“Animation Is the Most Timeless Kind of Storytelling”: ‘Moana 2,’ ‘The Wild Robot’ and the Animation Roundtable

In an increasingly polarized, complex and scary world, animated films are one of our last havens of pure communal joy. Divisions between red and blue, left and right, wokes and deplorables fall away when we collectively gather in a movie theater to hear stories of inner emotions transformed into quippy cartoons, to watch the adventures of elemental gods and sentient robots (or sentient garden gnomes), to ponder the marvels of real-world creativity through the medium of children’s building blocks.

THR invited the directors of some of the biggest and buzziest animated films in this year’s awards season — Josh Cooley, director of Paramount’s Transformers One; Kelsey Mann, the helmer behind Pixar’s Inside Out 2, the highest-grossing animated film of all time; Dana Ledoux Miller, one of the directors of Disney’s Moana 2 (along with David Derrick and Jason Hand); Morgan Neville, who helmed Piece by Piece, the Focus Features’ Lego-animated documentary about the life of Pharrell Williams; Nick Park, director (with Merlin Crossingham) of the Netflix claymation film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl; and Chris Sanders, director of Universal Pictures’ The Wild Robot — to talk about personal inspiration, technical challenges (including shooting the first Lego drug deal) and why, despite the looming threat of AI, the future of animation looks brighter than ever.

Maybe we could kick off with the question of how you fell in love with the movies. What was the film that made you want to become a filmmaker?

CHRIS SANDERS I mean, there’s animated film, and then there’s film-film. I would say that film-film, probably [1963’s] It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. What a movie! Just everything in camera, people flying airplanes through billboards. The whole old-fashioned scene in the airplane with Mickey Rooney. Holy mackerel. I just rewatched that. I watch it like once a year. Yeah, that’s a movie.

KELSEY MANN For me, it was definitely [1977’s] Star Wars. I think if I have a core memory, it’s definitely from Star Wars because I saw it when I was 5. It might be one of my earliest memories.

MORGAN NEVILLE My earliest memory of seeing a movie was [1971’s] Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It just blew my mind. And I wasn’t thinking about making movies at the time, but it’s funny because I brought that movie up and I even refer to that movie in the movie I just made. So it’s something that comes full circle.

DANA LEDOUX MILLER I’d say [1987’s] The Princess Bride is probably one of the first that I saw that really just changed the way I thought about storytelling, even when I was young. It was just so fun and so exciting, and I think it just got me excited about watching movies. But also [1992’s] The Little Mermaid. I know I’m in the house of Disney right now, but I swear they’re not telling me I have to say these things. I grew up with The Little Mermaid and [1993’s] Aladdin and [1994’s] The Lion King. That was like the sweet spot for me as a kid, and so I just remember seeing those films in the theater and wanting to be in those stories.

JOSH COOLEY The film that made me want to be a filmmaker was [1988’s] Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I just loved, loved that movie. It hit at the right moment for me. But before that, the very first memory I have at the theater actually was watching [1982’s] E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I remember it so strongly because it was the first time I really felt something emotional from watching the big screen. Then I looked over to my dad, and I remember seeing him cry. I think that it was the very first time, and one of the only times, I remember seeing him really cry.

NICK PARK I was just getting into doing my own stop-motion animation as a kid on 8mm. And I saw for the first time [1963’s] Jason and the Argonauts with visual effects by Ray Harryhausen. All those creatures coming to life, the skeleton fight and everything. I was just blown away. There’s this scene from Argonauts when they are stealing stuff from underneath the statue of Talos, and there’s a shot where Ray Harryhausen animates the head of the statue coming to life. It just goes: “Errr!” It’s the simplest thing but just sent chills down my spine. I used it for the gnomes in the new film.

Chris, with The Wild Robot, what was the core idea at the center of that story that spoke to you?

SANDERS With The Wild Robot, it was certainly Peter Brown’s [2016] book, which centers around a lost robot. Of course, I love robots, and the idea of a robot that doesn’t even know it’s lost is just really charming and compelling. But the cherry at the center was the mom story [voiced by Lupita Nyong’o]. I never get to work on things like that. The idea at the very core of The Wild Robot was a mom, and that for me was a really intriguing and compelling challenge.

Josh, was it robots that drove you to Transformers One?

COOLEY The idea was that this was totally different from all the other Transformers films because it was only on [the Transformers’ home planet] Cybertron. There are no humans involved. So it allowed all the characters to come right out of the characters that I grew up watching. But it was also about this relationship between the two main characters going from friends to enemies. I just loved the simplicity of that. This theme runs through some big classic films: [1960’s] Spartacus, [1956’s] The Ten Commandments. I was thinking if this is a chance to do a sci-fi film on another planet, but to also have this big epic with the most human kind of story ever told with these characters, I had to take the opportunity to do it.

LEDOUX MILLER Can I just say thank you? Because my kids loved your movie. I ended up having to make Transformer costumes for Halloween this year. They actually transform. They were a big hit, but I’ve never worked so hard in my life!

COOLEY I want to see that. You’ve got to share that. That’s awesome.

Dana, Moana 2 is your first feature as a director. What did you want to hold on to from the first film and what did you want to expand or transform with your movie?

LEDOUX MILLER The first film really changed my life in a lot of ways. It was the first time we had a Disney princess like Moana. I’m Samoan, and we never had a Polynesian superstar like this. And she was a woman. I remember watching that film and thinking that Moana was going to change the way I got to walk into rooms and pitch stories. I didn’t know eight years ago that I would be part of telling her story. I actually co-wrote the upcoming live-action Moana as well. I was working on it when I jumped into the sequel.

That first film is really about her connecting to her past and finding herself, which, in a lot of ways, it helped me do. For Moana 2, I really thought about what it would mean for a young woman who had just become a leader of her community — what’s the next step of that? Without reinventing that entire journey from the first film, we really focused on making sure that she was still growing. Not changing the fundamental core of who she is but expanding on that.

Nick, you’ve spoken a bit about the challenges with the first Wallace & Gromit feature, 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, in making your very British story inside the studio system with DreamWorks. Did you face some similar challenges making this new movie with Netflix?

PARK Strangely, this film was incredibly quick to make. It was 15 months shooting. Our average for features is about 18 months. I don’t remember any problems, to be honest. It might be because I’ve got jet lag and I’m in a brain fog now. But the guys at Netflix were very respectful of the Wallace & Gromit legacy and the Britishness of it. It was a great learning curve with DreamWorks, and I enjoyed it in many ways, but it was quite a challenge to hang on to our roots. We were aware this time that the language, the accents, couldn’t be totally obscure. We had to be a bit more sensitive because we didn’t want to have subtitles for the English-speaking audiences.

Morgan, this is your first animated feature. Why tell the story of Pharrell Williams as a Lego animation?

NEVILLE Well, looking back over the films I’ve made, so many of them have been about creativity and the creative process. I think of people’s creativity as their own kind of superpower. And Pharrell was somebody who was so creative in so many ways that I wanted to ask a lot of questions about that because he has grappled with balancing his creative instincts with a world telling you otherwise, telling you you’re too weird or you’re too mainstream or whatever. But doing it in Lego became a chance to not just be about creativity, but to be a creative act itself. Like, how do we invent a new type of hybrid film in a way? We constantly felt like we were trying to figure out the grammar of what we could do in a film like this. It was both incredibly fun to do and interesting but also reflective of Pharrell, too, because he’s kind of a magical thinker. The idea literally came from him in the first conversation I had with him. It felt organic to him.

COOLEY I have a question about that because I saw your film, and it’s amazing that you visualize sound so incredibly well. Pharrell speaks about how he has synesthesia, he sees the music in colors, it’s a very visual thing. How would you have done that without Lego?

NEVILLE I don’t know how you could. You guys, as animators, have all these possibilities, but normally if your main character has synesthesia, where they see color when they hear sound, you couldn’t do that in a documentary. But in animation, it feels totally organic. It became one of these great keys into why we’re doing it this way. I could ask Pharrell: “What does this beat look like? What’s the color of this beat?” And he would tell me. So all the beats and colors in the film are accurate to the colors he sees in his head. This is how he sees his sounds.

Kelsey, Inside Out 2 was your first animated feature as a director. Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter said before the release: “If it doesn’t work, we’re going to have to change everything about how we work in Pixar.” How was it to feel the weight of the future of the animation industry on your shoulders?

MANN Pete Docter, who directed the original film, he’s the one that first came to me and asked me to do this. At the beginning, I felt a lot of excitement and joy. I honestly never thought I’d ever get this chance to direct a movie, really anywhere, let alone at Pixar. So when he asked me, I was very excited about it. But then, you’re totally right. The weight of it all hit me. It’s funny looking back on it — now that the movie is done and out there, I can see I was definitely feeling joy but also a lot of overwhelming anxiety during this project. And I put that on the screen. It’s really a battle between my joy and anxiety, which is kind of the entire run of this movie.

Josh, how did you manage to bring issues like class consciousness, fake news or civil rights into a “kids film” like Transformers One?

COOLEY Taking Transformers and putting it on their planet, it automatically created the idea of, how is our society structured? I needed to relate their world to ours as much as possible because it is so foreign. Because Orion Pax and D-16 are underdogs who don’t have the ability to transform at first, I immediately pushed them in a lower class. The classism came out of just working on the story, and then came the idea of having a leader who’s in a position to form that class structure. I didn’t set out going, “I’m going to talk about this theme and this theme and this theme.” It just gradually grew out of the idea of being on this other planet and seeing the society. But also, we started this movie in 2020. Literally my first day on the movie was when the world shut down. So there was a lot going on and there’s a lot to bring from our own stories here into the film.

Are there certain issues that studios will just reject out of hand when it comes to animation?

LEDOUX MILLER That wasn’t my experience at all. I didn’t set out to tell a story about myself growing up and what it means as the world changes all around you, but it became that. And everyone at Disney was really supportive of it. There was no point where someone said, “You can’t tell this in a children’s story.” Everyone understands the assignment when you’re coming in and telling a Disney story, but at no point were we ever going to speak down to our audience.

SANDERS I’m absolutely convinced you can tell any story about any subject. It can be hard stuff. As long as you’re conscious of how you’re delivering it and you’re not excluding any part of your audience.

NEVILLE Because I was dealing with so much real-world stuff, we had a lot of debate. We have a Black Lives Matter scene in Piece by Piece. We had a lot of debate about how much do we show and not show. I think we have the first Lego drug deal ever done on film. We knew we weren’t going to animate things like Snoop Dogg with a Lego joint, but we had to come up with ways in all these instances that adults would understand it in a certain context, but kids could see it, and it would work for them, but they wouldn’t necessarily have to understand everything that was being told.

Both Chris’ and Nick’s films directly deal with the issue of artificial intelligence, which is obviously a huge subject within the animation world. Jeffrey Katzenberg said that generative AI could mean an end to 90 percent of animated jobs. What are your hopes and fears for AI?

PARK I’m not much of a techie myself. My fellow director Merlin Crossingham could probably say a lot more on this. But in Wallace & Gromit, the tech is actually automated gnomes. It’s a bit of a caricature world, doing it all through comedy. Tech seems to lend itself so much to comedy — the amount of times things go wrong. If there is any message in the film, it’s more about the love affair we seem to be having with tech and does it enhance our humanity or does it in some way take away from our humanity? We try not to be black-and-white about it. One of Wallace’s flaws really is that he believes in technology. Gromit in a way represents the human touch, which is what the film is about on a meta level, with the handmade animation. Wallace is a flawed character, and I think that’s why we like him because — speaking for myself at least — we’re all a bit like Wallace in that self-deluded way that we believe somehow things will bring us more happiness. Obviously tech and AI have many advantages, and it’s moving forward. But my film is just about keeping an eye on things. If there’s any message, that’s what it is. That and not trusting penguins [a reference to Wallace and Gromit’s nemesis, the flightless fowl Feathers McGraw].

COOLEY I don’t know much about AI, but what I do know is that you’re only going to get what you put into it. If that means we’re getting the same kind of regurgitated stuff back at us, that’s going to force us to make even better movies that are more exciting. I think about [2022’s] Everything Everywhere All at Once. No computer could have made that. That’s insane. And same thing with [this year’s] Longlegs even. The stuff that I love is just so new and original that I know that can only come from people.

LEDOUX MILLER So much of every great film that we love comes out of a happy accident. It’s two people working in a room. In our case, we have Mini Maui [a sentient tattoo on the demigod Maui], who’s hand-drawn on CG. It’s this complicated process that works because we’re in a room trying to figure out whether it’s one frame higher or one frame lower, and suddenly we have a joke that we didn’t have before.

PARK Will AI ever understand irony and absurdity?

NEVILLE I was talking to a composer friend of mine who was showing me these new AI apps. And he said, “This is probably going to erase 50 percent of composer work.” I think what we’re all talking about, which is about making real handcrafted art, is absolutely of value. I worry more about the taste of people and if people are going to care about the difference? I think if you just want to go home at the end of the day and have AI generate a new episode of Golden Girls for you or something, that might be fine, even if it’s just mediocre.

MANN I’m sure there’ll still be people who want stuff that’s created by AI, but there’ll be a whole bunch of people who will want the opposite. Nick, one of my favorite things about your film is seeing the fingerprints in the clay. I love that. And I think people will want more of that.

SANDERS The whole thing with AI kind of arose while we were in the midst of finishing The Wild Robot. It certainly wasn’t around when the book was written, but the new digital technology allowed us to get people back into the process. In our case, we had backgrounds that were 100 percent painted by people. Just like in The Lion King, just like [2002’s] Lilo & Stitch. We haven’t had that for a long, long time — for decades. People have reacted so positively to the vibe of the movie, and I think that’s largely because there’s such an immense amount of humanity just poured into every background. You absolutely feel it. That gave me a lot of hope for the human element being present in these things.

Morgan, you brought a documentary style into your animation. There’s even archive footage that looks like old VHS recordings. How did you manage to get that look in Lego?

NEVILLE In documentaries, you have archive footage and you’re jumping between aspect ratios and everything else. I wanted to keep all that. And so we did a lot of tests about how to get that archive look. There are all kinds of plug-ins you can do and things you can do in post. We played with all that, but honestly what we ended up doing at the end of the day is we would take the shots, the finished 4K shots, export them to VHS and reimport them. Those shots actually lived on a VHS tape and then were reimported into the film, because it looked better than every fake plug-in trying to make it look archive. I really wanted an analog quality to it.

LEDOUX MILLER That’s awesome.

NEVILLE Lego-style animation comes with a rule book. You get a binder of what you’re supposed to do in Lego. The prevailing limitation is that everything in the film has to be buildable with something you can go buy right now. One area we really pushed Lego on was skin tone and hair. They had one skin tone for Black skin and we ended up developing seven. We did a braid design, and they said the problem is that it could break off and a kid could choke on it. We ended up working with their team to actually do these hairstyles, some of which they’re actually manufacturing now, which is awesome. Those new skin tones, Lego is actually manufacturing them now.

What is something that you’ve seen recently in animation that inspires you for the future of this art form?

MANN We’ve had an incredible year. There are so many great movies that are in theaters right now and are animated and they’ve done really well at the box office. I feel like it’s bringing people back into theaters. If you want to feel the inspiration, just look at everybody here and look at every single one of the people representing the films that are here. It’s an incredible time for animation.

LEDOUX MILLER Our film is about self-evolution, but at end of the day it’s about community. Moana goes out to find other people across the ocean because she knows that building a bigger community is going to build a better future. I think now more than ever, that sense of coming together and finding people that live a different life than you, with whom you can find shared connection, feels like something that is of this moment. People want to be entertained, they want to laugh and they want to feel something. I think that means the future is bright for animation.

NEVILLE I just had a screening of Piece by Piece, and we don’t have to get too rooted in what’s going on now, but the film screened differently in the wake of the Trump election. People talked to me about it differently, saying, “It’s something I really needed, just a moment to think about human potential, human creativity, the joy of life.” These are incredible films everybody’s made here, all speaking to something about the human spirit, with a positive way of looking at that. I feel animation is actually the most timeless kind of storytelling, way more than documentary. That is so valuable in this day and age, to be able to make these films that speak not just to ourselves but speak to others that share messages of human value, a way of shared vision of a community in a world we’re going to live in. I think these films all do that. So, you know, I love the work that is happening right now.

SANDERS Not to pile on, but I totally agree. I think that this year more than ever, animation has really been out there taking the lead in entertaining people, comforting people. Animated films are such a labor of love, you sink so much time into them. But it’s totally worth it because animated films endure. They shake off age like nothing else.

Nick, Wallace has stayed timeless, even kept the same sweater vest. Where do you hope animation goes in the future?

PARK I think there’s room for everyone. I very much echo what everybody said. I wish I was writing down a lot of this stuff. It’s been so valuable to listen to everyone here today. We’re all doing it a bit differently — and that’s great. But I remember being inspired by Robert McKee, who said we may not know it, but we’re going to the cinema to find meaning and truth. That’s what we’re all trying to do. On the comedy side, I love a quote from Homer — the old Greek one, not the Simpsons one — who said: “If it’s funny, therefore it’s true.” We may be talking about cartoons and animation and goofy characters, but they can be expressing great truths at the same time. The clever thing is I think The Simpsons had Homer actually saying that line in one of the episodes.

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.