THR’s Full Animation Roundtable Now Available on ‘Behind the Screen’

The Hollywood Reporter‘s complete Animation Roundtable is presented in a new episode of THR‘s Behind the Screen podcast. Recorded remotely on Nov. 5, the discussion features Elaine Bogan, director, Spirit Untamed; Enrico Casarosa, writer-director, Luca; Carlos López Estrada, director, Raya and the Last Dragon; Quiara Alegría Hudes, writer, Vivo; Phil Lord, producer, The Mitchells vs. The Machines; Jonas Poher Rasmussen, writer-director, Flee; and Clark Spencer, producer, Encanto.

The conversation included discussion of diversity and inclusion, of which Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Spencer summed up, “There’s been incredible progress and there’s still an immense amount of work to do.”

“As a business, we’re a work in progress,” adds Lord. “One of the things that’s really exciting is that the schools are much more diverse and there are a lot more women, and beyond the schools, people are learning this craft online on YouTube. So the access is a lot greater than it’s ever been.”

“One of the challenges is leadership and making sure that we’re inviting people into those positions and helping them,” he continues. “Our production designer on Mitchells is Lindsey Olivares, and she was somebody that we noticed on Instagram, who just had an incredible body of personal work. I remember being in a meeting going, we need to find a production designer who can draw like this woman. And we were like, well, why don’t we hire this woman? We’ve got a million people who can teach you how to manage a team, we have a lot of support here at the studio. What we need are poets and inspiration. And it was a really great success story.”

Speaking of Luca, which is set in 1950s Italy, Casarosa notes, “you can start asking yourself, how do you bring some representation here? And we realized that that would have been hard to do with authenticity, and so we found other different ways that we could represent some diversity. We thought, for example, more about disability and bringing people that are not always seeing themselves in movies in there. Our Massimo character was a wonderful collaboration with the filmmakers from Crip Camp. And those are things that we talk a lot about in each movie. I don’t think that every movie has to check all the boxes, ’cause I think it can feel like tokenism as well, but it’s so important that we’re all having these conversations and really trying to think about ways that these kids need to see themselves on the screen, wherever they’re from or whatever their situations.”

Hudes talked about accents and female body shapes during the conversation. “With the accent casting, [we] just really wanting to steer clear of putting accents onto people that don’t naturally have them. I can hear when it’s not someone’s natural speaking pattern. And honoring the diversity of accents that exist within a community that is multilingual, that have different first languages, even within families, the two languages, Spanish and English might’ve been acquired at different ages, therefore leading to different accents.”

On body types, she adds that the filmmakers “wanted to push on the body types and in particular for more plus-size and round-figured females.”