: When you were working on The Swan Princess back in 1994, how would you have reacted if someone had told you that, in 2019, you would still be giving interviews about it?

Richard: “It was totally unexpected and unforeseen. I thought that The Swan Princess had been put to bed in the late 90’s. It’s been unbelievable, and such an incredible experience as a director to go back into a movie made 25 years ago and update with all the technology both in sound and in picture and do a 4K version with 7.1 stereo. We had all the elements to do that, and I have to say that the most exciting thing was that I was able to capture and color correct the picture that matched the original artwork that we created 25 years ago with a paintbrush. Quite remarkable. We kind of pride ourselves and claim that we were the last fully hand-painted animated feature that was released.”

AV: So let’s go back in time for a minute. What prepared you for making The Swan Princess?

Richard: “Well, I was very fortunate to get my training at Disney. I worked at Disney for 14 years. And I worked with one of the ‘nine old men’ there, John Lounsberry. I started working with him as an assistant director on Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. I owe so much to Disney. They gave me opportunities that were quite unique for a person who was not an animator. But I was able to co-direct The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. So I learned my skills and my skill set and earned my credentials by working at Disney. And without that, I wouldn’t have been able to do this. So it was a good experience.”

AV: So from a professional level, what was the difference between working for Disney as opposed to working on your own animated feature?

Richard: “Well, it was my own studio. I pretty much did The Swan Princess as I did a feature for Disney. We had all in-house artists on this one and a huge staff. I did the storyboarding, and all of those things that I had learned so well at Disney, I was able to duplicate. Now, it was a pretty daunting process to be the one who was totally in charge, but at the same time, it was incredibly exciting. And I would say that what was the most remarkable part of that was that the people who came to work on (our movie) wanted to be there. There was really no rhyme or reason why this film got made. It was a picture against all odds at that time during the 90’s, for an independent company to be able to take on a feature while trying to acquire the talent and the artists (that we did). And the artists gave their whole heart to this production. They wanted it to succeed, and they gave their very best every day for two and a half years to make this happen.”

AV: Let’s talk about the process of adapting the story of “Swan Lake” into an animated feature. The original tale kind of has a dark ending, in that Odette actually dies. How did you go about giving a pretty grim narrative a happier ending?

Richard: “We kept what we thought were the very best parts of the fairy tale. We kept the name ‘Odette,’ and we kept the name ‘Rothbart.’ The Prince in the fairy tale was called Siegfried, and we felt we needed a more contemporary name for him, so we gave him ‘Derek.’ And there were things like the princess changing into a swan, we kept that. But we knew we couldn’t have an ending where the princess died. When I started this, I was looking for a fairy tale that would be done in the vein of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, because that’s what’s great about them. We didn’t try to do all of the contemporary things that were popular at the time. We stuck with classical storytelling, and classical comedy and romance, and the music has a Broadway feel.”

“So then I think we talked about adapting the story, and that was really hard. It took a good year to break (it all together). One of the great breakthroughs for us was the moon. We needed some kind of visual element which would trigger Odette turning from a swan into a princess and then back from a princess into a swan. So when we came up with the idea that it was the moon, it worked so well because we needed to have one night where Odette could not change, and that was the night when the moon could not come out because the sky was dark. So that was the breakthrough for us in cracking the story.”

AV: The voice cast is pretty impressive for this movie, with big names like Jack Palance as Rothbart and John Cleese as Jean-Bob the frog. How did you go about casting the film?

Richard: “Let’s start with Odette. Because I wanted the movie to be in the classical vein, I thought that I needed New York stars, you know, Broadway stars. So we hired two casting directors who worked on Broadway musicals. And I went to New York and voice tested a lot of incredible actresses. But I was looking for that actress who had a natural voice that sounded like a princess. Not a ‘sicky sweet’ princess, but a real, honest, goodness princess. And I didn’t find one in all of those auditions.”

“So we went back to Los Angeles, where the voice casting directors were setting up interviews (of people they knew there), and one was Michelle Nicastro. She was playing in the cast of Les Miserables at that time. She came in to audition, and she walked in with her natural princess voice, and as I got to know her, not only was her voice a princess, but she was a princess. She was good, she was incredibly talented, and she was extremely kind-hearted. Everything I wanted in Odette, Michelle Nicrasto was in her own life. And she brought all of that to the role, and that is why she has become pretty much an iconic princess in the world of animation.”

AV: And then by contrast you have Rothbart, who is this menacing bad guy, but also very entertaining, and Jack Palance plays a big role in that.

Richard: “Rothbart’s an interesting story. We wrote the script for The Swan Princess, and he was a very dark one-tone, one-beat kind of a villain. And that summer, when we were doing the voice casting, you might remember the movie City Slickers came out, and Jack Palance was kind of at a career high. He was incredible in that. And we felt ‘wow, he has such a unique take to his speaking, and such a unique, deep quality of a voice.’ And he was able to be dark but comedic at the same time, and we felt ‘wow, that will change Rothbart from a very dark, one-beat kind of villain to a comedy villain.’ And he did that exactly.”

“We even wrote a song for Rothbart called ‘Rothbart’s Revenge,’ and it was a really dark song in which he was out to get Derek and Odette. No way was he going to lose Odette to Derek. And we recorded it, and it was really dark, and then came Jack Palance, and he brought a whole new thing to the part as I mentioned. So the song we re-wrote as “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and it changed everything. It gave us a really fun, fun moment for the villain to sing a song that he reveled in. And you can go to The Swan Princess’s YouTube channel, and ‘Rothbart’s Revenge’ is on there . It was very dark, and we storyboarded it, and recorded it, but it was just too dark. And that was one of the big changes we made.”

(You can watch “Rothbart’s Revenge” in the player below)

Richard: “Oh, John Cleese was fantastic. So Brian Nissen was the writer with me on it. And John Cleese was in London for the Monty Python series. And we watched a ton of clips of him. And there was one clip where he was doing a French accent, and we felt ‘wow, we gotta try to get him.’ And we worked it out. What was neat about that was that Brian Nissen and I went to London, and John invited us to his home there. And we went over the script, and he tried out all of these different voices trying to find one that was really great. And we recorded him there, we recorded him there in London. It was an incredible and really fun experience. He was really nice, just really a trooper to be a part of it.”

AV: Let’s talk about songs, but with a focus on two of them, “This is My Idea,” which opens the film, and “Far Longer Than Forever,” which has sort of become the anthem of this franchise and even got a Golden Globe nomination. Let’s start with “This is My Idea,” though, because that’s such efficient storytelling in that it chronicles Odette and Derek growing up as kids who can’t stand each other before turning into young adults who are very much in love.

Richard: “I have to say I really agonized over that. Trying to really sustain an opening song for six minutes. Could we really do that? But once I felt that it was a musical sequence as opposed to a musical song, you can see that it goes through lots of variations of musical orchestrations and themes and everything. And it just flows, and it becomes more sophisticated as they grow up, and then the ending with the beautiful love kind of thing that’s pretty great. And that has stood the test of time. Seldon Young (one of the film’s producers) goes around to Comic-Con, and someone from Florida was there who had done a lot of reviews of everything, and he says ‘That has got to be the best opening of any animated feature there has ever been.’ That was a real compliment coming from somebody like him. He was over-the-top excited about that. And people really enjoying listening to and watching that sequence. There is something that we all identify with that song, growing up and going through those feelings that Derek and Odette went through, even to the point when one falls in love. That’s a great song. I love it. It’s one of my most cherished moments of being able to do in the movie.”

AV: Can you tell us about the big one, the love ballad “Far Longer Than Forever”?

Richard: “I think that what’s so neat about that song is that in that moment (of the movie), the last time Derek and Odette saw each other, they left with broken hearts, because Odette was determined not to give in to just beauty and Derek was feeling a little bit cocky and prideful. And then everything goes on that gets them separated. And then both of them one night are looking at the stars thinking of the person they love, they sing this love duet, and it has a theme that is so true, that true love truly lasts longer than forever. And I think one of the reasons why that song is one that has captured in our hearts is the melody, which I have to say is an incredible thing to hear, and once you do, it’s hard to get out of your mind. And it has truly become the theme song of the series.”

AV: “Were there any major story changes made over the course of production, or did you stick to your original treatment?”

Richard: “You know, you’re the only one to ever ask that question, and I have to tell you it went through immense changes. We tested the picture with audiences when we finally got it all put together, in story reels and animatics and all of that. We tested it, and what came back was that people really didn’t like Derek. And I was shocked, because I loved him! Then I started to analyze that the way it was at that time, and at that time, Derek did nothing. And so there was all of this stuff that we did about Derek being the one who believed that Odette was still alive. And we started having him doing kind things, like after the song ‘Practice, Practice, Practice,’ he goes up to the duck and says ‘Sorry, take a few days off.’ We had him do all of these really kind things.”

“And in the original script, we never had him say what he really loved about Odette. That was added at the same time. And we had that speech he gives after Rothbart’s been shot, and he runs back to Odette and he tells her about how good and how compassionate she is, and her kindness, and that those were the things he loved about her. That was not in the original script. And all of a sudden Derek became an incredibly good, honest role model for boys to follow. And because he was concerned about Odette in an honest, true way, it wasn’t just her beauty.”

“And what’s likable about this whole story is, well, you know that line where Derek says “Arrange the marriage!” And Odette’s like “Wait…” And he’s like “But why? You’re beautiful!” And she says “What else?” And he says “What else is there?” And she’s like “What else is there? Is beauty the only thing that counts?” Even today, that is so important and that resonates, and that has given girls who have watched and love this show confidence that they can stand up against anything just like Odette. She is a role model for young women, as strong today as she was 25 years ago. And in some ways, it’s even more appropriate today than it was then.”

AV: Unfortunately, when it came to theaters, The Swan Princess wasn’t a hit. However, it became a huge success on home video. Were you surprised when that happened?

Richard: “I was relieved! I gotta tell you, when the film was released that day, you probably know that the re-release of The Lion King was put out at the same time. And I went that day to the theater, took a bunch of kids with me and watched it and had a good time. It wasn’t as full as I had hoped it would be that day because people were going to see The Lion King again. That didn’t really matter in the long run of things, but that night I was feeling really, really bad. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that bad in my whole life. And I was getting hourly reports of how it was doing across the country, and my wife turned to me and said ‘It doesn’t matter. You made a great picture.’ And once she said that to me, it all changed. It meant everything in the world for her to say that. I knew I had made a great picture because my wife is a tough critic.”

“And I knew that people liked it because it was so successful on home video. And it has continued to grow. I have never gone anywhere where someone hears that I worked on The Swan Princess where they haven’t gone ‘That was the picture of my childhood! I loved that picture! I watched it so many times!’ And it’s not just girls. A lot of guys watched it too. Derek is a great guy to watch!”

AV: Let’s talk about the sequels for a moment, as there have been several of them. How did you go about working on those?

Richard: “I have done every Swan Princess since the beginning. There hasn’t been anything done on Swan Princess that I haven’t done. It’s my heart, it’s my soul, my vision, and so nobody was ever considered for those but myself. Now I don’t want to sound full of myself, since I’m not that way. But no one has ever asked that question before either, so I don’t have an answer for it. But it was never in question that I wouldn’t do them. We are now working on Swan 10, and we’re using the same opening music underneath the title of the show as we have with all of the Swan Princess films that we’ve done. 10 is just being worked on now and won’t be out until next year.”

AV: And the later sequels have been done in computer animation. For you as a director, is there any difference between working with computer animation and traditional hand-drawn animation?

Richard: “Well, there is, but a lot of things are exactly the same. The voice recording, the writing of the script. The difference is the art. It takes an enormous amount of talented people to do cel animation. Those kinds of artists are few and far between today. And so it would be difficult to redo it. When we started doing the sequels, Sony’s first thought was that we should do them in 2D. We showed them what it would look like in CGI. At that time I think there were stores that were saying ‘we’re not taking cel animation anymore, we’re only taking CGI.’ And there was a real switch where the kids were expecting and loving CGI, so we did that.”

“A couple of the things that are different are, if you look at the animation of the original Swan Princess, it’s very loose and agile. And it’s moving, and we can force facial proportions, stretch them, and we can change costumes, much easier than you can in CGI. The fluidity of the motion is not as fluid in CGI, because it’s more realistic, and it’s rigging, and all that stuff. So there’s that difference. There’s also the difference in the hand painting of the backgrounds, versing what you can get by texturing everything. And as CGI has become bigger and bigger, and Pixar has pushed to become more and more realistic versing the ‘hand-painted’ look, those are differences. Is one better than the other? Not sure. Both have a strong point.”

“The fun for me as a director in CGI is I get to move the camera so much more. In 2D, I can pretty much go left and right, or up and down, but I can’t do these sweeping moves and turns and everything without an enormous amount of work and effort. The weak point in 2D is probably the constant struggle to keep everything on model, so they always look alike, because it’s based on the quality of an artist to be able to do that. So that’s really tough. And it takes a lot more time to go over animation and critique it over and over again. Not in CGI. In CGI, you make a model, and it’s like a human being. It looks like that person no matter what angle you shoot from, no matter what camera move is on them, so that stuff is a real plus in CGI.”

AV: We’ve talked about the 25th anniversary Blu-ray release. Are there any new extras on there you’re excited for the fans to watch?

Richard: “Yeah, there’s a great one about looking back on the last 25 years. And it has great memories and stuff that haven’t been seen before. And you can also go to the Swan Princess YouTube and Instagram pages, as those pages already have a lot of great stuff about what’s happened over the years.”

AV: Let’s wrap up with a loaded question: Why do you think The Swan Princess has lasted as long as it has?

Richard: “There’s a lot of varying reasons that people have for that. My personal belief is that it’s because of the incredible love relationship between Derek and Odette. It has that screen chemistry that is so hard to get that even in live-action you never know if it’s going to be there or not when you start a movie. And I’m sure that’s the same way in animation. And I think the love between the honest and true and self-sacrificing kind of love that Derek and Odette have for each other has withstood time. And it will continue to withstand time. There’s that one scene by the lake where Derek is chasing Odette as a swan, and Odette’s scared to death he’s going to kill her, and he points the arrow at her, and boom, she turns into Odette. The running together of those two and the love that they have for each other thrills me every time, with the big love theme playing, it’s just one of those neat moments. And that’s my personal opinion of what has sustained it over these 25 years.”

Many thanks to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment for sending us material from their archives to use. All copyrights go to them.

The Swan Princess: 25th Anniversary Edition is now available to own on Blu-ray.

Directed by Mercano The Martian‘s Juan Antin and produced by Academy Award nominee Didier Brunner ( The Old Lady And The Pigeons, Kirikou And The Sorceress, The Triplets Of Belleville, The Secret Of Kells and Ernest And Celestine), the visual and musically stunning animated feature follows Tepulpaï, a mischievous 10-year-old who dreams of becoming a shaman. As the villagers are gathering to make an offering to their great spirit Pachamama, the ceremony is disrupted by an Incan overlord who confiscates the town’s golden statue. Tepulpaï sees the chance to show his mettle and sets off to recapture the irreplaceable treasure, joined (whether he likes it or not) by his friend Naira and her smart-talking pet llama. Together, they make a journey across uncharted lands, full of unknown obstacles and dangers.

Netflix has a robust slate of animated event programming that reflects diverse perspectives and cultures in a variety of styles and formats, designed for families around the world. A few months ago, they acquired the rights to Pachamama and are planning to debut this beautiful film in select territories worldwide on June 7th.

We turned to Director Juan Antin to tell us more about this animated gem.

AnimatedViews: How did you get the spark that led you to create Pachamama?

Juan Antin: The first idea came to me in the form of a vision, when I was participating in the Latino-American Film Festival in Cuba for my first film, Mercano the Martian, back in 2004. One afternoon, I was sitting on a beach in La Havana, and while I was staring at the sea and the horizon, I imagined how, on the very same beaches but more than five hundred years before, the natives were watching the first European conquistadors arrive, and how disappointed they must have been when they realized that those strange creatures, looking like gods in their shining armor, were only bringing along the most savage part of their humanity. I left the beach that day with the seed of what was to become Pachamama.

Then it took me a few years of research and travels, first to the north of Argentina where my wife, María Hellemeyer, who’s an anthropologist, was doing social work and research on native communities. There, I had the chance to meet the shamans and chiefs of the communities and started interviewing them. I wanted to have their point of view for this film. Those research trips took us to Bolivia and Peru, always in contact with indigenous communities. and we learned more about the culture of Pachamama, which is still very vivid in the Andean region.

So, I started writing the story while María, who is also a visual artist, started to do some sketches that would be the basis of the visual universe of the film. But, at that time, I was imagining it as a stop-motion film. I even shot a teaser, but then I was delayed by difficulties on the funding of the project. In Argentina, after the economic crisis it got difficult to make such an ambitious project. I’ve moved to France to coproduce it there and, with some ups and downs, I was finally able to start production in 2015 at Folivari, Didier Brunner’s studio. Finishing in 2018, it took me 14 years to go from the idea to the screen!

AV: How did you envision your story?

JA: The story is basically an initiation journey. Tepulpaï, the main character is a boy who wants to be a shaman but he’s egoist, reckless and full of pride and has a lot to learn… Because in the shamanic cosmovision, man sees himself as a part of a whole, a spiritual perspective which implies that he feels love, respect and gratitude to the Earth and all that is living. Unlike the European conception at that time, whereby man saw himself as the center of creation, ordered, by biblical injunction, to dominate all and become master of the Earth. These two antagonistic conceptions are intrinsic in the story and play a huge part in how each character sees the world.
Tepulpaï‘s journey to become a shaman is a bit like ours, nowadays, in our becoming aware and our understanding of the Earth’s fragile balance and the ravages left by centuries of disharmony and wars between men.

AV: Nature seems an essential aspect of your story.

JA: The film is, above all, an ode to nature. In Quechua, the language of the Incas, Pachamama means Universal Mother. More than that, the indigenous cultures consider human beings, along with all animals and plants, to be part of the Earth itself, all together like a huge living organism. I think that this is a beautiful way to see nature, so the whole concept of the film, not just narrative but also graphical, is based on that idea.

AV: How did you work your story out regarding History and Mythology?

JA: This story is completely fictional; even though the inspiration came from the true History of the Conquest, it’s freely adapted and there are no true historical characters. Sure, there are a lot of elements of the Andean Cosmogony like Inti, the Incan Sun God, or Mamaquilla, the moon, or even Pachamama, but all this gave me just a context where characters would build their own story. I think that all that research helped us to be truly authentic to the Andean Cosmogony, and this gave the film a high cultural value and even a pedagogic interest.

AV: How did you create the visual style of the movie, its design and magnificent color palette?

JA: To create the graphic world of Pachamama, the idea was to base all the graphics on pre-Columbian Andean art, trying to immerse the audience in a different and truly authentic world built upon very simple elements like patterns, Andean designs, and vibrant colors. For the character, the inspiration came mostly from pottery. We used to look at those vases and see very funny characters; they are simple yet powerful and very expressive. And for the backgrounds, we’ve based them on Andean patterns like those found on textiles and pottery. They are very geometrical and repetitive designs that have a powerful effect.

Colors in the Andes are vibrant; that’s maybe because of the effect of altitude with a thinner atmosphere and a very powerful sunlight. People there use a great variety of rich colors on their clothes, combinations of turquoise, fuchsia, yellow… even the mountains, loaded with minerals, have plenty of different colors. In a film, I think colors produce a very powerful effect on the emotion of the audience.

AV: What was Michel Ocelot’s influence on the movie?

JA: I met Michel Ocelot in the Annecy Film Festival when I was presenting my first film Mercano The Martian. My film was awarded there and Michel was there too. He loved the movie so much that he gave me a special prize that he personally created: “The Golden Kirikou for Mercano The Martian”. I was thrilled because Ocelot was one of my heroes in animation. Since then, we’ve become friends and he helped a lot giving me advice and by making recommendation letters that helped me open doors… So, I would say that he was like a Godfather for this movie.

AV: How did you organize the production of the animation?

JA: Because it was an international coproduction, we had to share the different tasks between the different studios. Thus, the production had a quite complex pipeline, with a team of more than 100 people, scattered in two continents and three countries (France, Luxembourg and Canada). All the 3D character animation was done in Montreal, the color backgrounds and 2D FX were made in Luxembourg, and all pre-production, design, modelling and compositing were made in France. All coordinated from our HQ in Paris. And finally, sound postproduction was done in Luxembourg.

AV: How did you associate 2D and 3D animation in your film?

JA: Pachamama is a mixed 3D/2D film. All character animation was done in 3D over 2D painted backgrounds; also, all special FX (water, fire, smoke. etc.) were animated in 2D (hand drawn). The mixing of 3D characters with 2D backgrounds is quite well integrated because we used textures on characters and on the backgrounds, to give an earthy look. We did scanning of watercolors and mapping them over the characters. That made them look less 3D and helped on the compositing with the 2D backgrounds.
The only technical issue we had is that, because of the graphic stylization of the backgrounds, we didn’t use a realistic perspective and, sometimes, it was hard to match them with the 3D characters.

AV: How did you meet Pierre Hamon, the composer of the movie?

JA: That’s one of the most magical things that happened during the making of Pachamama. After moving near Paris to start production, I met Pierre Hamon in an incredible way: he was my neighbor! And I discovered that he was a musician and ethnomusicologist, expert in ancient European music and… he was passionate about pre-Columbian music! He was in possession of some two-thousand-year ceramic flutes from Ancient Peru and the minute we met, before telling him anything, he started to play those ancient flutes and to make rhythms with condor’s feathers! I was shocked and couldn’t speak, and left his house sure that I’ve found the composer of Pachamama. For Pierre it was a huge challenge to compose a score that could touch the emotion of today’s audience with such minimal elements, that is without chords, without known western harmonies, but he got inspired by those ancient instruments and wrote music that is completely magical, profound, and with melodies that go along beautifully with the images.

AV: How important is the music in your film?

JA: From the very beginning, I’ve imagined a music that will get the audience immersed into the pre-Columbian Andean world, using only the few elements available in that ancient time: winds, percussion and pentatonic scales, keeping it very natural, atmospheric and minimalistic. And then, with the arrival of the Conquistadors in the film, the music would change completely its style to become a European Renaissance music with all those new powerful instruments that came from the Old World (guitars, violins, cellos, brass, etc.) It was for me like a musical metaphor of the Conquest, and the score would have to be a dialogue between those two different styles of music, representing this clash of the cultures.

AV: Pierre Hamon also worked on the sound design, like the sound of certain animals. Can you tell me about that aspect?

JA: Actually, we’ve used for the sound design some samples of sounds produced by Pierre. For example, to create ambient sound we’ve mixed real ambient sounds with the sounds of some very strange flutes called whistling-vessels. They sound like birds or insects but not very realistic; that gives a special atmosphere to the film. Also, the sound of condor’s feathers was recorded from Pierre’s performance.

AV: Your collaboration with Netflix will allow a huge audience to get to know Pachamama.

JA: I am thrilled that Netflix acquired the rights of Pachamama to release it worldwide (except those that were part of the coproduction: France, Luxembourg, and Canada). I’m very excited because in a couple of days, they will launch it simultaneously in over 180 countries, dubbed to 19 languages! It’s amazing for me to have my film available to a huge audience like that; the message it carries will reach children of all the globe.

AV: Are you already working on another project? Can you tell us a little about it?

JA: Yes, I am working on the conception of another animated feature film. It’s still too early to give details, but I can tell you that it’s in the line of Pachamama but happening on the Amazonas. I am also working on the conception of a very funny animated series and also writing ideas for a live-action science fiction feature film.

Watch the Pachamama film trailer here

With very special thanks to Juan Antin, Fumi Kitahara and Olivier Mouroux.

AnimatedViews: How did you discover Roald Dahl’s novel?

Jakob Schuh & Jan Lachauer: We’re both from Germany, and this particular book of Dahl’s had never been translated into German when we were younger. Still hasn’t, actually. We’ve always been massive Dahl fans, having grown up both on his and illustrator Quentin Blake’s work. So when Martin Pope (from production company Magic Light Pictures) sent us Revolting Rhymes, it was a bit like hearing a fantastic song of your favourite band for the first time – decades after that band stopped playing. Admittedly, everyone else knew the “song” by heart and considered it a classic, but, well, we didn’t. It was exciting, and actually quite touching. Also, reading – for the first time – a book that you’re asked to adapt is a slightly specific reading experience, you want go to it very open, because that first impression a text makes on you is very hard to recreate later and we feel it’s often crucial in finding the essence of a story and its tone.

Revolting Rhymes as a book had so much going for it: Dahl’s rhyming is just wonderful, the world view he puts down is often shockingly timely, the themes of female empowerment, revolt, his take on materialism and tradition… it’s a gift to be allowed to work with that kind of source material.

AV: How did the idea of making a short film out of it take shape?

JS&JL: When we were approached with the book by Martin Pope, he didn’t give us a strict format to work in initially. The Dahl estate was also very open to ideas. The book consists of six separate stories, so we could have probably picked a few and made a little short film of each. But the tone of Dahl’s narration felt like these poems belonged together on a deeper level all along. There’s a beautiful connecting motif permeating the book: It’s all about fiercely determined female protagonists revolting against pretty much everyone else trying to screw them over.

So, we decided to try and let the tales of these young women play out in a shared universe, simultaneously, nudging each other along. It felt exciting but, on a technical level, writing this became a lot trickier than we thought, just because all dialogue is rhymed. We didn’t want to change or add to Dahl’s rhyming or break the flow of his couplets. So, whenever we would jump between stories or wanted unconnected story arcs to join and influence one another, it had to be done wordlessly or by using existing couplets in an unexpected way. Overall, the adaptation was a tough nut to crack, and it took a long time, but it always felt worth it because each story would give so much to the other once you found that one interesting way to conjoin them.

AV: In what way does that story lend itself to animation?

JS&JL: Regarding Dahl in general, we’d discussed that a number of times over the years, how peculiar it is that Dahl keeps on being adapted mainly into live-action films, often times with his specific warmth clashing slightly with the harshness that VFX-heavy live action can sometimes have. It feels kind of counterintuitive. We always preferred the somewhat less realistic portrayals of Dahl’s world: animation or, for example, Tim Minchin’s Broadway version of Mathilda, which brings its own kind of perfect stylization to the text. Also, while we very much understand why no one – including us – thinks it’s a promising idea to try and animate Quentin Blake’s ink drawings (to us it would have felt like blasphemy) we never understood why so very few adaptations try and honor the genius that lies beyond his matchless linework: his gorgeous shape language, expressive poses, the fantastic silhouettes. Most of the adaptations usually don’t go beyond some nods to his costume design, but there’s so much more goodness in these drawings.

AV: So, it’s more about the spirit of his drawings that you kept?

JS&JL: We both grew up on Quentin’s illustrations, we’re slightly obsessive fans. So, to us the idea of adapting Quentin’s work was just as exciting and daunting as the idea of adapting Dahl’s words. Also, Quentin is very much alive, he’s around and saw the project in development, so you really want to make good use of that fact. Even when we did the very first tests, at times dabbling with the idea to do the film in 2D, we never even talked about attempting to copy Blake’s actual drawing style, his linework. You’d set yourself and the viewer up for disappointment. But Blake’s interpretations of Dahl’s words have so much to give beyond his wonderful, meandering linework. The characters he invents in his drawings are such an integral part of the Dahl-universe, to us but also to many readers. So not incorporating the core of his character designs, their shapes and their form, that also would have felt like leaving an essential part of the book behind. So we set out to keep his characters, get close to the essence of their volumes and silhouettes without copying his style, his linework. It felt right to give the viewer a version of those stories that is its own thing, but doesn’t visually contradict the books. The basic rule was: When you go back to the book after seeing the film, you find the same characters in the same situations, sometimes even the same poses. Ours are just very obviously sculpted instead of drawn, an interpretation of that same character design by a different, hopefully able, artist.

AV: How did you create the visual style of the film?

JS&JL: There’s two worlds in that film, with slightly different design approaches. The majority of the action takes place in the more stylized fairytale world. That’s also the place shown in all of Blake’s original illustrations. For our first meeting about the project, the two of us met in a café we both like a lot, in Munich, which is the town we’re both from originally. That place is part of an old museum which houses, amongst other things, a great collection of pretty ancient marionettes and puppets. We both hadn’t been up there since we were kids so we thought we might as well take a little tour.

Some of the marionettes and hand-puppets in that collection, their simple shapes and their carved and painted surfaces, and – just as importantly – the simple logic of those old puppet theatre stages, the flat set elements with their volumes just painted-on, all that became a big influence when we started imagining the look of our main story. We took a boatload of photos and videos that day and that file remained our main reference for the modeling and texturing of both characters and sets, more inspiring than anything we’d find elsewhere afterwards. Even when coming up with our own interpretation of Quentin’s wonderful character designs, the beautifully twisted old puppets seemed a very nice three-dimensional analogy to Quentin Blake’s simple shapes and twisted poses.

AV: How did you adapt Dahl’s original storyline?

JS: The ground rules we set for ourselves regarding the adaptation were pretty clear early on:
First off, Dahl’s original poems sport a very distinct narrator’s voice – there’s an underlying menace to it, alternating with great warmth and wisdom. And he makes it known that he has opinions about these stories. In the book that narrator is obviously Dahl himself. So, we felt we should give the viewer an equally distinct narrator figure, a stand-in for Dahl almost, and make sure that this character has real reasons for telling these stories. So that was the first thing, find a great narrator figure and give him an exciting agenda for the viewer to discover.

The other thing was to honor the sheer joy of Dahl’s rhymes. When you read these poems, you can almost see him, sitting in his writing hut, grinning at the madness of it all. We knew we needed to extrapolate some of the character arcs, but we really didn’t want to add to Dahl’s rhymes, they’re just too special. As a consequence, whatever we would add to his stories would need to done without adding any new rhymes – but also without these new sequences feeling “pantomime” in the framework of a script that’s otherwise pretty dense with dialogue.

The biggest rule was obviously to try and be faithful to the general tonality of Dahl’s stories, especially where we expanded them: Dahl wrote the book almost 40 years ago, but a lot of the action feels shockingly modern. There’s a spirit of resistance all over it, of setting things right; and whenever Dahl suddenly drags these classic tales into more daring territory, he does it in that spirit.

The kind of liberties Dahl takes when tackling these well-known stories, they define your own leeway in the writing process, he kind of points you in a direction: Added strands about a corrupt mortgage banker, new tales of shifty pigs in back rooms trying to get away with shifty things, or of a special bond formed between these two young women – it all very seemed to grow quite naturally from a perspective that Dahl had already sketched out in his rhymes.

JL: And then we both felt that it would be exciting to have Dahl’s stories, which are unconnected in his book, play out simultaneously in a shared universe. Theoretically, you could just cut back and forth between the different stories; but If you want to avoid multiple endings – which we did – you have to interweave the characters’ fates tightly enough for them to find one conjoined, hopefully relevant ending. And then you have to connect all that with your narrator figure somehow. Without adding new rhymes.

So, the goal was to weave together Red’s and Snow White’s story, create this special decade-long relationship they’re forming in the face of quite some adversity. We always loved the ways in which Dahl has each of these two young women triumph, and having them triumph together just felt right.

AV: Can you tell me about the challenge of having two remote studios working together on the same film? How did you share the task between Germany and South Africa?

JS&JL: The biggest factor in how the project was organized was that – as a sort of ode to Roald Dahl – we wanted the film to coincide with what would have been Dahl’s 100th birthday. That meant that we had a deadline that you really couldn’t move.
As you said, the two main teams were located in Berlin and in Cape Town. The authors of the source material – Dahl and illustrator Quentin Blake – are very much British obviously and so are the film’s producers, as well as the entire voice cast. The directors are German, but the Berlin team came from all corners of Europe and then our South African team was even more diverse. Everything started out with a very small studio in Berlin, with only the two of us sitting in a room, agonizing over the adaptation. We then moved into bigger studios twice as the team grew, and within half a year we ended up with a team of about 25 people here in Berlin. Although a few of our Berlin team members had worked with us before, in essence we had to find a completely new team for this project on our side, where all design work, storyboarding, editing, most of the modeling, a lot of the key shading and rigging, and about 50% of the animation was done. The other half of the animation plus the lion’s share of texturing and shading, all rendering, lighting and compositing was done in Cape Town by an amazing group of artists which we personally hadn’t worked with before as well, and who kind of had to hit the ground running once they joined the project.

Coordination between two teams on different continents isn’t easy, obviously, and we spent a lot of time on Skype as well as traveling back and forth, but the degree to which a lot of the artists over in Cape Town, especially the younger ones, identified with this project made the distances between the studios a lot shorter. As this production was a particularly close shave we ended the project with one director in London taking care of sound while the other one was in Cape Town finishing the picture. But after 16 months working pretty much at the same desk, there wasn’t a lot left that we hadn’t discussed and agreed upon at some point.

AV: What technical challenges did you face in the making of your movie?

JS&JL: For its length, Revolting Rhymes has an unusually large amount of characters and sets. Managing the design and creation of those while working in a visual style that we both hadn’t done before was certainly one big challenge. The other challenge was that very hard deadline – the Dahl centennial – a date that simply couldn’t be moved. Writing had taken a lot of time, and so production had to start midway through the boarding process, which is something you always want to avoid, normally. This created the need for a very tight, disciplined schedule where many things had to be done in parallel: design, animation, modelling all happened at the same time. It was a pretty complex project to organize.

AV: What did you learn from that experience and what will you keep from it?

JS&JL: There’s maybe two main lessons we’ve learned while making Revolting Rhymes. The first is simple: Writing parallel, interconnected storylines creates really interesting results but it also makes everything else, from writing to final edit, exponentially more difficult. We surely didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to bring these four independent stories together in a meaningful way, having them coincide in one joint, relevant ending. It was great fun, but we now know what it means, work-wise.

The second lesson is more difficult to describe, but it’s probably something a lot of filmmakers can identify with. So you have a group of people believing in the potential of an idea and hence aiming for the impossible, trying to do something that seems unachievable within a given amount of time and money. Then the first really serious scheduling problems arise – it’s still very early in production – and we all sit down and discuss the problem. There’s a very human thing happening, because addressing a problem in its actual, scary size is exhausting. It’s so exhausting sometimes that it almost feels like working on the problem. But addressing a problem is not the same thing as solving it. You have to be very disciplined to never mistake one for the other. Sounds simple, but that mistake is made a lot. On this project there was no wiggle room for confusing the two, so every conversation had to end with everyone agreeing on actual real solutions.

We had several moments during the production where every one of us simply didn’t know if we’d ever finish the project in time. We kept going forward, learning, making sacrifices along the way, children were born, there was loss in the family, and it ended up being probably amongst the toughest months in our lives, but looking back, we do think it was worth the work. We really like what came of it.

Be sure to watch the trailer of Revolting Rhymes and to follow the movie on Instagram. With very special thanks to Jakob Schuh, Jan Lachauer and Fumi Kitahara.

Robin Joseph was born and brought up in a tiny coastal town in Kerala, India. He then moved to Canada to pursue film & animation. He has worked as a freelance character designer, visual development artist and production designer for animated features & commercials since 2005. Some of his clients include Pixar (Inside Out), DreamWorks (Mr. Peabody And Sherman), Blue Sky (Rio) & Illumination (Despicable Me).

He tells us about his and Fox’s journey.

Robin Joseph: The concept came from wanting to do a film about curiosity. Not so much a primal curiosity behind food, shelter, or even play. Rather, the grey areas and often pursuits that become hard to justify, that break with reason. There is something largely conceptual about that drive. It’s a strange compulsion, innately human.

AV: Your approach seems very metaphoric.

RJ: There are definitely visual elements, which incorporate symbolism. I hope the film reads like a fable.

AV: What were your sources of inspiration for the story?

RJ: My personal inspiration was science and exploration (especially space exploration). There is something so admirable and so humbling about that quest to know, to learn. Standing at the edge of the abyss and wondering what lies beyond. A deep sown thread that took us out of the caves, (and had us) climb mountains, cross oceans, and reach for things just past our grasp. The pioneering quests never present any assurances of success, yet we still go past the failures. We carry on. Fox And The Whale was my attempt at capturing this sentiment.

AV: How did you come to have no dialog at all? It is very contemplative. How did you work on the soundtrack to help tell your story?

RJ: It was definitely designed as a sound forward film. I was playing with the soundscape from the time I cut the first reels. The intent was to try and create a strong sense of space, and where possible really expand the scope of the world. I wanted the film itself to be supported and carried by sound design, and reserve music to the very end. Narratively I hope to leave the viewer with a sense of optimism. I wanted the music to help with this, but also wanted to employ a level of restraint. John Poon, the composer I worked with, created a theme that beautifully bookends the short. It has such an elegant simplicity and is so understated. I think it works really well for the film.

AV: Color is also very important in the narration.

RJ: Design and color was my way into the production. I spent a dedicated amount of time developing the color script. Since I wasn’t communicating with a team, the color script wasn’t elaborate. It was just the key moments I knew I wanted to hit, similar to keys in an animation scene. The purpose of the script was to have a strict reference point for myself, before getting into the process of painting fuller backgrounds. I also wanted to define each section of the world – the lush forest world, the dreamscape, and the journey beyond. Each of these sections also had a color progression, a buildup. Once I got into the background painting, I stayed as disciplined as I could, adhering to the color script. It was a very important stage of planning for me.

AV: What were your visual sources of inspiration?

RJ: The primary inspiration for the world building was the Pacific rainforest belt. A few years ago, I got to visit Victoria and Salt Spring Island (off the coast of BC, Canada). It was my first time experiencing the Pacific coast. That really stayed with me. Over the years I have watched every documentary I could get my hands on, about the rainforest belt. Even though the world in the film is fictional, I hope it communicates a sense of place, a specificity and believability.

AV: How did you choose to mix 2D and 3D animation?

RJ: Originally, I had planned the film as entirely 2D. [My girlfriend] Kim coming onboard to animate influenced the change to make it a hybrid. She is an incredible CG animator, who really understood on a gut level the kind of performance I was after. Given my background in design and development, painting in the light opposed to building a full CG environment was the best and most direct way for me. I wanted to avoid translations and keep it as straightforward as possible. The hybrid approach was a result of all of this. The other consideration was this approach kept the pipeline, rendering and the entire production, very nimble.

AV: How is it, to work with your girlfriend?

RJ: Kim really understood the aesthetic and sensibilities. Instinctively she had the right call for the kind of performance the designs demanded. Very subtle, nuanced and suggestive. CG also presented more opportunity to iterate. Occasionally I would have small notes and thoughts on pushing these a bit, or refining the graphic silhouettes of the designs to make them read a bit better. The performance was really rooted in pantomime and physicality. Our pet beagle ‘Koci’ was a big inspiration for the mannerisms of the fox. The workflow was quite straightforward. Kim handled all the CG character animation. Once shots were approved, the deliverables were a rendered .png image sequence I could bring into comp in (Adobe) After Effects.

AV: What challenges did you face during the production?

RJ: There were a lot of challenges in production. Being a self-financed film, it obviously had all the predictable financial strains. There were technical roadblocks as well, simply because I was attempting the different roles for the first time. But a bit of persistence, and you can find a solid footing to solve the problems. There were also parts of it, where I simply got very lucky. One of them, I can relay here, had to do with sound design. I found myself in a situation where I had to do the final sound design. I was at the end of production, with barely any budget to purchase a sound library. Through a mutual friend, Mark Osborne, I was introduced to veteran sound designer Tim Nielsen. He completely surprised me by loaning a massive library of his personal recordings for use in the film. Almost all the final sound design in the film was built from Tim’s raw files. He was so supportive and made himself available to me for phone-calls, emails, answering every question I had, helping me pick studio monitors within my budget, to calibrating them. I found myself at the favourable end of chance and luck, moving forward purely due to the goodwill and generosity of others.

AV: What kind of technology did you use?

RJ: The character animation in the film was CG done using Maya. All the vfx, backgrounds, and lighting was 2D. Storyboards, design, backgrounds, and 2D animation was done in Photoshop. Compositing and vfx was in After Effects with plugins from Red Giant. Edit was in Premiere. Foley and Sound design was using Audition. All rendering was handled by Media Encoder. The film was made using off-the shelf, commercially available software. There were no proprietary tools built.

AV: What is your vision of the relations between art and technology?

RJ: You can achieve a lot with commercial software nowadays. There is definitely easier access to technology. If you can understand what your exact limitations are, really break them down to its absolute basics, you can start building solutions to your custom problem, and push your boundaries. A lot of creativity comes from this problem solving. I think it is a really great time for independent creators.

AV: What did you learn from that experience and will you keep from it?

RJ: Making the film was a very fulfilling experience. Part of it was getting to work with my girlfriend, Kim Leow. Her support took me through a lot of the low points of production. Fox & The Whale is my first professional film. The learning curve was very steep, especially because I got to try so many roles in the film. All I can hope for is, to keep improving and keep pushing my craft. At the moment, I am researching and writing a new project. It is a lot more ambitious both in scope and scale. I hope to have more news to share next year.

Be sure to watch Fox & The Whale here. With very special thanks to Robin Joseph and Fumi Kitahara.

“A weathered Sheriff returns to the remains of an accident he has spent a lifetime trying to forget. With each step forward, the memories come flooding back. Faced with his mistake once again, he must find the strength to carry on.” — This is the story they wanted to bring to screen.

Born in Peru of Colombian and Scottish parents, Andrew Coats grew up around the world before settling in the U.S. at the age of 16. Meanwhile, Lou Hamou-Lhadj’s childhood took root in the culturally rich suburbs of exotic southern New Jersey. Despite their disparate upbringings, their shared passions for fine arts and film led both Andrew and Lou to study Film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was here that they first met, and learned they could combine those passions into the most rewarding of art forms: animation. Kindred spirits in their love for bringing things to life one frame at a time, they both worked on each other’s shorts during school, and vowed to someday make a film together when the time was right.

Lou enjoyed the next 8 years at Pixar as a Character Artist on WALL•E, Toy Story 3, Partly Cloudy, Day & Night, Brave, Toy Story That Time Forgot, and The Good Dinosaur. For the first 3 years, he and Andrew stayed in close contact while Andrew rose through the ranks at Blue Sky Studios, animating on Horton Hears A Who, Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs, and finally serving as a Character Lead on Rio. Andrew then joined Pixar in 2010 where he has animated on Cars 2, Brave, Toy Story OF Terror!, Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur. Reuniting at Pixar rekindled the spark to create something together. During their spare time over the past 5 years they have been learning, growing, failing, picking each other up and ultimately crafting Borrowed Time, a very moving and insightful movie, about which we wanted to know more…

AnimatedViews: How did you choose “western” as the context of your film?

Andrew Coats: Back in 2007, we had brainstormed a few ideas for a short we’d like to make, and one of them happened to be a western. We grew up watching films like Sergio Leone’s “Man With No Name” trilogy and really loved the iconography: from characters and setting all the way through interesting framing of shots and editing that is specific to the genre. However, at the time, I was at Blue Sky, and Lou was at Pixar, and though we gave it our best effort, making a film across the country without today’s technology really wasn’t feasible. So, we decided to hold off on making a film until we were in the same place. It wasn’t until 2010, when I started at Pixar, that we could finally move forward with something.

Lou Hamou-Lhadj: By that point, we had both been working in the industry for a while, and had the privilege to contribute to a number of great family films. But we knew that to make this film we’d have to work in our off-time, and that fueled us to spend that time making something “different”.

AC: We were a bit frustrated with the lack of breadth in stories told through animation in America, and wanted to contribute to the medium by helping illustrate that it isn’t merely a children’s film genre, as much of the public perceives it. We wanted to champion American animation as a medium to tell any story.

LHL: What better way to do that than to target something uniquely American? Westerns are irrefutably a genre, the way that horror is a genre. You can make an animated western, or an animated horror film, and if you’re true to that, suddenly the “animation as a genre” argument falls away. It’s just the vessel we use to bring that story to life. That said, westerns are ripe with opportunity.

AC: That iconography I mentioned brings with it certain expectations. We may choose to frame a shot of someone you believe to be a hardened and weathered cowboy, and in the same shot, reverse that expectation and have him break down with emotion. Fighting for that unexpectedness is really at the core of why we chose to make a western, and specifically in the medium of animation.

AV: What came first? The context or the theme of the movie – forgiveness, second chance.

LHL: Context, but only for a short time. In the very beginning, the story was very different from what we ended up with. It was a typical train heist with a reversal at the end. We were inspired by some of the fun action-oriented shorts produced at Gobelins when we were students. They’re fantastic, and their strengths are largely in the art and craft of animation. But after writing an outline of a film that felt like that, we decided that although it would be fun to do, it was a surface-level short that didn’t have much emotional impact. What became important to us at this time was to learn how to tell a more emotionally compelling story.

AC: We knew we had a lot to learn; we spent the better part of the next two years trying to tackle a story of forgiveness, that was based on an experience of betrayal I had gone through in my life around the time we were writing. That story had another main character and was way more complicated to tell, so after trying for over a year to crack it, we learned that it was not possible to get to a satisfying resolution to the many relationships in the 6 minutes we wanted the short to be.

LHL: We almost lost hope at this point, for a moment we decided to cut the film down to a teaser that revolved around the inciting incident on the cliff.

AC: At least that way we would have something to show for all the work we had put in… but luckily, cutting the trailer showed us a new angle on how to tell a much simpler story.

LHL: The ultimate incarnation was framing that formative moment for him – the cliff scene – with him returning to the scene many years later, and letting his physical and emotional journey through that space fill in the gaps for us of who he’s become. He’s looking for closure, instead of forgiveness, but it feels like there’s a lot of subtext and history behind it, because there is! That process of subtraction and simplification is what we really embraced to get us to the final version of Borrowed Time.

AV: In that regard, your film is very metaphoric. Can you tell me about that aspect?

AC: It is, and a big part of that is that is very difficult to get an audience to deeply empathize with a character in 6 minutes. Metaphor can provide life outside of the time watching the film. It challenges the audience to reflect on the meaning. We also personally enjoy films that leave an impression on you and challenge you to be introspective, instead of spoon feeding everything. The difficulty, of course, is riding that line without being too ambiguous and losing the audience.

LHL: One of the many challenges with a project that spans as many years and versions as “Borrowed Time”, is that you weave those metaphors in different ways for each incarnation of the film. Since the film is so visual, tweaking the presentation of an object or moment can greatly impact its meaning, not only for the audience, but for the characters as well. We had to be particularly careful of this, because it’s easy to get too heady, or have remnants of old metaphors and appropriations persist that are no longer supported, or no longer mean anything to the character. The pocket watch was an example of this. Late in the game we realized we had been a little too intellectual about its importance, and had to make some adjustments to sequences that were already far along in order to have it carry any emotional weight for the characters.

AV: How did you come to choose that subject, and what does it represent to you as artists?

LHL: It evolved quite a bit, but we both have had experiences in our lives where we attach a certain level of sentimentality to a common object. Be it a touchstone to remember someone by, or a reminder of deep regret. Ultimately those objects can serve as a source of catharsis, as they represent a moment, a memory, or a piece of that person. I even sometimes struggle with the fear of losing people who are not yet gone, and by extension, losing an item that I’ve imbued with a connection to someone. It’s maybe a little crazy, but it’s deeply human, and we’ve seen that in the response to the film as well. The multitude of ways in which it has touched people’s lives is totally unexpected, but is a reminder that loss is a universal experience.

AC: Truth be told, the suicidal overtones were something we resisted for a long time, because as an artist you want to be sincere in your work, and that’s something we’ve never experienced. It’s weird though, how a film or a character can take on a life of its own after a while, and it is your job as a writer to listen to and empathize with their motivations, and be truthful to that, because in the end they’re not you at all. For our protagonist, it was a desire to reunite and reconnect with his father that took him to that cliff edge. It was a positive feeling, so the idea of suicide was no longer this taboo notion we feared we couldn’t relate to. The realization that this story has brought some comfort to those who can see themselves in it is humbling. It’s about as much as you can hope for, as a filmmaker, or artist in general.

AV: This is about time, too. How did you approach that notion through animation?

LHL: In a variety of ways, really, ultimately it was that teaser edit that provided us an opportunity to frame time in a different way. We wanted every bit of detritus in the wreckage to be a painful harbinger of what had happened; he’s just trying to power through the pain to get to the release at the edge of that cliff. The intercutting allowed us some economy, but tied the specificity of what we showed to what he was going through in present day. His reaction to these things plays in stark contrast to the relief when one of those bits of debris brings him what he needed all along.

AC: Everything is treated in a way that reflects that time is a force of nature. Things are shaded to be worn and weathered and caked in dirt, the character’s pained shuffle of a walk and scar on his cheek call back to having fallen off of the carriage as a boy. The watch is a little closer to the cliff edge from where we left it in the flashback, as rain and erosion have carried it off a bit. But perhaps most important is the portrayal of this character being stuck, frozen in a moment in time emotionally. Speaking to visual metaphor, we show him ensconced in the watch as we fade back to present day to drive that home…with subtlety.

AV: Can you, as Character designer, tell me about the design of your characters?

AC: We love drawing and sculpture and at one point were even entertaining animating this film in 2D. Design is all about pushing for qualities in someone and externalizing them. Our early designs for the main character evoked elements of Lee Van Cleef, and Daniel Day Lewis. Some people even say that he looks a little like my dad.

LHL: His design originally was intended for an unassuming deputy that was a mastermind behind a train heist, but that same design, with little modification, served as a gaunt, haunted individual who grew to be a shell of a man.

AC: We very much chose to make him feel skeletal, even in the lighting of some shots. His iconic facial features, such as his nose, longer face and piercing blue eyes, were purposeful as we needed the audience to recognize them in his younger incarnation by just cutting between the two. The challenge was creating a youthful and appealing naivety within these strong features, and reversing the toil and guilt that we feel in his older design.

LHL: His father, the sheriff, is supposed to be the embodiment of authority. Still, we wanted him to be loving, and warm in his own way, so we looked to actors like John Wayne and Bernard Hill to give us that quality in design. The sheriff’s clothing too, is something that his son, in later years, dresses in reverence to. It’s that idea of not quite being able to fill the shoes that were left behind.

AC: Lou and I ping-ponged the designs, always pushing for specificity, but a lot of the evolution happened in storyboarding the film over and over. From there, we both shared the modeling of them as well, and that iterative process just took form in 3D.

AV: How did the presentation of your project to Pixar University go? To you, what made Pixar want to accompany you in your project?

LHL: Pixar University’s Co-op program is really in place as an educational outlet. Employees are encouraged to try out a variety of roles in the filmmaking process and grow in their understanding of what it takes to make something like “Borrowed Time”. The result is that a lot of people are exposed to things they’ve never had the opportunity to do before, and it feeds back into the studio in a really enriching way.

AC: The process of presenting it, however, it really one of clearing it with our Legal department. So long as the film’s conceit isn’t encroaching on something that is in development, you’re cleared to make it however you can, provided it doesn’t disrupt the existing productions. Our film was the first CG production to be completed under the Co-op. Prior to “Borrowed Time” the program was mostly supporting live-action films.

AV: What are the most important things about animation you learned during your journey?

AC: Animation is inherently a long, meticulous and controlled process. You can’t leverage actors playing off of each other, or shoot extra coverage to find the story in edit. There is no such thing as spontaneity: everything has to be planned to a tee. So, your really have to try and focus on what you love and enjoy about it, and remember that at the end of the day, the reason we animate is to tell stories and connect with people. And for me that extends past just connecting with an audience. Filmmaking is a collaborative process that involves multiple people from various crafts and places in their lives. If you get to know people that are working with you and what their goals are and help foster them, it will make for a richer experience for everyone and ultimately a better film.

LHL: Speaking to Andrew’s point, you really can’t get there on your own. In school, we were solely responsible for everything in our films, and while that’s an environment that makes sense when you’re just learning the basics, there’s as much, if not more, to learn from working with a team. We didn’t start this project that way – we began with chasing that sense of ownership we missed from our earlier films. The moment we put that hubris aside and began to delegate and really invest our trust in others, the whole process flourished. Building that team and sharing our journey with our friends was one of the absolute best parts of this experience for us.

AV: How did you come to choose Gustavo Santaolalla as your composer? What did you want him to bring to your film?

LHL: We were playing The Last Of Us as we were trying to crack the story of Borrowed Time and fell in love with Gustavo’s music. He has a natural ability to create a soundscape that has space and depth, with as much emphasis on silence and the space between notes.

AC: That was a perfect fit with our “less is more” vision for the music in our short. We wanted to give space for the audience to live in emotional moments and be there with the character, instead of leading them and forcing them to feel something with the music. The music should be there to support the way the audience feels, not force it.

LHL: Working with Gustavo was such a pleasure. He is a true collaborator who listened to our thoughts intently and surpassed and challenged our expectations of what music could bring to the film.

AV: Andrew and Lou, how do you think you complement each other in the whole process?

LHL: Terribly. We’re the worst match for each other.

AC: Every day was a living hell and just kept getting worse with time! But seriously, we are lucky that we found each other in school and not only respected each other’s drive, but also enjoyed working together. Our tastes and skills overlap quite a bit, as you can imagine, but our strengths and focuses in filmmaking aren’t identical. We tend to let each other take the helm on different aspects of the film, all the while talking through what the end goal is.

LHL: That might be our biggest strength together: we listen to each other from a place of mutual respect. We argue and differ in opinion all the time, but we usually end up in a place that is better than where we started. It’s definitely an iron sharpens iron situation.

AC: But yeah, he’s the worst.

LHL: DITTO.

AV: What are your projects, now?

AC: We are currently still working our day jobs at Pixar, but have some ideas that we are exploring for next projects.

LHL: The reality is that our focus has been on getting Borrowed Time through the festival circuit. It has been a lot more work than we could have ever anticipated, and there’s still a great deal to learn about.

AC: In our careers, we have gotten used to doing our work and finishing on a film and just moving on to the next one, while a separate machine of PR takes the film and gets it out to the public. For our own film, we have to suddenly be that machine (with the bulk of the work done by our amazing producer, Amanda Jones). We are definitely out of our comfort zone to say the least!

LHL: Needless to say, it’ll be refreshing when we can refocus on being creative!

Be sure to watch the Borrowed Time trailer and making-of here.

The Mila Family wants to prove that “cartoons” can successfully enlighten all age groups on serious, real world issues. They hope their film will encourage viewers to discuss the issue of child war victims and take action to prevent it from happening to more children.

Cinzia Angelini, writer and director of Mila, has worked as an animator and story artist in feature productions for more than twenty years. Her Hollywood career includes work on Spider-Man 2, Prince Of Egypt, El Dorado, Bolt, Minions and many more films that a lot of us grew up watching.
The story of Mila is very personal to her; but at the same time, as intimate stories often are, it has a universal appeal, hence the extraordinary response of hundreds of artists around the world.

And ours…

Cinzia Angelini: I heard stories of WWII my entire childhood. In particular, my mom and my grandmother always re-lived and talked about things that happened during those years. I think it was both a way to cope with it but also their way to try and pass on some history of what happened.

When the bombing started in Trento and hundreds of people died in a single day, September 2nd 1943, my grandparents took the kids in the middle of the night and with the help of a friend escaped with the bicycles, the kids still on their Pajamas and all that they could carry. The street they took is very steep and they pushed the loaded bicycles in the dark as more attacks were happening lower down in the valley. They found refuge in a village up high and stayed there finding a one-room little apartment. They stayed there for the next couple of years. The kids actually enjoyed that time up in the mountains and my mom remembers it with pleasure. The war did not get there. They managed to survive and did not suffer as much as many other people did. While they were up there, the family house they left behind got occupied by the Nazis.

Some aspects of this story can be found in Mila. The story that really touched me out of all the war stories is the one that my mom told me of how she felt when the bomber attacks arrived, how she could not move, breathe, or call for help. She was Mila’s age during those difficult times. For years, I tried to imagine how a little kid would feel in the middle of that inferno, and one day the time came to put that up on the screen, so Mila was born.

AV: In what measure was that story ideal for a visual rendering, on screen?

CA: I don’t think my first thought was that it was an ideal story for a big screen, I just knew I wanted to tell that particular story and that I would have worked on the script until that story of feelings would be ready to be transferred to the big screen.

AV: What in that story particularly fit animation as a medium?

CA: I think that the fact that the story is inspired by the feelings of a child makes animation the ideal choice, at least for me. We have war sequences that will show the brutality of being in the middle of that situation, and dream sequences that will represent Mila’s memories of her mom— extremes that will be linked together with the magic of animation.

AV: What do you think animation brings to your story, any special dimension?

CA: Animation can be really powerful, and if well executed can touch the audience deep down, reaching every heart, no matter what size.

AV: Can you tell me more specifically about the process of going from family memories to an actual movie script?

CA: I think that the process I used to tell a family story is the same I would have used for any other story. It’s a matter of finding the storyline, identify where we are, when we start, where we want to go and how we want the audience to feel once we end. The challenge I had is that my mom’s story is the story of a passive child that has everything happening inside but cannot move because of terror. Generally, the characters of a film and mostly the main character need to be dynamic characters that change, evolve, and carry the story forward. Mila is a character that goes through a lot of emotions during the film. We have sequences of war and sequences of dreams that are led by her. Characters are vehicles that carry the story forward and evolve with it.

It was not easy to start from a simple concept of a child not moving with terror, and develop it into an 11-minute short film with multiple locations and characters. Actually, a great exercise for anyone interested in getting into story.

AV: What challenges did you face in adapting that personal story?

CA: I had to create a story that would still be true to the core idea of my mom’s feelings, but that at the same time would allow the character to carry the story forward. I used many elements of other war stories I heard during the years to fill the story line with action and create the character of Mila.

AV: Why did you choose to have no dialogue?

CA: I want Mila to be a universal film that talks to everyone, and the choice of making it a musical piece was natural for me. I didn’t want to have dialogue that would have “placed it” somewhere. Yes, it’s a film inspired by true events that happened in Italy, but Mila represents all children, in any war, in any time, so it was obvious to me to rely 100% on the universal language, music.

AV: With whom did you work on the story and the storyboard? Was it difficult to share such personal memories?

CA: I boarded myself a couple of early versions of the film, but once the script was more defined I asked a friend and a great story artist, Emanuela Cozzi, to have a go. I recommend to any director and in particular indie directors to ask someone to interpret their story. When the story is yours, is personal, it’s really easy to get too close to it and not see things objectively. It’s important to share the idea, the script, and the animatic with your family and friends— with people that would not be afraid to give you honest feedback. It’s a great way to see what is not clear, what works and what doesn’t, and to reinforce what is working well.

AV: How did you find the name “Mila?”

CA: I was looking for a short name that could be easily pronounced in many languages. One day I was talking with our modeling supervisor about the film and he mentioned his daughter, Mila. It was an immediate connection and felt obvious to me to pick that name.

See the Mila Trailer on YouTube: goo.gl/g9lJtK
For updates on Mila: goo.gl/xD01AD
Or check them out on Facebook: goo.gl/A2BtId

Our warmest thanks to Andrea Emmes and Cinzia Angelini!

Sanjay’s Super Team blends many exciting elements – traditional 2D and 3D animation, alternate realities, ancient temples, deities, cosmic action sequences – with a story about family, identity and tradition.

Presented alongside Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur, Sanjay’s Super Team is also the subject of an art book written by the director himself, in which the director presents key moments of story, character and environmental development that gave shape to the film as it made its way through the production pipeline, resulting in a gorgeous chronicle of short filmmaking at Pixar.

We were fortunate to approach Sanjay Patel and evoke with him the different steps of the production of this unlikely short movie.

AnimatedViews: It is said that, at first, you were reluctant to direct an animated short. You preferred to write/draw books. Can you tell me about the differences between the two artistic attitudes, and what made you change your mind?

Sanjay Patel: The big difference is I feel super creative and happy by myself. The more people I get around the more exhausted and uncreative I become. In many ways I’m a classic introvert, I really need lots of alone time to feel good. So my personality does really well with working on a book by myself. Directing is the exact opposite of my personality. Your whole job is to surround yourself with a team and to be creative through them. The thing that helped me was when I realized that I didn’t have to have all the answers, and when I let myself just collaborate with my friends. When the short was working at its best, there was a true collaborative energy going on.

I changed my mind towards directing after talking to my dad. He reminded me that the studio had supported me for nearly twenty years. And to not try what they were asking me to do would create bad karma. He suggested that my duty was to try my best.

AV: How did you build your crew?

SP: I wanted to work with Chris Sasaki from minute one. The guy is an incredible talent and a really hard worker. And he does it all with a smile and laid back attitude. As a director you couldn’t ask for a better collaborator. The producer of SST, Nicole Grindle, did all the heavy lifting to assemble the crew. She gets all the credit for snagging Chris as well.

AV: Also, in your crew were Dice Tsutsumi and Robert Kondo, who created the wonderful Dam Keeper. Being, like you, both artists and directors, how did you collaborate with them?

SP: Once again Nicole orchestrated the collaboration with Robert and Dice. Nicole had worked with them both on Monsters University and felt they would be a great fit for us. Robert acted as mentor to Chris Sasaki who was new to the role, and Dice acted as mentor to Paul Abadilla, who created a beautiful color script for the short. We were extraordinarily lucky to set the short on sure footing with such seasoned pros.

AV: The subject being very close to your own identity, how did you share your vision to your crew, who doesn’t share Indian and Hindu culture?

SP: I started off by sharing the story reels, then told them more about how I grew up in a household that was split into east and west. I told them about trying to balance two cultures while trying to figure out your own. We also took a couple of trips to the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and were guided by some great docents who brought the deities to life by recounting their myths. We also had two other artists (Charu Clark: Lighting Lead & Arjun Rihan: Camera & Staging Lead) of South Asian descent who helped educate the crew.

AV: In matter of design, what were your sources regarding the temple and traditional Indian architecture? How was it, to create it in CG?

SP: Well, we took inspiration for Jain temples as well as the temple architecture of the Hoysala empire. Much of the design work was executed by Chris Sasaki and Nelson Bohol.

In some ways, working in CG allowed us to take some shortcuts with replicating details that the original creators of these temples might have appreciated.

AV: Your books propose a lot of wonderful designs of Hindu gods. Did you want to translate those designs in animation?

SP: I didn’t want the designs of my books to set the tone for the short film. In fact I gave Chris the freedom to find them in his own style. Once they were modeled and rigged, Royce Wesley our lead animator did some great tests to figure out the unique way they could animate. The big reference point for animating the deities was classical Indian dance. We brought in a local expert, Katherine Kunhiraman. She helped choreograph the movements of the deities with specific South Asian dance traditions.

AV: What were the technical challenges you encountered?

SP: Lots of tech challenges. All the deities needed flowing robes and ornate jewelry that could levitate and trail with the deities. Creating the cosmic temple was a major technical challenge that got solved by lighting and effects working side by side to pull off a set that was a moving visual effect.

AV: How did you make light a true storyteller?

SP: Light is the central theme of the story. Lighting the candle, keeping it lit, light changes representing the transformation of the temple from something grey, dead and lifeless into something vibrant and celestial, ultimately leading to Little Sanjay’s enlightenment.

AV: Can you tell me about the use of those particularly vibrant colors?

SP: Each deity has a color association. Vishnu is always blue, Durga is always red, and Hanuman tends to be seen in greens. Just stayed true to the tradition.

AV: Can you tell me about the sound design?

SP: We were super lucky to work with an amazing sound designer, Justin Pearson, who works here at Pixar. I asked him to limit himself to just a prayer bell and chanting, because this is all my dad uses in his devotional practice. Justin made fantastic use of the limitations by recording prayer bowls, massive temple bells, as well as crystal bowls for pure tones. Justin is a wizard with sound.

AV: How did you come to composer Mychael Danna for the score? What did you expect from his unique musical personality?

SP: Since Mychael was being courted by PIXAR to score The Good Dinosaur we were asked to consider him. After meeting and talking we realized that both of our sons share the same name, Arjun. It turned out that Mychael’s wife is Bengali and he was very in tune with the culture as well as the music of the spiritual culture of India. In fact, Mychael had the insight to introduce the bansuri flute for a peak moment where Vishnu anoints the boy.

AV: Sanjay’s Super Team is very specific in its subject, and at the same time, talks to everyone. How do you explain that paradox?

SP: Much of that credit goes to John Lasseter. John was the one who suggested telling the true story of me and my dad. Then he kept encouraging me to tell my truth, to be faithful to my story. He knew if we were honest about the experience it would ring true and resonate for others.

AV: It seems to me that, in a way, Sanjay’s Super Team allowed you to rediscover your traditions, but through the most modern of mediums. What do you think about that (again) paradox?

SP: Yeah, its sorta ironic! What I tell people is that my dad practices his faith sitting cross legged on a mat. I’m equally devoted and reverent, I just sit on a Herman Miller chair and use a Macintosh computer. I think Steve Jobs would have smiled at this short!

The Art of Sanjay’s Super Team is available to order from Amazon.com!

Our warmest thanks to Sanjay Patel and April Whitney!