CraveOnline: So much of the animation that reaches theaters seems very corporate and homogenized in a lot of ways. Do you look at those films and say “screw that,” or does that have its place and you just want to do your own different thing?
Tomm Moore: Yeah, I enjoy that stuff and I understand it for what it is. I’ve always been an animation fan, so I enjoy just the craft of it. A lot of the time I think it’s amazing what they do within the fact that they’re spending so much money, they have to answer to so many shareholders and all that kind of stuff. It must be terrifying, the risks that they do take. The fact that Pixar movies have allowed western audiences to start to imagination that animation can be for adults as well as for little kids on Saturday mornings is amazing. Because they’re making movies on this huge, risky scale where they spend hundreds of millions on them.
But for me it’s almost trying to provide an alternative or an antidote to that, by making independent films. For me I don’t think that scale of filmmaking allows for a lot of risk-taking, and any risk-taking that you take is very incremental. Tiny little steps, whereas you can be much bolder with an independent movie. I just prefer the freedom. I think I wouldn’t be very good at making a movie under the kind of pressures that some of those directors have to work under, where they’re having to answer to committees of executives and they’ve got millions and millions of dollars riding on it.
Your films, although they are more independent and do take greater risks, they are focused both on children.
Oh yeah.
“A kids movie might be the first movie that kid sees, and you really want it to have the kind of impact that the best movies had on you as a kid.”
Although they are intense they are films children can enjoy. Do you picture yourself making a film that’s catered more specifically to adults within animation?
Not sure. I’m not sure. I can’t imagination why I wouldn’t do it but it hasn’t come up for me yet. I think that’s interesting, in the future we’re going to go towards a situation where it is viable to make [an animated film for adults]. Because even though our film is independent, they’re still pretty risky. We’re still spending like… I know it doesn’t sound like much compared to American budgets, but 5 1/2 million Euros is still a lot of money when you don’t have 5 1/2 million Euros. So we’re still to some extent thinking in terms of what’s going to work, and definitely for me most of my ideas have been for family stories.
I think about kids movies as compared to adults movies, people sometimes talk about live-action or making movies for adults as some kind of step up, but for me kids movies are a different responsibility because I watch so many movies as an adult, and I forget a lot of them instantly. I usually don’t remember the names of the characters, I just refer to them as the actor that played the part of whatever. Whereas the kids movies that I watched as a kid, like Goonies or E.T. or any of the Disney movies I watched, they made a massive impression on me. They were maybe the fifth or sixth movie I’d seen.
So I think when making movies for families or specifically for kids, I think it’s a much bigger challenge and it’s a bigger undertaking and a bigger responsibility, because a kids movie might be the first movie that kid sees, and you really want it to have the kind of impact that the best movies had on you as a kid.
That’s a fantastic way of looking at that.
It just seems to me that there’s an attitude where movies for adults are somehow “real,” and movies for kids are somewhat throwaway. And I think it’s really the opposite, because you can watch so many movies as an adult and they might wash over you, but kids movies are responsible for shaping a kid’s attitude to so many things.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
