“I Really Love Going to Fantastical Places”: Seth Rogen, Kemp Powers and the THR Animation Roundtable

“There’s that great old quote about Hollywood: ‘No one knows anything,’ ” says Kemp Powers. “Yet everyone acts like they know everything. I get particularly frustrated by some of these trends, because they selectively omit things that don’t validate their thesis,” admits Powers, one of the trio of directors behind Sony Pictures Animation sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which made $690.5 million at the worldwide box office. “There’s always a selective omission. Apparently no one wants to see any superhero movies, but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did pretty damn well, too, with superheroes.”

Seth Rogen, one of the writers and producers of Paramount and Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (and the voice of Bebop) agrees, pushing back against a perception that family and animated movies might not yet have recovered from the pandemic. “Good movies prevail, period,” he asserts.

In this season’s Animation Roundtable, recorded Nov. 30 on Zoom, the pair discussed a range of topics including artificial intelligence and their latest movies, along with Karen Ryan, one of the producers of Annapurna and Netflix’s Nimona; Benjamin Renner, director of Universal/Illumination’s Migration; Peter Sohn, writer-director of Disney/Pixar’s Elemental; and Fawn Veerasunthorn, one of the directors of Disney Animation’s Wish.

A number of you are also writers. What do you look for in a story, and are there types of stories that you’d like to see more of?

PETER SOHN If the idea hits you in the heart in a way that resonates, that’s great. If it’s also making you laugh and giggle, just thinking about the idea, that starts to add on top of that pile of, “Is this going to be something?” And then those seeds of who these characters are, if they somehow get under your skin — that really starts the ball rolling for me.

FAWN VEERASUNTHORN I love the story that lets me ponder my own life and existence. It is great to put yourself in those characters. And for me, I love the medium of animation and how that allows us to go beyond the existence of reality. I really love going to the fantastical places.

KEMP POWERS I really love being surprised. I think not just artists, but fans are so savvy. Everyone has a really good understanding of story structure. So when you hear a story and you go, “Oh, I didn’t see that coming,” that’s always something that makes me perk up a lot. But I think at a base level, it’s honestly just characters that I find interesting.

SETH ROGEN I look for relatability and authenticity. With [Ninja Turtles], for example, the idea of teenagers wanting to be accepted and feel normal could not resonate with me more and feel more basic and simple, but at the same time is a great jumping-off point for insane world-building.

KAREN RYAN I want to see more stories where people see themselves onscreen. For us, Nimona was this strong female character. But she wasn’t on this journey of self-discovery. She liked who she was to begin with, and she’s this incredibly powerful character, but she just wants to be seen for who she is. And I think that’s so tragic and so relatable and something that everybody can see and put themselves into the story. So more stories like that.

Nimona began at Blue Sky when Blue Sky was part of Fox. And then, after the Disney acquisition and Blue Sky closing, the project almost didn’t happen. Would you tell us about the journey of the film?

RYAN We got the call that the studio was closing, and with it, the movie was canceled. It was heartbreaking. How do we keep going? We took the reels and shopped it around the industry, and Megan Ellison at Annapurna saw them and came to us immediately and said that she saw herself in the movie and was willing to help us get it done. And the movie pivoted to an independent film. We had to build our own little studio and call all our friends. If you’ve seen the movie, our credits are over 14 and a half minutes long. The animation community stepped in and pushed with us and helped us bring this movie to the screen.

POWERS Now I’m bummed that I’m not in your credits. Peter Sohn’s in Spider-Verse.

SOHN I remember getting to see one of the latest versions of the reels of [Nimona]. When it finally got picked up again, it was full animation community love for it.

RYAN It’s been this very communal experience. I love it.

Seth, why don’t you tell us about relaunching the Turtles?

ROGEN I grew up with Ninja Turtles. What we always gravitated to was the teenage part. Our whole idea was like, what if we really make a teenage movie and capture teenage energy in a way that I had not seen captured in an animated film before? [We were] casting actual teenagers, then actually putting them together in a room and allowing them simultaneously to talk and use their own words and argue and improvise and really use the language that kids use, and use references that they use, and allow them to play off each other in a way that felt to me as authentic as anything I’ve ever seen. And then to put that into animation. It had all these themes of acceptance and longing, but it all started with this idea of having four actual teenagers in a room together. And I was always like, if you do that, if within five seconds the audience sees them as just teenagers and not turtles, then we can make a really great movie that has a lot more emotional resonance and relatability than I think anyone would expect from a movie called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

SOHN That electricity being captured is something that I’ve just always loved in animation. What I don’t know if audiences really get, is that you are frame by frame trying to re-create electricity in a bottle, but in this slow-paint-drying sort of manner.

Just to riff off that idea of electricity, I mean, we’re doing a love story [in Elemental]. This idea of, “What if fire fell in love with water,” and so much of that idea requires chemistry, requires the belief that these two characters — Leah Lewis, who plays Ember, our fire character, and Wade, who’s played by Mamoudou Athie — that are seemingly opposite have some electrical connection with each other.

POWERS We tried both. I mean, sometimes it was effective, sometimes it wasn’t. We found that [having] people in the same room for us, oddly enough, worked the best when it was dramatic emotional moments, like George Stacy and Gwen. Putting Hailee Steinfeld and Shea Whigham in the room together for that father-daughter emotional moment, that actually was what cracked open that scene.

Some people are VO veterans, but we also had a lot of first-time VO people on our film, like Shea had never done voiceover before, so I think that was actually beneficial for his character, because he had a lot of questions. He came in and was like, “Let’s talk. Why would I do this?” We’d have these long, deep character discussions that actually would help reveal some of the holes in our character development and storytelling. We [including screenwriters Phil Lord and Christopher Miller] would just rewrite in the booth. I wish people could appreciate the vocal performances in animation more, because one of the big problems with this medium that I’ve seen, doing animation and live action, people don’t know what they’re looking at on the screen.

RYAN I also feel like sometimes animation gets a reputation where it’s a different kind of acting, where it’s almost easier, in a way. I think that’s completely the opposite. We weren’t able to record any of our actors together. It was a scheduling problem. [But onscreen] you feel a real chemistry between them, especially Chloë Grace Moretz, she’s our Nimona, and Riz Ahmed, who’s Ballister. They finally met after filming was over. But the level of talent that these actors have to have, to be able to convince you, and to get into these emotional moments, and these funny moments, alone in a booth, make these characters real. Animation is a crazy process, and people who can bring their art to it — beautiful.

Fawn, would you tell us a little bit about recording Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine for Wish?

VEERASUNTHORN Initially, Asha was a determined character. She loves her family and her people, but what Ariana brought to the table is this joyous personality, while also being driven. If you know her in real life — someone who is so passionate about her community, and she speaks up about them — that gave Asha a new dimension that we didn’t think of before. Both Ariana and Chris ask really smart questions about their characters. [For instance,] we wanted to give Magnifico depth, and Chris worked a lot with us on that. He’s so smart, he just sees right through. Sometimes you’re in the deadline, you’re just writing some stuff. Then he’s like, “Nope, I’m not buying that.” I’m like, “You’re right. Thank you for saying that. We’re going to work together on those.” He has such beautiful range from charming to powerful to crazy villain, and then who knew he can sing, right?

ROGEN That guy can do everything.

VEERASUNTHORN Yeah, everything. I want to give a lot of props to our editor, also. We did not record our actors together, either. All the spontaneity is happening in the editing room, of people talking over each other, in a way that sounds organic.

Benjamin, you’re a France-based cartoonist, director and animator, and the first time you and I talked was when you made 2012’s Ernest & Celestine, and you earned an Academy Award nomination for that movie. During that season, you met Chris Meledandri of Illumination, and Migration is your first Illumination movie. What was it like transitioning from the independent world to the studio world?

BENJAMIN RENNER It was a little bit stressful. I was very confused by the fact that Chris Meledandri was reaching out to me, in the sense that I knew Illumination, and I was like, “I don’t know how to do that.” I can do my little drawings on my side and everything, but doing an Illumination movie, that’s not my thing. Not that I didn’t like it, but it’s huge. But he started pitching me the project, and I really connected with what he wanted to tell through this story.

It was his idea. He saw an article about ducks being lazy now, because global warming is making everything hotter, so mallards don’t feel the need to migrate. It’s hot enough in their pond, so they don’t move anymore and get stuck in routine. He started thinking about himself as a man with his wife, and how he has his routine, and he’s afraid of getting out of his comfort zone. We talked about those very relatable things in our families. I was immediately charmed by the promise of what we could do with that. I just warned him, “I have no idea how to do your kind of movies. I can help, and I will do my best to help, but honestly, if it’s not working, you just tell me. I won’t be offended.” We started working together, and we got along.

You worked with Mike White, creator of The White Lotus. How did that come to be?

RENNER He wrote the story before I arrived on the project. He had the script done. We just met for a few meetings, and we got along really well, but he had to go to Survivor. We knew he was leaving, and we felt like he was going to leave for two weeks, or three weeks, or something like that. Two months later, we’re like, “What’s happening? Where is he?” He became a finalist. He came back and he had to do The White Lotus, so we didn’t have much interaction. The way Chris works, it’s very empiric, his way of writing a story. We can suggest and see how it plays. He offered me and the screenwriter who came in as reinforcement to bring new ideas. He gave me the chance of expressing myself through my storyboards, because I “write” with drawings. The main dialogues, they stayed in the movie.

We always talk about, in animation, how stories are being rewritten through the production process. In the case of Spider-Verse, you actually made the decision to split the movie into two parts and end on a cliffhanger. Would you tell us about how the decision came to be?

POWERS Even in the original concept, there was a lot there. As soon as we got into production, it became pretty clear that it was going to have to be two films, and it wasn’t as simple as just splitting it in the middle. It was quite a challenge. I come from more of a dramatic writing background in theater, and it was a really cool learning process just to see how [Lord and Miller] work on the comedy side, and the amount of problem-solving that’s being done on the fly. When I say on the fly, I mean through to when we were doing the sound mix. There would be times we would call in actors for ADR, and they were like, “Wait, are you serious? Isn’t the movie done yet?” We’re like, “Yeah, done-ish. Come back in. We need to rerecord this.”

Overall, I think we really locked down structurally what the film was going to be. But then there were just a thousand little bitty tweaks. Of course, the biggest concern was this idea of the cliffhanger, but we didn’t hide the fact that it was going to be a cliffhanger. All of us are tremendous fans of films like The Empire Strikes Back. I grew up in Brooklyn. My first trip to a movie in Manhattan, when I was a kid, was to see The Empire Strikes Back. We didn’t know Return of the Jedi was coming. I remember being traumatized out on the street in Manhattan after Empire. 

We wanted to wrap up a certain part of the story, but we wanted to introduce some new twist that hopefully people wouldn’t see coming in the last few minutes, so that even though people feel like they’re caught up, suddenly they realize that Miles is in Pottersville, and the solution that we think we know suddenly isn’t going to work. That’s what the third film is going to be. Needless to say, I got a lot of texts from friends after opening night that were basically just “WTF,” but I think that’s a sign that for the most part it worked. I hope it worked.

Two of the three highest-grossing movies of 2023 are animated, Spider-Verse being one of them, but many others did not fare as well, and there are still concerns out there that the family box office and the animation box office haven’t recovered from the pandemic. What are your thoughts?

ROGEN It’s so hard to quantify what makes a successful film these days. Ninja Turtles made, what, $100 million domestically in box office, and sold $1 billion worth of toys. People like to latch on to trends, and try to point out little trends. None of them hold up. They’ll all be like, “Everyone’s saying that family films aren’t great and they’re not doing well.” Then Spider-Verse makes a billion dollars [Editor’s note: The film made $690.5 million globally], and everyone says, “No one wants a female-led comedy,” and then Barbie makes a billion dollars.

People like good movies. People like to be a part of a cultural conversation. If everyone’s talking about something, they want to talk about it, too. If they see something they relate to, if they see something that is exciting, they go see it. Good movies prevail, period.

SOHN I totally agree. There are so many variables and layers to this. But it’s funny, because when Elemental first came out, it underperformed in a way that I could only see very myopically. I was only seeing it in terms of how it was quantified out there. In terms of getting wrapped up with that, it’s an emotional thing to see it in that view. But then the film, through word-of-mouth, was connecting with people. Exactly what you said, Seth, it’s that idea that audiences are connecting to a film. The idea of it being in a theater, or being in streaming, or in someone’s pocket, in their iPhone — you’re working your ass off, and putting all your heart into this stuff, so that it could one day chemically reach out to an audience member and spark something. Ultimately, it just boils down to that.

POWERS There’s always a selective omission. Apparently no one wants to see any superhero movies, but not just us, but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did pretty damn well, too, with superheroes. It’s like they don’t want to just say, “Look, it has to just be a good movie that connects to an audience, that excites people.” That’s something that can’t be plotted out.

VEERASUNTHORN You give me hope, though, when animated titles did really well in theaters. To me, that speaks to how far a reach this medium could [have]. Because some people were like, “Animations are for kids.” Animations are for everyone, so when it does well, I’m like, “Yes, go.”

To what extent is the current box office, in your opinion, affected by streaming?

RYAN When we started Nimona, it was a theatrical film. It’s got huge scale. So when it became a streaming film, it was an adjustment for us. That’s not what we set out to do. But Nimona has LGBTQ+ characters, we have a gay relationship, and if we went theatrical, there are markets that would not screen our movie. [For Netflix,] we got to make this movie and not compromise any of that. We made it authentic and true to what we wanted. And our movie went to 190 countries at once and people got to choose to see it. So there’s the box office, that’s one measure of success. And we made a film for a big screen, but our movie got to be received by anybody who needed it immediately around the world. That is very powerful. We don’t have box office numbers to look back to, but we have [a sense of] how people are connecting with the film.

Jeffrey Katzenberg recently predicted that generative AI will drastically cut the cost of making animated movies, as well as the number of artists making these movies. What are your thoughts?

SOHN I can clearly see tools that can help the process, as there are so many parts of animation that are painstaking and really labor intensive. In terms of artwork, I still haven’t seen some new idea that’s come out of AI that’s been like, “Oh, that’s sparking something for me.” And maybe there’s a day where that’s happening with the automated generative AI, where they’ll start thinking on their own. But at this point, I definitely see the value of it as a tool, but not something that’s going to create something new.

RYAN I agree with that. I think as artists, our industry is constantly changing, and technology is always going to keep evolving and we evolve with it. But the human side — the emotion that we put into the films — I don’t see that being replaced.

POWERS Yeah, I don’t see how you could replace it and still call it animation, to be honest. When you sit in dailies, animators are giving you different physical performances. I cannot predict what these tools are going to be and how they’re going to be used, but I think at its core, animation is human beings.

ROGEN Art by definition is human expression. So it just isn’t art anymore. It’s something else. When I was a kid, they had screensavers that were really pretty. No one was printing it out and putting it on their wall, because it didn’t speak to them. You know when something is art and when something isn’t. And things made by computers are not art because they’re not expressive of any person’s experience, taste, passion, fear, anything. They’re generated, they’re not expressed.

VEERASUNTHORN Point of view is important when you tell a story, and point of view can only come from human experience. And I love to think that we are too chaotic for a computer to guess what will come from our minds that makes it unique.

SOHN I don’t want to be naive about it. I know it’s beginning to take jobs away already, and this idea that AI is going to take your job away, there is a reality to it. But it’s not that AI will take your job. I assume it’s going to be that it’ll take people’s jobs away that don’t know AI. I feel like it is something that you have to understand to a certain degree. [But] maybe in five years there’ll be all these AI robots laughing at this video, “What did they know?” And it’s just going to happen.

ROGEN As long as they’re laughing, they’re potential audience members. (Laughs.) I think people are interested when you defy the perfection of technology. With Ninja Turtles, honestly, so much of the animation process was not letting the computers make this stuff look as perfect as they wanted to, and messing up the lines and the symmetry and the borders and breaking the perfection that a computer was trying to impose on it. Imperfection is far more interesting than perfection, and imperfection speaks to expression.

POWERS It’s just the choice of the artist, right? Remember when HD came out and it was supposed to be the end of film? How many movies do you see that are still shot on film? I remember watching Oppenheimer and I’m going, “Film ain’t going anywhere.” I think it’s really going to be up to the artists to make those choices.

RYAN All of the films [represented on the Roundtable] are completely different styles, and that just shows we’re all taking technology and using it to tell the stories that we want to tell. As for the next generation, we need to keep encouraging them to tell the stories that matter to them. And I think we’re going to get even cooler looks and crazier stories and better adventures because of this. Because we’re not limited anymore.

ROGEN I just hope they’re telling it in movies, not on TikTok.

Where do we go from here? What do you see as the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for the animation industry?

POWERS Expense. At least with theatrical, these aren’t cheap movies, and the metric of success, it can be so high when a film costs this much. I would just love to see more smaller films with smaller budgets — figuring out ways to do it that you’re able to take even greater risks. It’s a weird group to say it with because this is the most risk-taking group of animated films right now. So I almost feel like I’m in the wrong year. But it is something that I do think about. I mean, our Spider-Verse, it wasn’t the biggest, but it was significantly more expensive than the first one. And when it gets to a certain point, you’ve got expectations of the people above you.

ROGEN I’m currently making an $8 million animated movie. It’s a black-and-white, hand-drawn animated drama. And so it’s obviously very different. The biggest challenge is, does this younger generation actually like movies, and are movies their prevailing source of entertainment and therefore their go-to source of expression? When I was young, we were all obsessed with movies. That was it. [Today] there are huge movies that a lot of people never see, and there are a lot of groups of teenagers and kids who just don’t see movies at all. Instead they go on social media, they watch reruns of Friends on Netflix. The idea of sitting somewhere for two hours and not being able to look at your phone, I honestly think is one of the things that we are up against the most. That’s why it was important for us to make a movie that teenagers related to and that they quote to each other. And so, to give kids a cultural touchstone, a communal thing that makes them love movies, to me, was very important.

SOHN My fear is, can these theater chains create a better experience, and will audiences even pay for it? I was in line for a movie last weekend and I bought a $25 Dolby ticket, and that’s just one ticket. And the couple of girls in front of me, they said they bought a regular $15 ticket. And in that $15 experience, is that better than what people are getting at home? Can theaters remain competitive?

Pixar has been experimenting with HDR releases, including with Elemental. What are you finding about that opportunity right now?

SOHN Specifically for Elemental, having characters that were made of light  … but you can’t get that experience in every theater. It’s only in these few premium theaters. But there’s new technology [on the way].

ROGEN I remember, they would always make us redo our movies, our older movies, in like 4K, HDR, and we were just like, “What are we doing?” (Laughs.) It’s literally just to sell televisions and stuff like that. Better is not always better.

SOHN Well, Seth, just to push back on it, I think a better theater experience is valuable.

ROGEN That I agree with. I think if it was just cheaper, people would be happy. I don’t think the average person’s like, “The screen’s not bright enough.” They’re like, “I wish it didn’t cost $250 to take my family to a movie.”

RYAN The moviegoing experience is going to just keep getting better. I hope. But the other side of this trend of people watching on their phones and different places is we get to reach more people. It’s expensive to go to the movies. It is one way of seeing it, and it’s not going away. It’s just giving us more opportunities of how we can tell stories. And people have more choices now, which means that they can choose what they’re going to see, and that means stuff will break through when it matters. And I love that.

ROGEN I think what’s actually very heartening, though, is that even David Zaslav [Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO] has acknowledged that just putting a movie on streaming is not one iota as valuable as releasing a movie in theaters and then putting it on streaming. Because a theatrical marketing campaign is what gives a movie cultural relevance before anyone has seen it. And that is something that is hard to replace. I actually think that a lot of studios like streaming because it generally means you don’t have to give it a theatrical marketing campaign, and it’s just less expensive. To me, the ideal version is that everyone will have every opportunity to see the movies in theaters and then if they missed it in theaters or couldn’t afford it, they could see it on streaming. If I could write how Hollywood works, that’s what I would chase. 

This story first appeared in a January standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.