A Sloth Story is a new animated comedy adventure about sloths who move to the big city and hope their treasured family recipes make their food truck a major success. It opens in theaters this Friday Feb. 28. Director Tania Vincent shares the many wonderful ingredients that went into creating this grounded and fun film. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity).

Jackson Murphy: It’s about time we got an animated sloth feature!

Tania Vincent: (laughs) That’s how we felt as well. Obviously there’s a very famous “Zootopia” sloth that everyone thinks of, but there’s nothing else out there. They’re one of my favorite animals, so it’s about time it existed. We had a big writers’ room and we were pitching all these ideas. A sloth movie was definitely one of them. From there we took that nugget of an idea and turned it into this.

JM: You bring us into this core four family story. Laura has so many emotions she’s trying to balance at an important age in her life.

TV: I love animation. I’ve wanted to make animated films since I was five years old. I really don’t think we need to talk down to kids. I think kids are so, so smart. I wanted to make a main character that was a proper 12 year old girl — messy and uncoordinated, but at the same time she’s a tomboy but loves pink and purple. A mix of everything… the girl people knew in their own lives. For me, she was based on my younger sister… a well-rounded character with a lot of nuance to her.

JM: She has a lot to say. This family’s restaurant gets destroyed in quite an opening sequence. They move to the big city and [open up] a food truck. How deep of a dive did you do into what goes on with food trucks?

TV: There was someone on our crew whose family actually owns an empanada food truck, so that was actually amazing and very unexpected. So she gave us lots of photo references and talked to her family. Other than that, Ricard Cussó, my co-director, is spanish but also has a mexican wife and has lived in Mexico for a long time, so he was our food expert. Making sure it all looked perfect. Food’s really hard to do in CG. [We] tried to evoke the feeling of food rather than the ultra realistic perfection of food.

JM: Food is a key component of this movie. It’s about the memories of food and this recipe book. There’s a lot of emotion into this book this family has had for generations.

TV: Everyone has one. So many people keep coming up to us and being like, “My family has a recipe book. And my family adds to their book.” It was such a great visual representation of the past and how people hand things down to you and all those details you try to capture and hold onto even when people are gone.

JM: This movie has played at Annecy and in Australia. And now here it comes in North America!

TV: I’m a bit overwhelmed that it’s gonna be in America. When you think of animated cinema, obviously the world is so good at it, [especially] Japan, but American ones are the ones I grew up with. It’s gonna be a very surreal experience.

JM: Restaurant chains are so popular in America. You explore that with Zoom Fuel and Dotti Pace, the owner, voiced by Leslie Jones. She’s clearly having a lot of fun.

TV: Getting Leslie was an incredible win for this film. We did not expect — at all — her to take a risk on this little movie with us. We sent her the script. She jumped on board. We laughed the entire time. She gave us so much.

JM: And is there a memory of you going to one of these fast food restaurants when you were younger — maybe meeting characters… went into some of these scenes?

TV: I grew up in the UK, and it was like we had fake versions of what we thought American fast food restaurants were. Sorry UK, but in the ’90s and 2000’s, it was the cheesiest versions, so you would get people in those big massive suits, and the food would not taste good, but it would kind of look like what you saw in an American movie. That was kind of what we were capturing. A huge influence was when we came to L.A. My brother lives there, and watching In-N-Out… how efficient they are in those kitchens. There are so many employees and it is so fast and efficient. That was a really big inspiration for the assembly line element of the film. But obviously their food’s a lot better than Zoom Fuel. (laughs)

JM: And the food truck craze has become a phenomenon here in the last 10 years. What went into designing the food truck?

TV: We wanted it to feel so lived in and so them. It wasn’t clean and precise. Everything was slightly wonky, off and bigger than in real life. We very much leant into stop-motion as well… and how they would do sets where you would use the exterior and the interior at the same time with your characters. My favorite element is all the family photos all over the wall. It’s almost like a second home for the family.

JM: I clearly see the stop-motion influence in the animation. It’s CG, but there’s something about the movement of the characters with their arms that made me go, “That had to be influenced by stop-motion.”

TV: Being British, I think stop-motion’s in our blood. It’s so beautiful. And I think every CG animator is secretly the biggest 2D and stop-motion fan.

JM: Obviously animated movies take a long time. And this is a movie about sloths, and a lot of it is about, “Should you go fast with something in life or should you take it slow?” So what’s your perspective on all of this?

TV: The irony of working on an animated film that is so stressful and you’re trying to power through when you’re telling everyone to “Appreciate the moment”… it was almost like live therapy. You kept having to re-center and make sure you’re enjoying this. I love what I get to do, but working on this film, the actual experience of it, was such a joy with our team because we were constantly reminded that this theme was important. It’s a special moment in time. The team really took that and ran with it and put it on the screen and appreciated the whole experience. My mom used to joke with me when I was little. She would say, “I steered into the future rather than just looking.” It was definitely a cathartic learning of… Slow down and not completely come to a stop but take a moment to take it all in before it passes you by.