(L-R) Executive Director Roger Durling, Kelsey Mann, Nick Park, Chris Sanders and Gints Zilbalodis. (Courtesy of SBIFF)
The Santa Barbara International Film Festival hosted an Animation Panel in Arlington Theatre on Feb. 5, featuring an in-depth discussion among directors of films nominated for Best Animated Feature at the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony.
The panel featured “Inside Out 2” director Kelsey Mann, “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” director and creator Nick Park, “The Wild Robot” director Chris Sanders and “Flow” director Gints Zilbalodis. The directors were interviewed by Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) Executive Director Roger Durling.
The panel started with “Inside Out 2,” a sequel to the Pixar film where the main character Riley’s emotions are depicted as characters in her head. Mann discussed the decision to film the movie in 2.39:1 aspect ratio, saying that he wanted the aspect ratio to reflect Riley’s expanding world, considering that she is older and dealing with new emotions from the first film.
“When I thought about it and I’m like, well, Riley’s getting older and her world is expanding. So I thought that’d be really cool if the aspect ratio expands along with her, plus after you fit all those emotions in one shot,” Mann said.
He also highlighted the character Anxiety, one of the new emotions for Riley featured in the film. Mann discussed the decision not to incorporate the color orange at the beginning, which is representative of anxiety in this film. This decision was done to depict how anxiety can take over someone’s life, even if it’s never been present before.
“Whenever Riley’s feeling really anxious, we’ll try to put a little bit more orange, kind of make her environment. You kind of notice that throughout the film, especially when she shows up to the summer camp, her anxiety is really showing up,” Mann said.
Mann also discussed the depiction of panic attacks in the film, highlighting a particular scene which features intense cinematography through camera shakes and the lighting, as well as a violin being used as the “voice of anxiety” through Andrea Datzman’s score. The film also dealt with the social shift of prioritizing friends over family through Friendship Island and social anxiety through Anxiety’s takeover of the other Islands of Personality in Riley’s head.
Mann finished by highlighting the pressure of directing a sequel to a critically acclaimed film.
“It was built with a lot of anxiousness, you know, because [with] any movie we do at Pixar we have a high bar and our audiences have a high bar for ourselves … At the beginning, before the film’s out, so many people were like, ‘So “Inside Out,” it’s my favorite animated movie of all time, maybe my favorite movie of all time. ‘Do you feel any pressure?’ Well, now I do!” Mann concluded.
Park then began discussing “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.” Produced by Aardman Animations, it’s the sixth film in the “Wallace & Gromit” franchise and the first film after the passing of Peter Sallis, the voice actor for Wallace, in 2017. Park discussed the challenge of continuing to work after his passing, as well as the replacement voice actor for Wallace, Ben Whitehead.
“We just discovered he could do a great impression of Wallace, and he’s got[ten] better over the years, so he’s really been a godsend. Really, he saved the future of ‘Wallace & Gromit,’” Park said.
The film also featured the return of the fan-favorite character Feathers McGraw, beloved for the “sinister element” he adds to the films. In the film, McGraw gets revenge on Wallace and Gromit by reprogramming their garden gnome.
Park discussed how difficult McGraw’s character can be for animators.
“Only about five animators would dare animate Feathers McGraw because he’s like an exercise in minimalism and nuance,” Park said. “We were very careful to hold our nerve and not do much with him, and it’s strange for animators to ask them not to animate something.”
Park also discussed the various influences he had for the film, which range from films noir to the James Bond movies, in order to craft a unique artistic style for the film while still fitting it inside the style of the “Wallace & Gromit” films.
“We tend to just jump around in different genres, something where you set up a shot and in the moment, or it’s a bit like that movie, maybe push it to be a bit more,” Park said. “‘Wallace & Gromit’ is always set in a kind of nether world between 1950s and modern day, and the technology is never that modern or it’s got rivets all over it. For the first time we do actually have computers, but they’re all a bit vintage, you know, they’re all kind of 1980s.”
Park also discussed the themes of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) present in the film.
“It is a kind of commentary on modern AI, but with gnomes. So we keep the kind of silliness and vintage quality in the lighthearted touch,” Park said.
“The Wild Robot” director Sanders discussed his adaptation of the 2016 novel of the same name by Peter Brown, which is about a robot named Roz learning to adapt on a deserted island with the native animals.
Sanders discussed the art style of the film, which features a more “painterly” look as a result of DreamWorks Animation experimenting outside of their traditional animation style, as seen in other films like “Puss and Boots: The Last Wish” and “The Bad Guys.”
“When I read Peter Brown’s book for the very first time, I thought this story [was] deceptively friendly and really simple in some ways, but the feelings inside it were really vast. And my concern was that, if we were to do it in the style that we had been in for a very long time, that we were obligated to, I think technologically that it just wouldn’t have the sophistication that I felt that it really deserved,” Sanders said.
Sanders also discussed the film’s score, which is the only film of the Best Animated Feature nominees to also be nominated for Best Original Score. The score is composed by Kris Bowers and is meant to fill in the gaps of the story without dialogue, where the music’s build up will occasionally dip for a brief moment of dialogue before building back up again.
“‘The Wild Robot’ has about 50% of the dialogue that a film like that would normally have, so we do have these wide open spaces where the music becomes the voice of the film,” Sanders said.
The film also tackled complex themes regarding technology, motherhood and nature. Sanders was excited to explore the concepts of how kindness can be used as a tool for survival and breaking free from traditional patterns.
“We were attending to what I would say were the two largest load-bearing thematic pillars: that of kindness being a survival skill and the idea that eventually you may have to change your programming — but that’s a moment you’ll likely look back on and be very proud of,” Sanders said.
The last film discussed in the panel was “Flow” with director Zilbalodis, a Latvian independent film which contains no dialogue. The film follows a nameless cat trying to survive a flood, working alongside other animals.
Zilbalodis discussed using water as a visual motif representing the cat’s emotions, where the water changing from aggressive to tranquil matches the cat’s state of mind. He brought up how, since the film features no dialogue, he had to use visual and sound cues to represent the emotion in the film.
He also discussed the cat’s need to keep climbing away from things in the film, even if it is seemingly unnecessary.
“When the flood comes, [the cat] climbs up on its house and just waits for it to go away … Later, when they’re in the boat, everyone is fighting and arguing, and the cat decides to leave, climbing up the boat’s mast and waiting for the problem to go away,” Zilbalodis said.
“It does run from its problems, but in doing so, it also escapes positive emotions. It avoids fear and dread, but in the end, there is only emptiness,” he continued. “It has to realize that running away isn’t the answer.”
Zilbalodis, who also composed the music for the film, said he wrote some of the music even before writing the script. He said it takes a lot of effort to find the shape of the film, and writing the music can help guide the emotion behind the film.
“Some of these [themes] are really hard to articulate with words. They’re very kind of emotional and raw, and if I could express them I wouldn’t need to make this film. So the music kind of expresses things that you can’t express in words,” Zilbalodis said.
The panel ended by opening up the conversation to all the directors, highlighting similarities across the four featured films, as well as the role of lighthearted elements in animated films to achieve emotional depth.
“I think that we locked into the emotional, more weighty side of this thing really quickly, because that was the thing that compelled us quite a bit. You have to balance it with humor I think because you need all those wavelengths. You’re not going to get those emotional depths unless you have light things,” Sanders concluded.
