For the Oscar-nominated director, the move from small, intimate films like ‘Ernest & Celestine’ to a major studio production meant learning to rely on a much bigger team and find new ways to communicate story ideas, designs, gags, and creative sensibilities; produced by Illumination CEO and founder Chris Meledandri, the film hits theaters today, December 22.
Illumination’s all-new film, Migration is a fun, funny tale about a feathered family vacation that somehow doesn’t go as planned. So, it’s like every other family vacation in history. In the film, the Mallard family is in a bit of a rut. While dad Mack is content to keep his family safe paddling around their New England pond forever, mom Pam is eager to shake things up and show their teen son Dax and duckling daughter Gwen the whole wide world. After a migrating duck family alights on their pond with thrilling tales of far-flung places, Pam persuades Mack to embark on a family trip via New York City to tropical Jamaica. As the Mallards make their way south for the winter, their well-laid plans quickly go awry. As is to be expected. Because it's a family vacation. But how they rally, and make friends along the way, brings them together in ways they never imagined.
The 3DCG animated family adventure flies into theaters today, December 22.
The film is directed by Benjamin Renner, known for his work on critically-acclaimed, intimate 2D films like the Oscar-nominated Ernest & Celestine and The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales. Guylo Homsy (Sing, Sing 2) co-directs, while Illumination CEO and founder Chris Meledandri produces. The topflight cast includes Kumail Nanjiani, Elizabeth Banks, Caspar Jennings, Tresi Gazal; the film also stars Danny DeVito, Awkwafina, Carol Kane, Keegan-Michael Key, David Mitchell.
For Renner, directing a “big Hollywood production” and shifting from 2D to 3DCG were both major moves. “I worked on movies that had very modest budgets, with very small teams, almost family made,” he says. “And being contacted by Chris Meledandri was a bit of a shock to me in the sense that I never really saw myself as a Hollywood director because I'm very shy, I like to work by myself, and I draw. I had never done 3D, so I knew I wouldn't have the same dynamic that I had on the previous movies that I made, or at least I thought.”
“I met him and first of all, I was very reassured by his attitude,” he continues. “I’d met a few Hollywood producers and I've been pitched projects, and it was literally… ‘It's the story of this character and this character, a little bit like in this movie, and they meet characters like in this movie, and then they meet another girl who acts like in this movie.’ And it always felt like we're really talking about references and not so much about emotions. And what shocked me with Chris was that he only talked about the emotions and relatable things that he loved. So, he asked me to direct the movie and I told him, ‘I have no idea how to do that. I can try, and if it's going wrong, if you see we're not matching, you just tell me to move away, and I won't be offended. I'd rather be useful and not try to transform myself and do things that I don't know how to do and be unhappy and you're unhappy and no one's happy. Because I always try to do my best for a project.’ And that's what he gave the movie. He allowed me to have my tone, my personal tone in the project.”
Renner admits they were a bit worried that the movie was different from a film like Despicable Me, with its very funny characters saying very funny things while using very funny machines. “We knew it was going to be hard, because it’s so intimate,” he shares. “If you made a pitch of this movie, it’s very simple. It's just a little family that wants to go on a holiday. That’s it. It's not like Lord of the Rings where we need to save the world by doing something. So, we knew it was going to be hard to pull the audience in.”
Noting it was a very long production for an Illumination movie, the director and his team worked “step by step” to find and make relatable the emotions of the characters and through that effort, “completely understand what this movie is about.”
Having worked exclusively in 2D, Renner nevertheless didn’t want the production team to assume his arrival meant the film would employ some type of watercolor style or effects. “I told everyone that in all the movies I had made, I always adapted the graphic style to the story,” he says. “You have incredible skills, and I don't want to be the director that comes into the studio and says, ‘We are going to do something immensely different.’ That’s not the kind of director I am. I always try to adapt to the people that I'm working with.”
As early work began, Renner quickly realized he didn’t always have answers when questioned about look development. “At the very beginning they were asking me things that I couldn't answer,” he explains. “And I told them, I was very honest, I can't answer that. Just to give you an example, the very first things that I saw being built were cars. There are almost no cars in the movie. The very first thing to validate in 3D, and I said, ‘I don't know. That's not how I'm used to working.’ In 2D, you see a final picture almost straight away and that's it. And here, you have to really wait for a long time before you see anything close to final. So, that was a challenge for me. Learning to trust them that they knew where we're heading, but also me warning them about things that I think were important for the storytelling. And I really wanted something very simple. Graphically, I didn't need to be able to count the number of grass blades or number of leaves in the trees. I told them just make it graphic.”
He adds, “When I arrived at the studio, they were working on Pets 2 [The Secret Life of Pets 2], Minions 2 [Minions: The Rise of Gru], and I think Mario [The Super Mario Bros. Movie] had started. I very quickly noticed that what they were so good at was this ability to make even the weirdest design that you can imagine feel like it's real, that you could touch it. You could make it move. They could even make the floor feel completely realistic. They were so good at it. And so, I thought, okay, we need to use that. Me being from 2D, it's almost the opposite. It's like we're using texture, we're using watercolor and stuff like that, and you have to sort of imagine. But there's no feeling of I want to touch that, I want to feel it because I see it and I can almost feel it under my fingers because it's so real. So, we had to find this balance between things.”
Renner also realized early on that as a director who’d worked primarily on small 2D productions, he’s used to expressing and communicating ideas through drawings, and at a big studio like Illumination, he’d need to be more verbal and less hands-on. “I have a big issue as a director in that I'm not very good at articulating, or at least coming up with ideas, narratively speaking, without drawing,” he admits. “And so, I go through a process of creating thumbnails that my previous producers accepted completely. It's been part of the pipeline. And when I arrived at Illumination, people told me, ‘You can't do that. You have to ask storyboard artists. You have to tell them what you want, and they have to do it.’ It was very tough on me because I couldn't come up with ideas. We were giving them a script and they were giving me a storyboard based on the script. And from there, I was completely stuck. The only way to get unstuck was to take the storyboard and draw myself, ‘Oh, we could do that, and we could do that,’ which could have been quite frustrating for the story artists. Me giving them drawings, then saying ‘You do that, that, that, and that.’”
Ultimately, with Meledandri’s support, Renner found a way to work with the large storyboard team on the project where he could better communicate his ideas, rework sequences, or add gags. “We came up with a method where I took my thumbnails, did the voices, and pretended how the scene would play, and put that into the computer, which I was happy with,” he says.
When asked if he was ultimately able to impart his own artistic 2D style and sensibilities on the movie like he had on previous films, Renner hesitates. “It's really hard for me to tell because it's been a five-year process, so I sort of lost track,” he says. “My working method before was to do the storyboard myself. My producer in France would beg me to validate the storyboard so the film could move to the next phase, which was animating and everything else. Here, it's been a very different process. We do the storyboard, and we start production, which means that as we're doing the storyboard, we're doing animation and everything. We keep working on the storyboard and sometimes we don't even know how the film is going to end, or we're still thinking about how we haven't settled that, while we’re animating. So, there was this very iterative process. I was always offering something deep and sincere, things that made me laugh or things that I’d experienced that I was trying to share in the movie - my kind of humor and everything. But the film also evolved. I was asked to shift some elements here and there, because even if it's animated and composited, we can change this thing, remove a line here, even redo a whole sequence. So, to be very honest with you, after five years, I can't really see what's from me. Chris and everyone keep telling me ‘There's so much you in this movie.’ And I'm like, ‘Is there?’”
“There's a lot of my sensibility in the film,” he adds. “For example, there are no fart jokes. I really hate them. There’s not a fart joke that made me laugh in my entire life. Well, there’s one good one in Finding Nemo. So, there are no gags in the film where I didn't understand the humor. But then the character of little Gwen definitely has the kind of humor that I tried to replicate from how I saw people that I met when I was a kid. But this is not my movie. It’s the movie of me, Chris, and the rest of the team. And that's also the reason why I wanted to do this movie, to sort of relieve a little bit of the pressure of working in France, where there’s big expectations on the author. I didn’t feel that here. I felt with an American studio, I could benefit from this feeling of let's all work together and let's do the best we can do to make it work.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
