August 9th, 2019 
Jackson Murphy 
Sony Pictures Animation’s follow-up to their Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is The Angry Birds Movie 2, the sequel to the 2016 hit – based on the phenomenon mobile game franchise. Director Thurop Van Orman (creator of TV’s “Flapjack”) and producer John Cohen (“Despicable Me”) are excited for audiences to return to Bird Island and meet a whole flock of new characters.
Jackson Murphy: Thurop, this is your feature film directorial debut. How has it been?
Thurop Van Orman: It’s been wild. It’s such a different process than making TV. Obviously, a lot of it’s the same process – just a lot more money and a lot more time, and in a lot of ways a lot more pressure on every single joke. It’s been an amazing experience. It’s been amazing working with John and Aron Warner, our other producer. And the whole team was really the best team you could ask for.
JM: And Aron Warner was part of the original “Shrek”, so a real animation history with him.
TVO: Yeah. I worked with him on the “Trolls” movie for a little while. He was the producer of that on one of the many iterations in its lifetime over at DreamWorks. I’ve helped Aron out on some movies over the last few years in a really minor way – but enough I guess that I earned his trust and John’s trust to direct this one.
JM: John, you’ve been in the animation producing world for a while as well. What were some of your goals going into “Angry Birds 2” from working on the first one?
John Cohen: My first goal was to have the chance to work with Thurop, who I’ve been a fan of for so many years. This was such a fun experience, and we had such a great time making this movie. But on the movie itself, one of our big goals was to surprise the audience. We knew that a lot of people would be expecting the sequel to “Angry Birds” to be more battles between birds and pigs and the continuation of everything people have experienced in all the “Angry Birds” games. And that’s where we really felt the fun challenge to do something different.
And that really led to the big idea of the movie, which is that we introduce a brand new villain. And it’s a villain that no one has ever really seen or heard from before. The birds and pigs realize that their only hope for survival is if they came-up to work together and take the villain on. And that for us led to a lot of great comedy and conflict and trust issues – and I think ultimately made for a very fun movie.
JM: And that villain, Zeta, is voiced by Leslie Jones. You’ve got Tiffany Haddish in this, Awkwafina, Sterling K. Brown… and I think the MVP is Rachel Bloom, who voices Silver, Chuck’s sister. She’s terrific. How was it working with Rachel, and what makes her right for this role?
TVO: Rachel’s amazing. She was really fun to work with because she’s incredibly smart. She’s incredibly smart, and she knows what she wants. She has so much experience not only in front of the camera but also behind the camera working on her show [“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”]. She really knew where she wanted to take this character. I think where we started with Silver – she was a great character; she was fun and capable – but Rachel really owned this character and made her her own in a lot of ways.
I think that’s why she’s not just a flat, two-dimensional character that you’ve seen before. She’s special. She’s really smart and funny and capable and a great team player. But she’s also not going to let herself be sidelined when she has an idea that she can help everyone else out. And that’s how Rachel Bloom is – I feel so lucky that we got her because really that character wouldn’t be the same without her.
JM: And Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s kids voice some of the Hatchlings. How did they become a part of this?
JC: We have the kids of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, and we also have the kids of Gal Gadot and Viola Davis. They voice Hatchlings, and it’s really the next generation of phenomenal acting talent in the movie. And I think based on all the reactions we’ve been reading and the early reviews, and hearing from audiences who have been seeing the movie and tweeting and posting on Instagram, I think the Hatchlings are a big stand-out and characters that people love. And they’re also voiced by the incredible Brooklynn Prince (“The Florida Project”) and Jojo Siwa.
JM: There’s a really fun “Mission: Impossible”/”Avengers”-esque team theme in “Angry Birds 2”.
TVO: The thing that works so well with the “Avengers” and any team you put together is that you’re taking all these really unique, different characters with really big voices and jamming them together and forcing them to work together when they wouldn’t naturally ever want to do that. And we were able to mine a lot of comedy… and surprises out of that because you never really knew where it was gonna go. And just when you think you did, we tried to twist and turn things a little bit.
JM: I think you do. You think something’s going in one direction, and it’s completely unexpected. That’s one of the smart, great things about these “Angry Birds” movies. And you have quite a soundtrack – a lot of different, big hit songs. One of them is Sarah McLaughlin’s “Angel”, which has been used in a lot of different ways – sometimes for dramatic purposes, sometimes for comedic purposes over the years. When you’re talking to Sarah McLaughlin’s people and you’re trying to get the rights, do they (and she) know it’s all in good fun?
JC: They do, and she does. And we explained the way the song was being used in the scene, and I think they thought it was hilarious. I think they were excited to have it be a part of the movie.
JM: That’s really good to hear. I also love the moment when you use “Flockbuster” for “Blockbuster” in the ’90s scene.
TVO: It’s so crazy looking back at that nostalgia and that scene. That whole shot is so nostalgic for me because it feels like Salt Lake City, where I met my wife in the ’90s. And Mighty Eagle’s skateboarder, blonde haircut was exactly my haircut from then. That whole sequence has a lot of nostalgia for me, and it’s really funny. But yeah – Blockbuster was its own experience. You could walk in and see any movie in the world. That’s just crazy. It’s hard to capture how amazing that was now when everything’s at your fingertips and you don’t have to go anywhere. You can sit on your bed and be on your phone and pull up any movie you want.
JC: For me, Blockbuster Video was the internet. It was the place where you could go and spend time and immerse yourself in movies that you love. My memories of Blockbuster and the extended periods of time I would spend in them were always about getting to the store, running to the return counter to see what was just returned to see if anything good and new had come back. But my favorite experience with a video store was that one of my first jobs was working at a video store, which is the coolest thing you could ever get to do – where you could get to watch movies all day and night.
JM: That is very cool. As I was watching Angry Birds Movie 2, I was thinking, “I would want to hang out with these characters – and I would want to hang out with the voice actors of these characters.” Do you think that this could be a television or streaming animated series where we see these characters a lot more?
JC: We would love to have the opportunity to continue to bring these characters to life. Thurop and I are always noodling on them and thinking, “What would happen if they ended-up in this situation or that situation?” But at the moment, we’re focused on getting this one opened and then we’ll be, hopefully, excited to think more beyond that.
TVO: I’m glad it’s so apparent that it’s fun to hang out with these characters because that’s exactly how it felt to record them. We had so much fun. We were literally rolling on the floor laughing sometimes for minutes straight because every one of these voice actors was such an incredible improviser and jumped in with the funniest things.
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