Adapting a video game, let alone a mobile app, into a movie is no easy feat, but The Angry Birds Movie[2] was unique in that it had a basic premise and eye-catching characters to go on, but not much else. And as first-time directors Clay Kaytis (Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph) and Fergal Reilly (Hotel Transylvania, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) put it, that gave them the freedom to really explore Rovio's multicolored world and take it in new, comedic directions.
Recently, IGN got a chance to sit down with the two filmmakers, both in a press conference and one-on-one, to talk about their take on Angry Birds, how Tangled and The Iron Giant influenced the film, and why the Angry Birds aren't actually birds...
While Reilly and Kaytis are making their directorial debuts on Angry Birds, they both have a storied history in the world of animation. When asked which of their previous works had the biggest influence on them as artists, they each offered insightful -- but very different -- answers.
When you create a character, add a believability to it, add a relatability to it, and really respect the integrity of what you create.
For Reilly, The Iron Giant was a major touchstone project, on which he served as a storyboard artist. "Even though our film and that film are completely different, tonally and comedy-wise, I learned a really basic thing, but it's influenced me on every project I've done since, and that is: when you create a character, add a believability to it, add a relatability to it, and really respect the integrity of what you create.
"So basically, really believe in that character and try and translate that belief into the audience, whether it's dramatic or comedic," Reilly continued. "[Director] Brad Bird was a big believer in that, in creating characters with relatability to them... That and then, of course, with the action stuff and just what we did with camera, like my live-action training in Spider-Man 2 and working with Sam [Raimi]."
The Angry Birds Movie directors Fergal Reilly (left) and Clay Kaytis (right)
Meanwhile, Kaytis recalled his time at Walt Disney Animation. "I was an animator my whole career, and I did hand-drawn animation for Disney for 12 years, and then I switched over to CG," he explained.
Don't accept what the computer gives you. You have to force it to look beautiful.
"At the peak of my CG experience, I was head of animation on Tangled, and I got to work Glen Keane and kind of combine my hand-drawn experience and doing CG with Glen. Again, he's a guy who has so much experience in terms of creating appealing characters and beautiful drawings, and he just really taught us -- I knew this going in, but he really hammered it into the entire crew -- don't accept what the computer gives you. You have to force it to look beautiful... and I think that's probably one of the biggest things I brought into this. You know, they may be simple bird designs, but we spent a lot of time making the characters asymmetrical or cheating their beaks."
So how did The Angry Birds Movie come about? "We got a call from our producer John Cohen, who was a producer on Despicable Me," Reilly said, "and he talked to us about, 'Why don't you guys come in and take a look at Angry Birds?' And, like anybody, I think we were both a little skeptical," and rightfully so. If you've played Angry Birds, then you know that there's not much of story to it -- basically, birds slingshotting themselves at pigs and trying to rescue their eggs. However, Reilly said that the initial screenplay by Jon Vitti (The Simpsons Movie) won them over.
"[The script] immediately set you off on a tone and gave us an indication that the movie was going to be super funny," Reilly continued. "It was a fantastic start, a great springboard. It immediately set the tone for the comedy, and in some ways it was very freeing to just have a very basic premise."
The pigs in The Angry Birds Movie
Added Kaytis, "Every script, you have your plot and all the story points you're going to go through, but it doesn't always tell you what the themes are. As you're making the film, you start connecting these dots like, 'Hey, here's this thing that we're saying here,' and you start reflecting on things. We found these through lines after backing up and looking at the story, at the script."
You can't just go blindly from a script; you have to let the movie reflect back what it's trying to say.
Kaytis gave an example: "Red's relationship to his house. That wasn't a big deal in the original, but that became something big... So you can't just go blindly from a script; you have to let the movie reflect back what it's trying to say."
When asked what some of the major changes to Vitti's script were, Reilly pointed to the finale. "The second half of the movie is where the birds take action -- they go to Pig Island to rescue their kids... And you want to pack it full of entertainment and make it not just action for the sake of action but wrap the action around a comedic idea, which we did for every single moment.
"We really created an architecture for the last half of the movie, to make what the audience expects from the game, which is firing the birds and rescuing the eggs, into something completely comedic and special and heightened and just surprising. So that is where we spent a lot of time."
People think they know the characters from the game, but really they're just icons.
According to the directors, the big selling point of Vitti's script was the characters, which laid the groundwork for the story. "I think that was one of the keys to its success," Kaytis said. "When we got onto the show, [Vitti] had already kind of defined who Red was, who Chuck was, who Bomb was, and they sort of built this triumvirate of these three characters that really worked well together on the page. We knew that just reading it, but building the sequences, boarding it, we recorded scratch for the voices and started creating it in editorial, and we just realized that these three characters worked so well together... and we really built the story around those predefined characters."
A breakthrough moment for Kaytis and Reilly was the anger management scene, where the birds explain why they're so angry. "Anger management class is like the perfect scene to introduce the new cast of characters to the world," Reilly said. "People think they know the characters from the game, but really they're just icons, so we saw it as a great opportunity to really delve into each of their personalities."
Kaytis chimed in, "It's funny when you think back on your influences for these things, but we talked about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Full Metal Jacket, where this kind of normal... or at least this person who perceives themselves as normal is put into this situation where it's really beyond their experience."
Obviously, designing the birds was another major part of the development process -- extrapolating on the original designs while also making them feel iconic. Interestingly, the filmmakers pointed out that the Angry Birds weren't actually birds as we know them, but rather flightless, birdlike creatures (which, by the way, also explains their arcane abilities).
We both had the idea that they were very much like Muppets.
"We both had the idea that they were very much like Muppets," Reilly said. "Even their hands are part wing, but they're also part gloved hand."
"To me, they always felt like something you would make in a craft room with feathers and pingpong balls," Kaytis remarked. "They're very kind of imperfect in a really beautiful way and not your typical animation designs that you see in most movies."
Reilly continued, "One of the first days, they brought in a bird specialist, an ornithologist who knows every single detail about how a bird is put together -- everything from the way their wings and feathers sheathe to their bone structure -- and he started explaining how a bird walks and why their skeleton does this and why they hop, and we were like, 'Hang on, hang on. No, no, no.' [Laughs] These guys are like creatures. They're like representations of birds in this world, but they're like little characters."
Added Kaytis, "Yeah, and we really wanted to approach it from a cartoony, fun, animation perspective versus making real, anatomical birds. That would just limit the comedy and the performance that we could do."
When it came to casting, some voice stars were easier to find than others. Jason Sudeikis as Red, for example, was an easy cast. "He's not really doing a voice, but it is," Kaytis said. "He just does Jason Sudeikis as Red, so it's not a huge deviation from his own voice, but there's something he's doing that's different from his speaking voice."
For the voice of Chuck, Kaytis said comedian Josh Gad was a little hesitant to sign on at first. "You know, Josh did Frozen," the director explained. "He was Olaf... clearly. [Laughs] Everyone knows that, and he was pretty concerned he didn't want to do another Olaf. Obviously, the content of his character in this film let him move away from that, but also I actually did animated shots of Olaf in Frozen, so I could tell him in the booth like, 'Eh, bring it up a little higher, because that's a little Olaf.' So we were very conscious of not repeating that."
Meanwhile, the voice of Leonard the Pig was one of the hardest voices to nail. "With the other guys, we kinda had a voice," Reilly said, "You know, we scratched all the characters in the storyboards, so we sort of attempted to do our own voices. But then [Bill Hader] came in, and he was just like, 'Well, let me try this,' and he just went into this character, and he found this level -- I don't know how he does it. Bill is amazing. He can just create characters and change the nature of the character with his voice."
Sean Penn recording Terence for The Angry Birds Movie
Then of course there's Terence, whose only lines are a series of grunts and murmurs. "Fergal was actually the temp voice for Terence, for a long time," Kaytis noted. But just a month before release, Rovio announced that Sean Penn would lend his voice to the Groot-like role. "With Sean you have this Oscar-winning actor -- it was stunt casting, right, for Terence, clearly -- but he applied himself with the same focus and intensity that he would on any of his roles. It was kind of amazing to watch."
Penn may or may not also have his own musical number, apart from Gad, Sudeikis and Danny McBride as Bomb, who all sing in the film as well.
Reilly and Kaytis also talked a bit about Rovio and what they were allowed to do with their game characters and setting.
They were precious about some things, and other things it was just like, 'Have at it.'
"They were precious about some things, and other things it was just like, 'Have at it,'" Reilly recalled. "Obviously the iconic look of the birds, we tried to preserve that because, one, they're brilliant in their design. Those dark eyebrows and big eyes and that red, red bird. Red is like the strongest primary color in the movie. There isn't much red, if you look at the movie. He stands out, and the DNA from all the other characters, design-wise, and also personality-wise comes from Red.
Red in The Angry Birds Movie
"So [Rovio] actually helped us a lot at the beginning, because they gave us all the material that they used to create the game, including the noises and the sounds of the birds and the artwork from the game and the toon series that they did. So we had a lot of support from Rovio in Helsinki."
"Yeah, it's a really unique movie situation where Rovio financed the entire film," Kaytis added. "There's no other outside investor. Rovio controls the property and the funding of the film. We didn't have some executive committee that we had to go to or a board of trustees or anything like that. It was Fergal, me, our producers John Cohen, Catherine Winder, our executive producers David Maisel and Mikael Hed and our writer Jon Vitti."
The Angry Birds Movie hits theaters stateside on May 20. Be sure to check out IGN's review of the movie[3].
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson[4] on Twitter and MaxNicholson[5] on IGN.
References
- ^ Max Nicholson (people.ign.com)
- ^ The Angry Birds Movie (www.ign.com)
- ^ IGN's review of the movie (www.ign.com)
- ^ @Max_Nicholson (twitter.com)
- ^ MaxNicholson (people.ign.com)
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