AMERICA: THE MOTION PICTURE
The first word on the barmy animated movie that retells the birth of America. Strictly for those with a strong constitution.
“THERE WAS ONE rule,” says director Matt Thompson, of his bonkers adult animated film America: The Motion Picture. “No research.” The film, which reimagines the founding of the United States as a wild, animated action-movie farce, is revisionist history at its most insane.
“That’s my goal: to make people laugh and set back education,” says Thompson, with a laugh. With Phil Lord and Chris Miller on the production team (“They watched the film the day after winning the Oscar for Spider-verse,” Thompson recalls), here are three ways that America: The Motion Picture will make history teachers very unhappy.
1. GEORGE WASHINGTON — AS A MUSCLE-BOUND IDIOT
One of America’s Founding Fathers and its first President is here reimagined as an action movieesque hunk (voiced by Channing Tatum) who says things like, “Sic semper my dick, bitches!” Thompson describes him as “kind of a dummy, but a dummy with a good heart.” His childhood friend is fellow President Abraham Lincoln, and Thompson delights at the thought that “a lot of people believe Washington and Lincoln could have been friends.” The famous apocryphal story about Washington chopping down a cherry tree as a boy, meanwhile, is taken to appropriately ludicrous heights. “If that’s the thing that George Washington is known for,” Thompson says, “why not give him chainsaws for arms?”
2. KING JAMES — AS A PALPATINEESQUE VILLAIN
Washington’s enemies are the British, with Simon Pegg voicing King James (rather than the historically accurate King George) as a scowling bad guy straight out of Star Wars. (“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen,” he mutters at one point.) Thompson was impressed with Pegg’s near-unrecognisable line readings. “I thought I might have to take his voice and pitch it down a notch, just to make it scarier, but that big, giant deep scary voice comes out of him.” The King’s nefarious plan involves turning Americans British by steeping them in tea; Thompson credits motion graphics animator Mark Paterson, a Londoner, as his “in-house British sounding board”.
3. THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR — AS AN EPIC TRANSFORMER BATTLE
The final scene, in which Washington’s ragtag team of revolutionaries take on the British army, was “the single hardest scene that I’ve ever done in 20 years of making adult animated actioncomedy,” says Thompson. “It took months.
It was just vast in scope.” Unlike the actual Revolutionary War, this battle features, among other things, “Benjamin Franklin reincarnated as Frankenstein”, and “London buses as AT-AT walkers”. For such a chaotic final act, the filmmakers were sometimes careful not to go too overboard with the ridiculousness. “There was a balancing act,” says Thompson. “You can’t go full-on insanity all the time. But you can take Big Ben, turn it into a Transformer, and make it fight Paul Bunyan.” God bless America!
AMERICA: THE MOTION PICTURE IS ON NETFLIX FROM 30 JUNE