Ben Smith is the writer/director of the new CG superhero animal animated feature StarDog and TurboCat. It premieres this Thursday May 21st on DirecTV Cinema before heading to more VOD and Digital platforms on June 19th. Smith and his team finished making the film last August. And after a run in UK theaters, Smith is excited for U.S. families to watch this at home.

Jackson Murphy: How do you feel about this month-early premiere for this film on DirecTV Cinema?

Ben Smith: We’re really excited about it. This is a comparatively low-budget, British-produced animated film. So to get such a wide release in the U.S. is a bit of a win for us. And to be honest, I think when we made the film – when we started doing this a few years ago – we didn’t really anticipate or plan on getting such a significant release in North America. So we’re really delighted about it.

JM: The cast is huge, and the story is really appealing. The set-up: Buddy, a dog, goes up to space in 1969 and he comes back down to Earth 50 years later. And a lot ensues from there. Were you always interested in space and animals and wanting to bring them together?

BS: We had wanted to do a movie for many years, and the starting point for this was the whole superhero pets angle. For many years, we had this kind of idea of a superhero dog and a superhero cat in the back of our minds. A superhero dog who’s really excited and enthusiastic about helping everybody and can’t help running off to do it. And then a superhero cat who’s a bit lazy. And he might help you, or he might not. It kind of depends on how he feels about it. These just seemed to be really great characters that you could think, “Well, this is the sort of thing you could run for 80 minutes in a movie with.”

The jumping-off point for the story was… “How did this superhero dog get his powers?” And the idea of, “What if he was launched into space back in the 60s and something mysterious happens – and when he crash-lands back on the Earth, he develops superpowers?” It just took flight from there.

JM: Nick Frost and Luke Evans are great as Buddy and Felix because it’s not their normal voices. And that’s what impressed me about listening to the two of them. Did you always envision them doing character voices?

BS: I’ll be honest. When we did this… the casting for the two leads was something that we were only able to do once the film had been greenlit and it was actually in production. We looked around a lot – we asked a lot of people. By the time we found Luke and Nick for those two roles, we needed to do it quite desperately. We were getting to the point where we were like, “We really need to get on and record this.” And it wasn’t until we actually got them into the recording booth (and they came in independently; they never met each other), that you realized that they were absolutely spot-on for it.

Nick Frost is a Londoner. He comes in, and we said to him, “Have you ever done a U.S. accent in anything?” We looked on YouTube, and we couldn’t find anything where he had done a U.S. accent. And he was like, “I’ve never done it. Give it a go!” And then this funny, pip-squeak, squeaky clean American voice comes out of him. And we were like, “It’s just perfect.”

Luke Evans is actually Welsh. His screen persona is U.S. He gives us this amped-up version of his U.S. screen persona. We had to push him quite hard. We said to him, “Look – this is a cartoon. You make it ridiculous. You over-act. Push it further than you think it ought to go.” But they were both absolutely fantastic, and it wasn’t until we had recorded them that we sat back and went, “We could not have found two better people to voice these roles.”

JM: There’s a scene early on where there’s a sign in the town of Glenfield that signifies, “Watch out for Goldfish.” And you think, “How could a goldfish be dangerous? It’s in a bowl!”

BS: (laughs)

JM: But when we find out that it’s an actual character, Bullion, that’s a really great payoff.

BS: Once the story became focused on the idea of pets, what kind of pets do people have? I always lean towards the absurd, and so the idea of a goldfish who’s permanently trapped in his bowl but who is convinced he’s basically Mr. T, and is some sort of special weapons operative, was just naturally appealing. It’s one of those characters you just knew you had a great little cameo performance on your hands. And we did give him some more material when we were animating… he’s just so funny.

JM: And I like Bill Nighy too as Sinclair the robot butler.

BS: What a thrill to work with him. He came in, and he wasn’t in the recording booth very long – just a couple of hours to do that part. He embodied this character.

JM: I’ve been to a lot of the old-fashioned small towns with the one main street and one cinema that you represent in the film. What inspiration did you draw from to create Glenfield?

BS: We’re in the UK, and we knew from the get-go that this film had to be set in the U.S. The joke was these are superheroes, but they are animals. It didn’t make sense if they were British. Superheroes aren’t British, they’re American. If they’re superheroes and animals and British, it kind of broke it for me. We leaned on what, for us, is a received wisdom of small town America. I have been to places like that, but only very briefly. It’s very much based on what we perceive of that from the media.

But the important thing for us what that it was a small town and it was very knowable. This is not an epic that takes place in a metropolis. It’s kind of a pint-size story with pint-size heroes, and it takes place in a small, very knowable place with a limited cast of people. Somewhere that everybody knows everybody else and you kind of feel you understand the scope of it.

JM: I related to a lot of the visual details of it, and you get many of those as well from the TurboCat car and lair with all of the monitors. How was it designing those and throwing some nods to Batman and other superhero sagas?

BS: That kind of stuff is just fun. You go to work and brief somebody and say, “I need you to design TurboCat’s car and his hoverboard and his weird ray gun thing.” Once we found the visual style… and it helps here that the whole point of the TurboCat character is that he’s over the top and he’s just doing it to show off.

JM: And we find out that Felix’s secret life (besides being TurboCat)… the real reason that he pays the bills… is that he’s a YouTube star. My favorite line of the film is when he says, “No one can resist the spot of light.” That’s funny and there are a lot of meanings to that. Are you personally obsessed with all those YouTube cat videos?

BS: I am not. I am not the YouTube generation. I’m a bit too old for that. But it is something that I am deeply conscious of and pops across my radar every now and again. The guys who animated those little YouTube skits – they were much that generation. They were coming to me and saying, “Oh, we have to do this one with the cucumber! We have to do this other one with the piano!” And I was like, “Okay – You researched this a little bit too much here.” But that kind of stuff is fun.

JM: But you absolutely got it right. You also voice David, Buddy’s owner. And that’s a key role for several reasons. Did you intentionally cast yourself for this role?

BS: This film was in development for a very long time. I wrote and directed this film. I’m also the co-director of the studio that made it, Red Star in the UK. We had wanted to do an animated film for several years. So we basically storyboarded the whole thing as one of the things we did to try and convince the people that we could actually make a feature. We storyboarded the whole thing. There was a version of this entirely done with drawings where I did all the voices.

I was playing all the characters, and some of those are easier than others. One of the roles was I was voicing Buddy’s owner David, and it was just a case of, “Well, that sounds pretty good. There’s not really much point in going and finding somebody else to play that because it’s something I can do.” So we just ran with it. It’s nice to contribute in another way.

JM: There’s a nice sense of warmth and heart, especially towards the end of the film. You’ve established this world with fun characters and this story for kids and adults to be able to latch onto. Where do you see this franchise going from here?

BS: Well you used the operative word: franchise. We wanted to make an animated film. We wanted to do something that was going to clearly be appealing to kids and family audiences. I was slightly surprised that no one had really done this before: superhero animals. The goal was always to put a mark in the sand and say, “This clearly is the first part of an entertainment franchise… a superhero franchise squarely aimed at kids and families about superhero animals.” And we already have a couple of other films in development. There’s one we’re working on… about a team of superhero animals on a farm. I think there’s an opportunity here to create an interconnected universe of superhero animal movies. And it would be great.

One of the reasons for doing this film – and this is going back about 5 or 6 years now. When my daughter (who’s now 8) was about 2, she was coming home from Nursery [School], and I was reading a magazine or something. And there was a picture of Batman. She would point at it. She’d go, “Batman! Spider-Man!” And I’m like, “You’re two years old! You know who Batman is!” And you realize that even very, very young kids – they get superheroes because they’re just so visually clear. It’s not just some guy wearing a suit. It’s Batman. It’s such a strong visual image. So distinctive.

And then you realize small children can’t watch Batman movies. They’re far too mature for kids. And even the Batman cartoons they make are too grown-up for small children. I was like, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a superhero franchise that was completely suitable for a family and you could share it with your kids? And if you were excited about one of these movies, it was something you could take your whole family to.” And we mixed that with a big dollop of silliness and came up with this!