Chris Meledandri interview: Titan AE, Despicable Me, and the fatigue of the familiar

The producer of the Ice Age trilogy, Titan AE, Horton Hears A Who and many other Fox animation successes, Chris Meledandri is a man with quite a pedigree behind him. He made a flying stop in London to present Despicable Me, his first animated film for Universal, joking as he did so that Titan AE, his first animated production, lost around $90m. Which seemed a good place to start our chat...

Titan AE would have lost $90,000,015 if it hadn't been for me! I'm really quite fond of it...

There's a very finite group that still holds a warm place for that film! For example, a friend of mine went to Bungie, he was writing the Halo games. He had helped me at a point in time with Titan AE, doing a little bit of uncredited writing. And he called me one day, and said, "Oh, my God, there's a whole studio of Titan fans up here! They heard I worked on Titan."

It was too soon, though?

Yeah, yeah.

Onto your new project, you've carried quite a responsibility here, in delivering a Universal animated film, the first major one in some time.

When I think of Universal animation, I think of The Land Before Time, An American Tail, the Steven Spielberg films. This, then, is the second time that you've gone into a studio, after Fox, and set up animation. What's changed since you set up Ice Age at Fox?

Well, I think one of the primary things that's changed is that 13 years ago, when we embarked on Ice Age, there was really only one way to do a CG animated film. And that was to have a bricks and mortar standing crew who you'd do every film with, because there simply wasn't enough creative talent to find if you didn't have your own crew that you had built up.

Today, in the ensuing period there has been this explosion of talent coming into the space. It's the first generation of kids who watched Toy Story when they were ten, played videogames, kids where digital imagery remained a central part of their cultural experience, from kids to teens. And now they've become adults.

And with the availability of animation tools, simpler tools like Flash and After Effects, and then the availability of distribution through the Internet, all of these things combined have resulted in this talent explosion.

Artists who never would have had an idea of how to take their artistic instincts and translate it into career, now have found the means to connect, to be found, to be discovered.

Today we have a lot of choices when it comes to with whom and how we're going to assemble a crew. So, we can go out and cast a crew around what the specific needs are of the movie. The availability of talent, I'd say, is the central thing that's changed, even more than technological advances.

From where I sit, it seems that the physical production of making an animated film has got quicker. You've hinted that Despicable Me, for instance, took two years...?

The three year process from starting the story to completion is quicker, but you know, what's happened with technology allowing us to move at a faster pace, or technology allowing us to achieve more in a shorter period of time, there is a definitive limitation to that. Because the harder the film is, the artistry of, let's say, creating a performance, that process is essentially an artistic process, whether you're holding a pencil or a stylus.

So, you reach a point very quickly where increased computing power, or automated background animation, is not significantly changing the pace of making the movie.

The storyboarding process is still exactly the same. The character designing process. What enables a picture to truly move more quickly than not is finding the film, and defining it in the story in a more clear and precise manner, earlier in production rather than later.

One thing you've said is that you've talked about the "fatigue of the familiar", something that has being levelled at animated films and at movies as a whole, with the underwhelming performance of many films this year.

For me, Despicable Me sticks out. The tone, having the villain as the main character, and how you don't approach his story quite as I was expecting. I thought, too, it was quite a dialogue-light film. You're making some choices there that are going against the tide?

The fatigue of the familiar, the first level of it is an overdependence on sequels and remakes, and too much of an aversion within our industry to originality. Then, it all comes down to risk aversion, or the perception of it.

Is it more if you are risk averse in a terribly challenging, expensive industry? Do you resort to things that have worked before? Or are you a contrarian, and believe that audiences go to the movies to have experiences that are fresh and exciting?

I just choose to believe that audiences, they have to love and care about the characters, but they don't have to love them in the first two minutes. They have to find things that are compelling and intriguing.

We utilised a lot of comedy to express character. That's the first threshold.

Then, ideally, we take audiences on an experience that is fresh and exciting and different from what they saw last weekend.

I have to ask you about the minions in the film. The last time we saw that number of characters of that ilk in an animated film was Happy Feet, and Happy Feet sold us scale, rather than individual characterisation.

But I got a sense here that it was characterisation you were going for? The minions weren't Oompa Loompas, they weren't one character en masse?

The minions are really a creation out of the imagination of one of our two directors, Pierre Coffin, working with our art director, Eric Guillon. And what emerged was very quickly after Pierre and Eric created the characters, Pierre also does the primary vocalisations of the characters.

What happened was people immediately, myself included, responded to them. Within our team, the visual artists and crew, was a group of artists who started working on them. And so came the assignment of personality and subtle differentiation. I love they have these very ordinary names like Dave and Bob, but the assignment of those comedic personalities really is a credit to this team within the crew that just fell in love with them and ran with them.

You hold them back for a lot of film, too, and there must have been a temptation to use them more. It goes back to Scrat in the original Ice Age, where he too was held back.

I had experienced the same thing with Scrat in the first Ice Age. What constitutes too much? Chris Wedge, the director and I had a really healthy debate about where he wanted to hold Scrat back even more. And he was the creator of Scrat, and did the vocalisations.

I think that I'm fortunate enough to work with directors, and many of them are first time feature directors, who appreciate restraint. I think that you see that restraint manifested in how they create in the 3D environment. You see it in situations like the minions.

It just comes down to a taste level of creative people, who have that kind of restraint.

And with that, our time was up! Chris Meledandri, thank you very much!

Despicable Me is released in the UK on 15th October.