Animation Directors Use New Tech and Styles to Tell Modern Stories
variety.comPaul Plunkett In today’s high-tech world, there are as many ways to make an animated film as there are film genres. Each year’s top animated features span everything from family fare to real-life documentaries and everything in between, and today’s animation directors have as many, or as few, tools at their disposal to tell their stories as they want.For Sony Pictures Animation’s “The Mitchells vs.
the Machines,” a comedy about a dysfunctional family battling a robot apocalypse, directors Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe saw the irony in using top-notch tools to tell a cautionary tale about technology.“We were making a movie about technology and the only way we could contact our mom or see our friends was over the computer,” says Rianda of working during the pandemic lockdown. “It’s a wonderful time for animation right now.
I would love to see people from all walks of life telling stories. I’m excited to see where people take that.” Both directors met while training at CalArts, where they made films each year to show to their peers.“If you did good, you have an audience that laughs and cheers and if you did bad, you just have to like sit there in a quiet room of like a hundred people,” recalled Rowe. “I think it kind of like instilled in us the audience is always right.
You don’t make stuff in a vacuum, you make it for people.” While animation technology is evolving almost daily, some directors use the advances to aid in techniques they were originally trained in, rather than changing how they work.Michaela Pavlátová, whose film “My Sunny Maad” tells the story of a Czech woman who marries an Afghan man and her experience moving to Kabul during the American occupation, deploys a simple, hand-drawn animation style.Growing up.
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