Two-time Annie Award nominee Kris Pearn co-directed 2013’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 for Sony. Now he’s the director of the new star-studded Netflix animated feature The Willoughbys, debuting this Wednesday April 22nd.

Jackson Murphy: Kris, you’re in an interesting position right now. You and everyone who made the movie and everybody at Netflix are putting out one of the big new pieces of animation content for families to enjoy during this crazy, unpredictable time. Has that thought kind of sunk in yet?

Kris Pearn: Yes and no. When you start a film five years out, you don’t think about what it’s gonna look like on the release. We all have families, and we’re all worried about the people we love in this time. So it’s hard to square that circle. Ultimately I’m thankful that the hard work and all the efforts put in by the crew will have access to an audience, and I really hope it makes people happy out in the world. I think the timing is something that we just can’t predict.

JM: This movie is whimsical and wild and fun. I think families are gonna really enjoy this. How soon after “Cloudy 2” did you really get underway on this and read the Lois Lowry book?

KP: It was about 2016. After “Cloudy” finished, I bounced around and worked on a couple different projects. I was working on a “Star Wars” project in Los Angeles when the producer, Luke Carroll, had breakfast with me and he gave me the book and said, “Give this a read and let me know what you think.” So it was really around 2016 that the seed got planted. A long road to get to where we are today, but that’s the way these things get made.

JM: Did you work with Lois Lowry on bringing this to life?

KP: Not really. The gap that happens between the way a book is consumed and the way a movie is consumed – you kind of have to step back from the source material. Definitely went through an internal process where the early drafts of the script really hung onto the book. I think the root of her story that I loved was it made fun of children’s literature – and made fun of it in a way that it was sort of a love story to it. It was subversive, but also caring about the source material.

As we pivoted from children’s literature to children’s film entertainment, it sort of led into slightly different directions. As the audience consumes it in a different way, we have to find our own sort of pace and our rhythm through that storytelling. Ultimately when we were closer to the end of the process, we began sharing a lot of the film with her. And she was always supportive. One of the things that was really great over the four-year journey was that after every screening, I went back and re-read the book. And that helped me hang on to the integrity of what the source material was trying to provide.

JM: The nods to children’s film entertainment are evident in “The Willoughbys”. Parts of it feel like “Willy Wonka” and “Lemony Snicket”. Of course, Gene Wilder and Jim Carrey are two of the all-time comedy greats. Did they and those scenes in those movies lend themselves as inspiration to how the comedy is executed?

KP: Yeah. Being a kid growing up in Canada, I grew-up on a lot of sketch comedy, whether it was “Kids in the Hall” or “SCTV”. The fact that I got to work with Martin Short on this movie is a dream come true because I grew up with him. That physical comedy that comes from character driven foibles… I love the idea of biting down on the nerve of what makes a character funny. With Tim, he’s a kid trying to be an adult, so there’s an arrogance there that he can’t carry. And that takes us into all sorts of reference points, from John Cleese in “Faulty Towers”… he was a huge reference point for Tim… to a lot of the Jim Carrey stuff. We really watched the “Ace Ventura” movies for the physicality. He was always trying to be tough and stoic but then had this sort of rag-doll quality when he lost his confidence or got tossed around. All of that is definitely referenced in how we built the characters’ movement and voices.

JM: The movie is so fast and zany – and there’s so much pacing to this. Was it challenging at times to go along with the rhythm of this and get everything just right? (Because it moves and moves and moves!)

KP: Yeah. It’s a tricky thing because animation is such a backwards process. You don’t ever have a moment where you have a set and all your actors on stage and the lighting and you get it all in one go. One of the things that really came early in the film for me was the fact that it was a collision between a sitcom and a movie. The design of the film: the characters are stuck the first half of the film in this house. So I really wanted to shoot it practical.

I was watching a lot of “All in the Family” and “Seinfeld” and really trying to steepen that rat-a-tat of, like, “Arrested Development” – of how fast that dialogue goes… kind of classic three-camera sitcom set-ups. So one of the challenges was trying to keep that rat-a-tat up, but at the same time try to give space for the film to have those movie moments. Hopefully, when the audience watches it, that push and pull comes forward. There’s almost two rhythms in the story.

JM: You are shaking up and changing up the rules when it comes to making animated films based on how we see it in “The Willoughbys”. Was that one of the goals going in, or did that just sort of happen along the way?

KP: I don’t know if it’s the goal, but I think it’s always something that we [most filmmakers] challenge ourselves with. Every movie that I’ve worked on, one of the things that I’ve appreciated about my weird career is that they’re very different, from “Shaun the Sheep” to “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”. When you look at what the story can offer an audience, it’s important to stand back and say, “How do I deliver it in a way that’s original?” I think, in trying to be original, you don’t want to alienate the audience, so that’s the juggle. It’s like trying to find something that feels organic to the source material without it being forced. I think it took us a few years to get there on “The Willoughbys”.

But ultimately the pace and the rhythm and the design and the comedy all comes from an honest place of us discovering… it’s a bit like slow-motion stand-up, to be honest with you. Every time we had a screening, whether it was in storyboards or early animatics with digital assets, I was always trying to respond to the audience in a way that allowed the film to be entertaining but also… I wasn’t just trying to make something that you recognized. I wanted to make it feel like it was coming from these characters. Owning that is where the originality comes from. It wasn’t like trying to be subversive for the sake of being subversive. I think it was trying to make the movie work for what the content was. And it’s a weird story! When you start with a weird story, you have to kind of go to some weird places in order to make it work! (laughs)

JM: You have such a big cast in this movie. Short and Jane Krakowski voice the parents. Were they together in the voice booth doing their lines?

KP: No. I wish they were. [Though] weirdly enough… they kind of were. It worked out that we got Martin first and the couple of records we did with him. I would play Martin and we would put pauses in, and Jane would react to him. But he was there in a canned way. First time I worked with Martin, he was up in Ontario. So we went to this hotel, and the engineer built this little pillow fort out of mattresses and blankets. And he went into this pillow fort, and he came-up with character in a way that I’d never seen before. He’s such a weird, wonderful man.

When we played that for Jane, she got all of these ideas and started to riff with somebody who’s not in the room. It was incredible. They’re comedy geniuses and they’ve worked together before. Part of the casting was trying to find that pairing of people who kind of go well together.

JM: Ricky Gervais is an executive producer on the film and he voices The Cat (who’s also the narrator). When he came on board, was an automatic “I’m the EP and The Cat”?

KP: He was actually there before I was. He was one of the things that made the project very attractive to me. I’ve always loved his comedy after the first season of “The Office”. I find him to be such a genius in how he subverts what we expect. He was already attached, and the idea of making him The Cat came organically from looking at his tone and the way that Ricky talks – and if you’ve ever seen his stand-up, how his mind kind of wanders and comes back to things. The other is: you almost don’t want Ricky to not be Ricky. So being the straight man in the movie allowed us to keep him very honest to what his tone is and what his voice could bring to the table.

And he was very supportive of the entire process. Anytime we needed him – if we had questions – anytime I was unsure about the comedy, I would send it to him. He helped us with a teaser. A lot of what is in the movie was really the last pass when we were almost finished and we did a run through of the film and he commented on it. It was amazing. It was like watching a stand-up show live in the booth. It was incredible.

JM: And The Cat is an interesting character – maybe the most dynamic in the movie – because, without giving too much away, The Cat has the power to change the course of the story. And for me, those are some of the most surprising moments of the film.

KP: One of the things I really wanted to play with was… again the tropes and archetypes of filmmaking. Every character in the story, from the narrator to the bit players that the kids collide with along the way, they all represent an archetype and a trope, and then hopefully the audiences picks up on how we bend that trope. One of the things I was really passionate about was I didn’t want the movie to feel like a parody. I wanted it to have a little bit of that comfort that parody brings to the table, but then it ultimately becomes its own story. Each character kind of has that movement. And the narrator starts off as sort of an observer of the world. And at the end he becomes really part of the theme.

JM: The kids are Tim, voiced by Will Forte. You reunite with him after “Cloudy 2”. And Alessia Cara voices Jane. She’s a huge pop star. This is one of her first big acting roles. What made her right to voice Jane?

KP: We were looking for a casting on that character. And at the time, the idea of her being a musical character was already seeded. We’d been playing with it in our… writers’ rooms. One of our editors was watching “Jimmy Fallon”… and Alessia Cara was on the show. He was doing a “Predict the Future” thing, and she was like, “I wanna be in an animated movie”. So the fact that she was Canadian and a singer, and her voice… she’s so funny and her timing is good, I got really excited about thinking “What if she’d say Yes?”

So we reached out, and right away she signed on. The first time in the booth it was a bit like, “I hope this person can act”. And oh my gosh, was she ever game? She just found the funny in the character. And for Jane, there’s an honesty in how [Cara] approaches it. As a kid from Toronto, she’s got this Canadian underpinning of niceness that’s subversive in its own way. Jane should be that annoying little sister that was constantly driving Tim to points of frustration. The comedy of having Jane as sort of the irritating but lovable foil for Forte’s straight man – that really started to show itself very quickly. I think [Jane] is my favorite character in the movie.

JM: That’s such a great story. So Kris, is there another animation project you have in mind that you could spend the next four to five years on?

KP: (laughs) I hope! I grew up on a farm, so everything’s farming metaphors for me. You put some seeds in the ground and you hope good stuff comes up. I love the medium. I think it’s important to tell stories… in all times. You just hope that you find the right one and you can get excited about it because it’s a journey. A five-year marriage!

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Jackson Murphy

Jackson Murphy is a movie critic and entertainment columnist. He is the creator of the website Lights-Camera-Jackson.com, and has made numerous appearances on television and radio.

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