INTERVIEW: Benjamin Renner On High-Flying “Migration”

INTERVIEW: Benjamin Renner On High-Flying “Migration”

December 15th, 2023

Jackson Murphy

The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales director Benjamin Renner takes to the sky with Illumination’s new animated comedy Migration. It opens in theaters next Friday December 22nd. In this Animation Scoop Q&A, Renner talks about his love of hand-drawn and CG animation, ducky research and working with one of the most star-studded voice acting ensembles of the year. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: It’s very cool that in the opening scene of “Migration” we get hand-drawn animation, which I know you love because you directed 2017’s hilarious “The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales”.

Benjamin Renner: Funny enough, it’s something I really wanted on the movie. Narratively speaking, it’s a story before we get to the real story of the film. I wanted to do something graphically different. And to be very honest with you, it’s not actually hand-drawn animation. It’s 3D that looks like hand-drawn animation.

JM: Whoa.

BR: I did the hand-drawn animation, so behind it they could animate in 3D. That’s why it looks so much like 2D animation. It was really fun to do, and I was so happy that the team at Illumination were okay to try to match the style. It’s very complicated for them to get the 2D art style.

JM: It looks so good. The whole movie does! Especially the flying sequences. There are so many moments where the characters are up close to the screen. Eye-popping. Cool. Swirling through the clouds. Great moments.

BR: Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved watching those 3D movies. And with 3D, it’s so much easier than in 2D to make the camera move and give it a feeling of flying or sliding. I remember when I was a kid, in [An American Tail] “Fievel Goes West”, there’s a scene in the very early stages of 3D where the mice are in the sewers and they’re being thrown… from the point of view of 3D sewers. As a kid I loved that. The feeling of immersion. I love watching scenes like that. On “Migration”, it was my opportunity to make a 3D movie, and I thought, “We need to do some immersion feeling. We need to play with that.” The flight sequences were perfect for 3D — making you go up, down, left and right. And not just the camera movement but all the details we added on the feathers and the wings… feeling the wind. Like it’s real. It was great as a filmmaker to use all those tools to immerse the audience in what the characters are feeling.

Benjamin Renner and Jackson Murphy

JM: Breathtaking moments. The five-member Mallard family is on this journey of a lifetime, including [the voices of] Kumail Nanjiani, Elizabeth Banks and Danny DeVito. And Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key show-up as key characters later on. How important was it for you to have this be so comedy-centric, in the casting of all these comedy greats?

BR: I really made sure that they connected to the characters. I watched a lot of their interviews and things they did beforehand. I always made sure they had this connection with who this character is. Kumail Nanjiani has a stand-up comedy sketch where he’s always complaining about new things. He loves a routine. I thought, “That’s perfect.” When we gave him the script he was like, “Yeah. That’s me. That’s exactly me.” Elizabeth Banks is the opposite. She wants to try new things and is open to new experiences. And same — she was like, “Yeah. That’s me. I’m that exact person.” You can really ask them to share their own experiences and ad-lib and improvise.

All the actors had this in them where you could tell they could help write the characters in a new way and evolve. That works great in working with a studio like Illumination. You can record the movie but then you can also… change the characters a little bit to make them more like the actors themselves. You can evolve them in a way that’s going to benefit the movie. Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key were more than perfect. And Carol Kane… portrays a weird heron that’s generally scary but she can’t help it but she’s so weird. An awesome experience working with them.

JM: You and writer Mike White (who was also a contestant on “Survivor”) created this story about these mallards who interact with other animals. You mentioned the heron. They also interact with rats, pigeons and other ducks. Did you really study nature, or your own experiences seeing ducks walking by?

BR: I observed a lot of ducks and all the animals. Since I was a kid, I’ve always been a huge fan of animal documentaries. I loved watching animals. I’m passionate enough to talk about them. There was a lot of work watching them and watching pigeons — how they interact — capture what’s funny about them and also making them relatable with humans. How you show a pigeon’s attitude and having them almost act like zombies. They’re all completely dumb, and there’s one, Chump, with a genetic problem that made her more intelligent than the others, so she has to take care of all the pigeons. She’s the only one making sure no one is mocking them.

And ducks are very interesting creatures to work with because they’re so cute and innocent. They’re this grumpy little creature. When you get close to them they go, “Quack! Quack! Quack!” Complaining and shouting. But you know they’re completely inoffensive, which is great for this movie — portraying this ordinary family that’s going to go on a journey that you can tell is going to be more than epic for them. Scary and dangerous, but at the same time they’re going to learn so much from it that it’s definitely worth it.

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Jackson Murphy

Jackson Murphy is a movie critic and entertainment columnist. He is the creator of the website Lights-Camera-Jackson.com, and has made numerous appearances on television and radio.

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