Seth Rogen has made projects about the end of the world and anthropomorphized grocery store items, but the new hand-drawn, black-and-white animated film “Tangles,” a drama about a woman returning to her small conservative town to take care of her mother who has Alzheimer’s disease, might be closest to in his heart. In conversation at the Middleburg Film Festival this weekend, the producer shared how the specific approach that director Leah Nelson and her co-screenwriters Sarah Leavitt and Trev Renney was more of a selling point than a deterrent.
“To me, animation is a medium and it is my instinct to trust the creative ambitions and instincts of the people that I work with and to not question them too much, honestly. And if anything, I have tried to train myself to really go on the journey with people’s creative instincts, even if they are not my own or even if they seem like you could argue against them,” said Rogen. “This film being an animated film is the perfect example of that. You probably could have talked them out of this. You probably could have argued there are surreal sequences [that] you could probably do in live-action if you really wanted to. There’s visual effects, you can make a wave come into a room. It’s not impossible.”
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The opportunity for Rogen and his wife, director Lauren Miller Rogen, to produce the film came about from the advocacy work they’ve done for Alzheimer research. The couple met Nelson and Leavitt, who wrote the graphic novel that the film is based on, “Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me,” at a charity event, and stayed in touch with them to develop the film adaptation, and fundraise for it over time.
Talking more about the film taking what some may see as an unconventional approach to the material, even from an animation perspective, Rogen said, “Truthfully, they came to us wanting it to be animated. It was based on a graphic novel. They had a look, they had a vision. And rather than try to poke holes in that, we all chose to support it. And rather than say, ‘Why does this have to be animated?’ We all thought, ‘Wow, very interesting. What an interesting approach to this.’ It’s more unique, it’s more specific.”
He continued, “The more I make things, the word ‘specificity’ is the thing that I am telling the people I work with the most to seek and to try to create in their own work. What makes it specific to you and to this? What makes it different [from] what anyone else would do to tell this story? What makes it distinct? And so all those things, animation, that’s specific, black and white, that’s specific. Hand drawn, that’s specific. And I think in art, the more specific art is, the more it seems to resonate.”
Rogen used examples of other famous artists working in different mediums to support his theory. “Andy Warhol isn’t the best painter. He’s one of the most specific painters. Jackson Pollock you can argue is not even a good painter, but it’s unbelievably specific. You see it, you know who did it right away. And that’s to me the key of specificity. And I think with this, you see one frame of it, you know what it is,” he said.
Speaking again about “Tangles,” the producer said, “You could put 10 movies on the screen. If this was one of them, the specificity of it is what would make you instantly recognize it. And to me, that has become, as I’ve worked more and more, something that I’ve really looked to and encouraged those who I work with to pursue, is not just creative ambition or clarity or any of that. All those things as well, but also what can you do to make this specific? What can you do? What are all the things you could do, all the parameters you can put on it that will set it apart from anyone else’s version of this were they to do it?”
“Tangles,” which includes the voices of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein, and Rogen himself, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and was eventually acquired by IFC in August, just in time to mount a Best Animated Feature Oscar campaign.