EXCLUSIVE
MIGRATION Love and adventure collide in a quackers new animation…
To launch an entirely original movie in the franchise era is a bold gesture. This is especially true of animation, where takings for Pixar originals in recent years have plunged in comparison to 2019’s billion-dollar-busting Toy Story 4 and 2018’s follow-up to The Incredibles. The folks at Illumination are no strangers to box officebothering franchises themselves. The architects behind Despicable Me, they also raked in a staggering $1.362 billion with 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It’s perhaps no surprise that they’re feeling confident now as the studio throws down the feather gauntlet for Migration, a wholly original new animated feature about a family of ducks.
ABIGGER POND
‘“We want to make a movie about love… with ducks,”’ director Benjamin Renner says, quoting Illumination boss Chris Meledandri’s Migration pitch to him. ‘Which I felt was a terrible idea. Then I started understanding what he wanted to do.’ Namely, explore how a couple can grow apart as one craves stability and routine while the other seeks new challenges, and how they might overcome this difference. Ultimately, the film is a simple story about a family of ducks –mum Pam (Elizabeth Banks), dad Mack (Kumail Nanjiani), ducklings Dax (Caspar Jennings) and Gwen (Tresi Gazal), and Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito) –venturing out from their small New England pond to head to Jamaica. UNIVERSAL
CANNY CANARDS
Why ducks? Renner: ‘Mallards are a duck you see everywhere. They illustrate a typical human being very well.’ Ducks are unthreatening and relatable; they’re a great subject for a story that is essentially a fable. ‘Every human on Earth can connect with them because they’re animals. They have no colour, they have no culture.’ Animating a duck –whose movements are manipulated on a computer as if the animator were a puppeteer –needs three times as many controllers as ahuman ‘rig’. As a result, on Migration, a single animator would work on less than the average of two to three seconds of footage per week.
PEAK BEAK
Renner’s favourite character is Gwen. ‘She was my life-saving character,’ says the director. ‘Each time the movie was blocking, I just added her. There’s a sequence towards the end where Dax is yelling at his father, and we couldn’t make the sequence afterwards work. I started improvising Gwen coming in. I showed it to the producer and he loved the relationship and the idea of her. Even when Dax is meeting the girl [love interest], I added Gwen. She became this very funny “young me”. I have older siblings and was always following them. I wanted danger but was ready to rat them out for whatever they did.’
CRISPY SHREDDED LUCK
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