FLIGHT OF FANCY

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

Mike White, the mastermind behind The White Lotus, penned the screenplay. ‘He came up with the whole story, created the characters, the essence of the movie,’ explains Renner. ‘And then he had to shoot The White Lotus so he left. We did some rewrites… but I was trying to make sure that when we had to change things we kept in his spirit.’ Some dialogue was improvised by the cast –when you hire an actor like Danny DeVito, that’s par for the course. ‘Danny DeVito comes in, reads the first line and just goes for 15 minutes of ad libbing, going completely crazy. You’re literally crying with laughter.’

FOWL PLAY

The family’s journey brings them to New York. Renner wanted to add an element of surprise to their Big Apple arrival. Clouds shield the city and facilitate a dramatic entrance for the quacking quintet. ‘I discovered, working on this movie, it’s not like The Lord of the Rings where you start by saying there’s this little thing you have to destroy or it’s the end of the world,’ says Renner. ‘We have a duck that needs to go on a vacation. And if they fail, they go back home. That’s not a big issue.’ They had to find inventive ways, therefore, to pull the audience in.

NATURE CALLS

Renner cites the horror-influenced heron sequence as one of his favourites in the film – partly because it’s based on a real experience he had at an Airbnb and partly because Erin the heron is voiced by Carol Kane. She helped no end in ‘making the character weird’ and proved difficult to recast for the French dubbing. But, perhaps surprisingly, this wasn’t the film’s biggest challenge. For the Gallic director, the trickiest aspect was making sure the story ‘makes sense from the beginning to the end… until the very end, we were very close to having a film that didn’t make sense at all.’