Kirby Atkins is the writer, director and star of the new animated family drama Mosley, which debuts in select theaters, on VOD and Digital this Friday Dec. 10. Atkins shares what has made this 25-year experience so special, including working on the film with his own daughter. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: You’ve been in the animation world for more than 20 years [through] your work on “Jimmy Neutron”, “VeggieTales” and “SCOOB!” But is it true you had the idea for this movie and everything in your head that entire time?

Kirby Atkins: Yeah. It started right after my daughter was born — about 1997. I just started writing and working on it in private before there was any money or financing or anybody, just because I was interested in the story myself. Then when my daughter came of age, around six years old, I recorded both of us playing the parts out just as I was putting the film together in storyboards. That’s sort of where the thing found its feet, I think.

JM: We’re gonna get into all aspects of this. Mosley and his family are Thoriphants. They’re unique, four-legged creatures. And right away in the opening scene, we see that they can talk to humans and the humans can understand them. Why did you feel that element was important?

KA: The idea is that: they’re in the world that a farmer can use any animal he wants (a horse, oxen). And usually in these films you have talking animals or you have the animals [not talking]. But here I wanted to create the dilemma in the world: What if some animals did talk? Particularly this one species could, and their relationship then would become very complex between the human master and the animal. And the idea is the longing of this animal to… What if you couldn’t evolve as far as your heart was meant to go? These creatures are longing for something better than the life that they have.

JM: They’re dramatic themes. And this is a nice film for the entire family to watch this holiday season. There are fun moments (which we’ll get into), but I have to tell you Kirby, I think the majority of this film is a drama. And it’s kind of rare to see that in CG talking animal movies — and I’m really impressed that you went down that path.

KA: It’s a family film, but it’s a family drama more so than a comedy. We have a term “comic relief”, which means that a story gets tense and tense… and then we put some comedy in there to relieve everybody of the tension. But usually with animated films it’s all gags and fart jokes and things like that. And then they give you “dramatic relief” to make you sort of care at a particular point. But I wanted this to feel like those films I grew up with — family films that were very dramatic, like “The Neverending Story” and “The Black Stallion”. I remember growing up with [them] and they marked me because they were dramatic and they ended-up being a part of my childhood and growing up. They addressed big themes, about unhappiness and suffering and joy and overcoming adversity. I definitely wanted the vibe of the film to be of that ilk.

JM: Did you always know you wanted to voice Mosley?

KA: No. I didn’t. In fact I was surprised that… I always knew my daughter, as soon as she recorded, it was like improv with a six year old. She was just fantastic. And I knew there was lightning in a bottle there. Me – I always figured we would re-cast Mosley, as soon as the financing came in and as soon as people got involved. But in the recordings… the dynamic and the juice in the real relationship that existed between me and her — it was so palpable that, as they say, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” We wanted to keep that dynamic because the relationship between those two characters is really one of the juices in the movie.

JM: It is. Your daughter Leah voices Mosley’s child, Rue. And I honestly think Rue is one of the best representations of a child in a CG animal movie that I have seen in a long time.

KA: That was because she wasn’t acting. She was playing. Of all we did, I just got a microphone. She knew the story backwards and forwards. We just got on the floor on our hands and knees and we just pretended the story in our living room. She was completely, as kids are, un-self aware, uninhibited, had no sense that she was performing. She was pretending. That’s where the genuineness of the performance comes from: it’s not a performance, it’s not acting, it’s a six year old pretending in the privacy of her own home. That’s what made it really look.

JM: Everybody loves authenticity. I wanna get into some of my favorite sequences. One of them involves the waterfall. You have this waterfall that the characters come to and the mist that comes from it. How were you able to make that scene happen?

KA: There needed to be a big set piece where we had this… first confrontation between Mosley and our villain, the hunter who’s after him. I wanted this action sequence to inform you about who the character is and his need. The big primary moment in that scene is when Mosley wants to grab a… limb from a tree to stop from falling and he doesn’t have a hand. He can only paw it with his foot. The idea of a waterfall and the chaos of a waterfall I think created more excitement and made the need feel more desperate. As far as CGI and creating the effects of that to make it seem real, that was one of the more difficult sequences because water is very difficult to do in animation.

JM: Oh yeah. You pull it off. And one of the strong themes of Mosley is this idea of respecting elders, elderly people and older people. How do you really value that when it comes to this story and how have you valued that in your life?

KA: This being a family film: there’s something in there for the kids, but there’s absolutely something in there for parents and adults. I don’t think we begin to mark time quite the same way that we do after we have kids. Once we do, there’s sort of this barometer for how time is passing. It makes you look ahead to people who are older than you. There’s this reverence for old folks. You know you’re going there. We’re all heading off the cliff together, right? In that regard, you see people who are a little bit ahead of you — people who have raised their kids, had their family and now they’re being more reflective about life. These are the people that are rock stars to me now as I get older and my kids have grown up. The film absolutely has this surprise reverence for and shout-out to people who are ahead of us in life and all the wisdom, the humor and the insight they can give us.

JM: That’s really well said. When was the day that you knew that you had the financing and this movie was gonna happen? Obviously you’ve had this in your mind for 20 years. Here we are in 2021 and it’s coming out now. When was the day you knew, “Alright: we’re good!”?

KA: It’s odd. It’s surreal because it’s a story me and my family have lived with since our kids were small. And it’s a story, in that regard, that we’re very comfortable with. And unlike a lot of, I think, directors’ experiences where they make the film, they release the film, they have a big weekend or not. They know whether it was successful or not within days. Whereas this has slowly leaked out into the world. We were released in New Zealand and Australia and several different parts of the world… in October 2019. That’s a long time ago.

JM: Yeah.

KA: Now COVID contributed to that, but also because it’s an independently produced animated feature, we didn’t have that gigantic muscle of a gigantic studio like Disney or DreamWorks behind it to open worldwide. But I kind of have enjoyed this because it’s been a way of enjoying different parts of the world discovering it at different times. So finally now with Paramount and Saban coming on board, we’re finally gonna be able to introduce it to U.S. audiences, which (obviously I’m a native of the U.S.), so I’m very excited about it coming to the U.S. now.