Nappy Days
THE BOSS BABY: FAMILY BUSINESS I Alec Baldwin’s back in the highchair, now with backup.
They grow up so fast. The last time we saw Ted (Alec Baldwin), he was crawling around the kitchen, wetting himself and secretly running an underground network of intelligent, business-minded babies. With the first film told in flashback, the sequel picks up Ted’s adult story as the billionaire CEO of his own corporation – forced back into nappies by a magical milk formula that transforms him into a one-year-old.
Throw in his big brother Tim (also magicked back into a baby), his niece Tina (a real baby), Jeff Goldblum playing an evil nursery teacher, plus an army of tiny ninjas and you’ve got a bigger, cuter, loonier ’toon sequel to the 2017 Dream-Works blockbuster.
“We didn’t just want to make ‘a bossier baby’,” says returning director Tom McGrath. “The new generation is much more in touch with their emotions, so we really wanted to play the millennials off against the old-school business world.” Amy Sedaris voices Tina, the family’s new Boss Baby and the perfect foil for Baldwin’s dry wit and Goldblum’s smart sarcasm. “She’s pure energy,” laughs McGrath. “Alec has that Mad Men mentality and Jeff is Jeff, but she’s more about hugging the competition. It’s personal for her, it’s not business. She’s just so smart and witty – in a charming, manipulative kind of way!”
After coming up with a dozen ideas for the sequel while making the first film (“With every animated movie there’s always a three-hour version you end up boiling down to 80 minutes”), McGrath wanted to make sure his own experience was still at the heart of everything.
“My brother is a stay-at-home dad, and I came to Hollywood to make movies,” he says. “I’ve always worked hard, but I’ve never had my own kids. There’s envy on both sides of that, I think. I don’t always pick up the phone as much as I should. This movie is about how you can get estranged from your siblings as you grow up, but it’s about it never being too late to have a second chance.”
Of course, it’s also about a fight between 200 sword-wielding ninja tots, plus a lot of baby body-swap comedy and an explosive set-piece chase staged on the back of a running dog. “It was a challenge, for sure!” laughs McGrath, who was less than halfway through the film when lockdown forced all his animators to work from home. “The silver lining here is that the people making it got to be with their own families while they were working. We had people’s kids walking into production meetings all the time, so it was actually pretty handy to see if they started laughing at whatever we were working on!”
ETA | 26 MARCH / THE BOSS BABY: FAMILY BUSINESS IS OUT IN TWO MONTHS.