The Tech Revolution
Michael Rianda welcomes our robot overlords in The Mitchells vs. The Machines
DON’T BREATHE A WORD TO SIRI or Alexa but new animated comedy The Mitchells vs. The Machines may just be a stealth warning to humanity.
“It’s like, ‘Hey, kids, here’s a funny cartoon,’” laughs helmer Michael Rianda, before switching to a dread whisper. “Also: ‘Look out!’”
The latest from Sony Pictures Animation finds our screen-addicted, perma-swiping world facing an AI uprising. Led by a malevolent personal assistant – voiced by Olivia Colman – it’s a revolution enforced by an army of robots, out to rid the Earth of “fleshlings”. Our only hope? An everyday family named the Mitchells, an admittedly dysfunctional “bunch of weird humans” inspired by Rianda’s own relatives.
“I basically had this opportunity to pitch a movie,” he tells Red Alert, “and I was like, ‘What? What? What?’ It felt like there was a safe with a two-hour window and I was like, ‘I can crack this thing!’
“I got really excited because I’d always wanted to make a movie. I asked myself, ‘How can I make something that feels really personal but can still get made at a big studio?’ So I took the thing that I love the most, which is my crazy family, and combined it with the thing I loved the most as a kid, which is killer robots!”
It’s a debut feature for Rianda and co-writer/ director Jeff Rowe, who previously collaborated on TV animation Gravity Falls. While it’s a breezy, gag-stuffed take on a cyber-apocalypse, the pair took a detailed look at the world of machine intelligence.
“It’s actually something that I’m very concerned about! As a kid killer robots interested me, but as an adult they interest me in that AI might be taking people’s jobs – what does that mean for humanity? So we went to the Caltech lab and they took us to the inner sanctum where they showed us some very intense robots that were doing dances and stuff. We were asking questions!
“Ultimately, though, the movie is so much more about the family than it is about that. Hopefully the AI stuff is informed by that, but it’s not as much in the forefront. We had earlier versions that were deemed too intense!”
Originally scheduled for theatrical release in 2020, only to be shelved by the pandemic,
The Mitchells vs. The Machines now arrives on Netflix. It’s produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the duo behind the Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs movies as well as 2018’s vibrant, template-smashing Spider-man: Into The Spider-verse.
“It was like going to film school working with those guys and having them both
encourage our wildest instincts,” says Rianda. “I think they liked the fact we were like a bunch of film students who just took over an animated movie. They were like, ‘Go! Do the crazy thing! Make it happen, man!’ And they also helped us refine it. We got to a point where we were happy with it and they were like, ‘Nah, let’s keep going…’ I learned a lot about taking something to the next level just by tightening every little screw.”
And Rianda’s happy to be following Into The Spider-verse. “It’s such an honour to be after that movie,” he shares. “When I saw that movie my hair lit on fire. I was like, ‘Oh my god! Everything is different!’ It was so cool.
“We just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and we got a bunch of the artists from Spider-verse and a bunch of the VFX people, so they were all fired up too. Because we were working with the team that had pushed CG in the craziest direction possible, we were like, ‘Well, can we take those tools and push them the other way?’ On Spider-verse they were trying to manipulate the tools of 3D to make the film cooler and sleeker and more like a comic book. On this we’re trying to manipulate the tools of 3D to make it look lumpier and more like an illustration, so you see all of the human imperfections. Because the movie is about humans we wanted to see the human hand in it as much as possible.
“We didn’t want our movie to look like every other animated movie. Animated movies look great but I think people are numbed to them. As an artist I look at some movies and think, ‘Oh my god, that’s gorgeous!’ And people are like, ‘Yeah, whatever! It’s a movie. That’s what they look like!’ So hopefully if we can do something different we can catch people and re-excite them about the art of animation, which is a heady concept.” NS
The Mitchells vs. The Machines is on Netflix from 30 April.