Writer/director Mike Rianda revealed that his animated sci-fi action/comedy The Mitchells vs. The Machines contains the most visually complex, expensive animated character in the history of Sony Pictures Animation.
Rick Mitchell, voiced by Danny McBride, is the well-meaning patriarch of the Mitchell family, with the character design featuring a full beard, a mess of hair and a large stomach (as one character notes, "like a top-heavy James Bond"). Rianda told Inverse that animating the character was perhaps the biggest challenge in the production of the film.
"For Rick Mitchell, they were like, This is Sony's most expensive character we've ever had," Rianda said. For the finished product to be up to standard, Rianda's team had to push its boundaries a little. "We were like, 'His beard hair needs to be more uneven', and they were like 'Jesus.'"
This is even including Sony's critically acclaimed 2018 animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which featured a similar style of hybrid 2D/3D animation. However, for The Mitchells vs. The Machines, these techniques were "bent" to the film's purposes. Whereas Spider-Verse evoked a comic book atmosphere with the usage of dots, The Mitchells vs. The Machines favors digital paintbrush strokes for -- as Rianda put it -- a "Dirtbag Miyazaki" look.
"But I'm really glad we did it because when you see the movie, the people come off as almost made by hand and it emphasizes their humanity, hopefully," he added.
According to Rianda, Mike Lasker -- a visual effects supervisor on both Spider-Verse and Mitchells -- told the director that The Mitchells vs. the Machines was the more difficult of the two. "I don't know if he would still cop to this, but at the time, he was like, 'This is harder than Spider-Verse,'" he said.
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Sony is currently continuing production on the untitled Spider-Verse sequel, helmed by Soul co-writer/director Kemp Powers alongside Joaquim Dos Santos and Justin K. Thompson. It is expected to hit theatres on Oct. 7, 2022, with Shameik Moore and Hailee Steinfeld expected to reprise their roles.
A quirky, dysfunctional family's road trip is upended when they find themselves in the middle of the robot apocalypse and suddenly become humanity’s unlikeliest last hope!
Directed by Michael Rianda, The Mitchells vs. the Machines stars Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Mike Rianda, Eric André and Olivia Colman. The film is now streaming on Netflix.
Source: Inverse