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Seth Rogen has done projects about the end of the world and anthropomorphized grocery store items, but the new black-and-white animated film “Tangles,” a drama about a woman who returns to her small conservative town to care for her mother with Alzheimer’s disease, may be closer to his heart. In a conversation at the Middleburg Film Festival this weekend, the producer shared how the unique approach of director Leah Nelson and her co-writers Sarah Leavitt and Trev Renney was more of a sell than a hindrance.
“For me, animation is a medium and my instinct is to trust the creative intentions and instincts of the people I work with and not question them too much, honestly. And if anything, I’ve tried to train myself to go along with people’s creative instincts, even if they’re not my own or even if it seems like you could argue against them,” Rogen said. “This movie being an animated movie is a good example of that. Maybe you could have talked them out of it. You might have argued that there are surreal sequences. [that] maybe you could do live action if you really wanted to. There are visual effects, you can bring a wave into a room. It’s not impossible.”
The opportunity for Rogen and his wife, director Lauren Miller Rogen, to make the film came from their advocacy work for Alzheimer’s research. The couple met Nelson and Leavitt, who wrote the graphic novel on which the film is based, “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 raise money for it over time.
Speaking more about the film taking what some see as an unconventional approach to the material, even from an animation standpoint, Rogen said, “Actually, they came to us wanting it to be animated. It was based on a graphic novel. They were looking, they had a vision. We all thought, ‘Wow, very interesting. What an interesting way to go about this.’ It’s more specific, it’s more specific. “
He continued, “The more I do things, the word ‘uniqueness’ is the thing I tell the people I work with the most to look for and try to create in their own work. What makes it special for you and this? What makes it different [from] what else would anyone do to tell this story? What makes it different? And so all these things, animation, which is special, black and white, that is special. Hand drawn, that’s special. And I think in art, the more unique art is, the more it seems to show up.”
Rogen used examples of other famous artists working in different mediums to support his theory. “Andy Warhol is not the best painter. He is one of the most special painters. You can argue that Jackson Pollock is not even a good painter, but he is incredibly special. You see him, you know who did it immediately. And that for me is the special key. 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 uniqueness of it would immediately make you recognize it. Is there everything you could do, every parameter you could put on it that would set it apart from anybody else’s version of this if they did it?”
“Tangles,” which features 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 finally acquired by IFC in August, just in time for the Best Animated Feature Oscar campaign.
